Rangers: good riddance?

Many of us, sick of the obscene overpayment of footballers by the richest clubs, are secretly (or openly) pleased at the prospect of a top club going out of business.

If (as seems likely) Rangers are refused entry to the Scottish Premier League, that is surely where the road leads. For why should the Scottish League let them in? Surely the only ways into the League are by relegation from SPL or promotion from feeder leagues. Do they join at the bottom of the pyramid, or what?

But hold it. Barclays Bank has been accused of – well, I can't quite make out what. But it looks as if we have all been thoroughly swindled. A serious financial penalty is in order, for starters. But nobody speaks of punitively closing the bank down: because it would solve nothing, serve no-one, and punish the innocent along with the guilty. A major bank going out of business would destabilise the whole sector.

So it is with Rangers. The punishment should be severe, certainly: but (effective) extinction – even if we don't think it too harsh – would have difficult consequences for the rest of Scottish football.

Here are two possible alternatives:

(1) The other clubs could vote newco Rangers into the SPL: but then apply such a points penalty that the team is immediately relegated. (Presumably instead of one of the teams currently going down.) That would give the new club legitimate entry into the League, as a club relegated from the SPL.

This would limit the punishment suffered.  Of course, a year out of the SPL and a further year (presumably) out of European competition would represent a sizable hit, and rightly. Or:

(2) The approximate financial weight of that penalty could be calculated. Then the newco could be fined the equivalent amount, to be paid over those two seasons, but spared the actual relegation.

Then Rangers have to live within restricted means, as if they had been relegated.  But the SPL as a whole keeps Rangers in their portfolio when touting for TV and sponsorship deals – and receives a healthy bonus in the form of the fine levied. So the SPL does not take a financial hit, and newco Rangers do not gain financially from the sins of oldco. (But are not crushed out of existence.)

Or let Rangers die, and no doubt serve them right, and see what happens to all the other clubs when there are no Rangers matches in the calendar.

Morality and the free market

The other day David Cameron said Jimmy Carr's tax arrangements, though legal, were morally wrong. Then yesterday the courts said the same about HBOS's actions towards Farepak savers.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that, for money earned (and unpaid), Carr pales into insignificance alongside many sly businesspeople whom Cameron obviously doesn't want to upset.

The puzzling thing is to find a committed free-market capitalist suddenly discovering morality. Milton Friedman (Thatcher's monetarist guru) famously said that the only "social responsibility" of business is to make maximum profits for its shareholders. You do what is profitable for you, I do what is profitable for me. In this world-view, the only "immoral" thing is to go against the dictates of greed. The market knows best: the market is the only wisdom, the only morality.

It's not a new philosophy. Friedman just pushed an old one to a new extreme. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" means my happiness, not my neighbour's happiness. He should pursue his own happiness. That is why the talk is always of a Bill of Rights - not a Bill of Responsibilities. That is why there is no such thing as society: and I am certainly not my brother's keeper.

Ed Miliband said: "I'm not in favour of tax avoidance obviously, but I don't think it is for politicians to lecture people about morality." Nor for the courts, perhaps. But it is for politicians to legislate against wrongdoing, and it is for the courts to interpret legislation accordingly (by the spirit, not the letter, one might say).

To challenge Carr, or even HBOS, is to miss the point. We might rather question the whole ultra-captialist experiment and the (often unstated) assumptions on which it is founded. Perhaps, to reverse the flow of Ed Miliband's comment, it is for people to lecture politicians about morality