Inside Job and the Cost of Living Crisis

Part 2

In the 1600s, the British East India company was formed. Everyone thinks that the British Empire was founded on the ambition and vision of rulers backed by a population of people keen to prove they lived in the greatest country in the land. People still appear to be proud of an empire, Brexit seemed to be a campaign fuelled by a ‘the world needs us’ attitude backed by nationalism that surely comes from the fantasy of an empire.

In reality, the British Empire stemmed from a Tea company. The British East India company had rented an army of mercenaries larger than the British Army (both then and now) and invaded India completely independently from the government and purely in the name of profit. A tea company launched a full-scale invasion of India. This was early stages of capitalism, where large business was new concept and many people outside of London still only knew of the baker and the butcher.

The BEIC would go onto cause mass famine in Bengal, create its own slave trade and make 1 in 10 of the Chinese population at the time addicted to opium (something that was backed by the government in the opium wars). While it seems personal, all this was done with a cold indifference towards any person, but it was a blind and unforgivable love for something we seem to be seeing more and more of currently: profit. To be clear: some of the greatest human atrocities, with consequences to this day came from a lack of regulation.

Inside Job knows the important of regulation and it’s focus on this emphasises how timeless the issue is, as demonstrated by the BEIC’s cold tyranny. Where the US government barely earnt a mention in the Big Short, it is in their direction that Craig Ferguson aims the brunt of his criticism. For me the form allows him to do this, the cold face of a documentary saying this is what happened (while a Sacha Baron Cohen or Micheal Moore documentary is also there to entertain). Ferguson makes it clear the greed of the financial sector is inevitable – the nature of the industry attracts greedy people with greedy intentions and greedy disregard for what their greed means. While critical, this is the way an unregulated market creates a narcissistic and cyclical echo chamber of perpetual bonuses, profits and indifference to anyone else. What shouldn’t spawn greed, and should have the publics’ best interests at heart is the government.

Ferguson names every politician of the time that had ties to Wall Street, every Harvard professor turned government advisor who took bribes from Wall street and every missed opportunity to regulate Wall Street. The point of the document is not just that a market got out of hand, but that there isn’t a market that exists, no matter how profitable, that should be allowed to get so out of hand to this extent. The only reason it happens is because of a government that doesn’t give a shit about the public.

Which nicely brings us back to the current cost of living crisis. I don’t feel like much else needs to be said, but I’m writing as Liz is unpacking her toiletries in number 10. What’s been suggested is that there will be a cap on energy bills (good) for the public, while the government takes out loans to pay the difference to the companies (bad). I think we can see where this will go – friends in government using borrowed money (to be repayed by taxpayers) to reward oil companies with massive bonuses for no reason. So, yes we are still paying for it, but in more a medieval / feudal system where the government will just tax us for stuff it wants to do. Nice.

Surely its easier just to regulate companies better?

Craig Ferguson ends his documentary with Matt Damons angry voice saying through what I can imagine are gritted teeth – ‘they will tell us that we need them and what they do is too complicated for us to understand. They will tell us it won’t happen again. They will spend billions on fighting reform.’ I don’t think it will be too long before we see who the billions are going to in the UK government.