Today's prime Ritchiebollocks:

Erm, Ritchie,this isn't the way business works. We don't make individual employees liable for the losses of their employer, even in cases where you believe you are able to apportion liability to an individual. That's because it's frankly a totally stupid idea. Are we really to say that we should find the employee who - say - failed to tighten a bolt properly on Deepwater Horizon and send them a bill for tens of billions of dollars?

Equally, we aren't commencing a witch-hunt to identify precisely which miserable sod in the London 2012 organisation can be blamed for the tripling of the Olympic budget. Nor are we singling out a Department of Health civil servant to land them with an invoice for the NHS supercomputer overruns. Instead we establish lines of control and responsibility within organisations in order to reduce the risk that an employee goes off on a frolic on his own. In Hartnett's case, this includes lines of political accountability.

The very idea that we should seek to make individual employees liable for the economic outcomes of their business decisions is an extraordinarily right-wing - one could even say 'neoliberal' - point of view. I simply don't know why Ritchie espouses such a view. Other than, in the case of Hartnett, it fits his political narrative to say it. I don't think for one second he actually believes it.

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Filed under: Economics, Taxation with tags bp, dave hartnett, hmrc, idiots, nhs supercomputer, olympics, richard murphy