Campaign group stage game show at Stormont to call out corporate polluters

Campaigning group Act Now have staged a ‘game show‘ at the steps of Stormont, and friend to corporate polluters and genocidaires John O’Dowd was there to celebrate the ongoing bonanza for plutocratic filth. Well, his head was anyway, in giant papier-mâché form as the surrogate Finance Minister spun a giant wheel marked with the names of companies benefiting from the Six Counties’ rates giveaway.

As with your ‘collateralised debt obligations’ and ‘asset-backed securities’, the policy has its own cryptic jargon to hide the theft going on. Known as ‘industrial derating’, the policy writes off 70% of the rates payment for manufacturing spaces. Meanwhile, the average household rate bill here is £1,180, with no such relief available for the average person. Defending the policy, the real John O’Dowd has said:

The main beneficiaries of industrial derating are small and medium size indigenous manufacturers, and the policy supports jobs and investment in our manufacturing sector. It is aligned to our economic vision of good jobs, improved productivity, decarbonisation, and regional balance.

Crooks and killers rake it in from Stormont handout

However, the list of beneficiaries for the policy is a true rogues gallery of nakedly evil corporate monstrosities. In the press release for the Stormont stunt, Act Now list some of those looting the public purse to aid their ongoing criminality. They include mega-polluters:

Moy Park – £9,729,919 | NI’s first £2 billion pound company who have breached environmental law hundreds of times around Lough Neagh.

LCC Group – £4,479,861 | The Cookstown-headquartered energy company behind the controversial plans for an oil terminal at Whitehead and owned by Michael Loughran who is worth £530 million.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targets complicit in Zionist outrages:

Caterpillar – £13,250,386 | The company with factories based in Belfast and Larne was named in UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide’ report as one of 60 companies profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Coca-Cola – £6,965,648 | The $12.5 billion company with a bottling and packaging facility in Lisburn has factories in the occupied West Bank which are illegal settlements under International law. 

RLC(UK) – £1,105,059 | The publicly-funded Newtownabbey and Crumlin-based company makes components for F-35 fighter jets which Israel uses to drop bombs on Gaza.

And corporate manslaughterers:

Kingspan – £4,363,397 | The €8.6bn company supplied combustible materials to the Grenfell Tower for its disastrous refurbishment before the fire that killed 72 people in 2017.

O’Dowd contortions collapse under scrutiny

Hardly the innocent wee local businesses O’Dowd claims are the beneficiaries of the scheme. The North of Ireland stands out in maintaining the policy, which has long since been scrapped in England, Wales and Scotland. The former two ditched the giveaway in 1963, while Scotland dumped the corporate welfare policy in 1995. Act Now campaigner Roan Ellis-O’Neill highlighted the false dichotomy presented by O’Dowd of either handouts to the worst of big business or abandonment of small firms:

[O’Dowd] says that he can’t change the rates exemption policy because it would affect small businesses here. But he is the Finance Minister after all with powers to make all sorts of changes to the rates system. He can end these giveaways for businesses with multi-million pound profits without it affecting small businesses here.

This is a political decision – one where Minister John O’Dowd is siding with big businesses, some which are actively complicity in and profiting off the genocide in Gaza.

Another line of defence from O’Dowd has been that the policy is “supported by the majority of parties in the Assembly”. It is true that the policy has been either supported or met with ambivalence from others at Stormont. One exception was Gerry Carroll from People Before Profit, who came along to the performance and handed over 3000 signatures collected from the Act Now petition against derating. Carroll said:

Industrial Derating is a huge hand-out to big business – the Finance Minister could end this, but is refusing to.

He continued:

…many of these companies are knee deep in support for Israel or in environmental destruction here at home. Not only then are they contributing to wars and climate destruction, they’ve gotten tens of millions in rates relief from Stormont. Meanwhile the Finance minister has raised rates for ordinary people. Unfortunately when it comes to Sinn Féin’s economic policies at Stormont the proof is in the pudding: millions given away to multibillion pound corporations, while working class people have to pay more.

Sinn Féin knee deep in the effluent of the affluent

The Act Now event follows on closely from another Stormont handout debacle, as Caoimhe Archibald attempted to whitewash Invest NI involvement in ploughing money into the F-35 warplane programme. The repeated prostration before deranged warmongers and polluters comes at a time when the Executive has been castigated for its failure to deploy resources to those who most need them.

The message of a neoliberal political class is clear – socialism for the opulent and the iniquitous, the bitter ravages of capitalism red in tooth and claw for everyone else.

Featured image via Instagram/Act Now Campaigns