BA Abuse of Power

With the closedown of Concorde, we are facing a gross abuse of corporate power.  Richard Branson wants to buy five Concordes, to fly the Atlantic under the Virgin label. He has offered £1m each, for five of the planes. Yet because they are "privately" owned by the British Airways "corporation", they will not be sold. These fantastic assets will simply be quietly destroyed, to remove the possibility of their being used successfully against BA.

This is a gross abuse of power.  It is the laws of private property which accords to private corporations the right to destroy their own property, without any third-party intervention.  For you and me privately, if deciding to dispose of a time-expired greenhouse from the garden, that power may be reasonable (though even then, society is claiming the right to ensure its proper recycling...)  But in the case of a massive national asset like Concorde, it is wicked that the current management team - in the eternal game of pass-the-parcel which the corporations play - should be allowed simply to negate this great aircraft, just to removeit from the competitive skies.

Yet this awesome wrong is hardly even perceived as such, in public political discourse. The destruction of great assets like Concorde ought to be considered a wrongful act, a breach of trust - for which the BA Directors, as trustees, should be called to personal account.  Yet this open act of commercialism vandalism is occurring before our very eyes, and there are no whistleblowers.  Richard Branson is treated as a whinger, a bad "loser".  Many of the worst of corporate excesses are "legal and above board" - but they are nevertheless grave wrongs against the wider society.

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  to reform company law (in particular, with regard
  to the use of corporate property power) - see my manifesto
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