Fighting Back Against Private Equity

What you love about your business is probably not the business of doing business , not the payment processing point of sale systems or the sales analytics , not the inventory shift scheduling or the never ending stream of admin . And that's okay because that side of business is our business . And yes, we love it as much as you love yours. At Square, we look after the things that really you'd rather not, so you can focus on the stuff that actually make your business the business that you and your customers love. Square , we do the square stuff, so you don't have to. Visit square. com or find us in curries in Argos. Square up Europe limited is authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority . Hi, this is Podsave the UK, I'm Nish Kamar and I'm Coco Card. We are three weeks out from a monumental by election in Makerfield and campaigning is in full swing. In two weeks so far we've, witnessed this candidate with drawers and Elon Musk cameo and enough Brexit chat to take you all the way back to twenty sixteen. We'll be discussing it on today's show. Plus, we speak to author Hetty O'Brien about her groundbreaking exposed of the private equity industry and how it's contributed to our broken economy . We are three weeks out from the most consequential by election in recent memory. Polling date in Makerfield is set for Thursday the eighteenth of june, the candidates have been announced and there has been no shortage of headlines. That's right. So in just two weeks, a green party candidate was announced and then withdrew on the same day. Reforms Robert Kenyan has been labelled a misogynist by Carol Vorderman. Tony Blair has taken a swipe but Andy Burnham and others in a bizarrely timed five thousand seven hundred word essay and Nigel Farage did a disappearing act for seven days. So let's start with the most recent polling data in Makerfield . The polls have the Labour candidate and leadership hopeful Andy Burnham only slightly ahead of reforms candidate Robert Kenyan. So that's a poll of three hundred sixty nine respondents in Makerfield with undecided voters stripped out that put restore Britain on seven percent, reform on forty percent and labour first on forty three percent. The Far Right Party Restore Britain was set up by former reform MP Rupert Lowe. Just to be clear about this, Rupert Lowe was too extreme for reform. So here he is in restore r. In regards to sort of restore surge, the pollster loot trill of more in common said in general we are noticing restore being raised more in focus groups and Rupert Lowe in particular among more right leaning participants. It tends to be people who are more engaged, so the test I think is there an online are they an online phenomenon or something deeper and Makerfield might show that. I mean it's quite, terrif ying in it. Like, I got a B in my Mathieu C, but forty percent of reform plus seven percent of restore is forty seven percent and that is more than Andy Burnham. You know, the right being split is great for Burnham and great for progressives, but it is scary. Those numbers are terrifying, aren't they? Listen, it's not ideal . It's suboptimal, I would say. So Farage said the Burnham would be delight ed after Elon Musk shared a tweet from Lowe about the by election. Why is Elon Musk so concerned about local politics in Britain? The tweet said Restore Britain. That's all it said. So farage told the telegraph Elon Musk has decided he would try to spit the right of politics as best he can. Although it should be said that Farage calling an end to foreign intervention in UK elections does smell a bit hypocritical. We're just sort of seeing a kind of war of egos between Farage and Musk now. Farage seems to be rattled by the Musk's sort of intervention in the favour of Ristaul. Yeah, but of course never rattled when it was in favour of him. So Lowe used offensive language directed at immigrants during the restore campaign launch in Makerfield, stating I can't believe I have to read this, they should be deported to a midge infested island offshore, either England or Scotland and let the midges do the rest. Reform figures have noted that Rebecca Shepherd appeared uncomfortable standing next to Low. She was grimacing at these words. Yeah, I mean it's come to something that kind of normalization in British political language of this kind of hostile xenophobic rhetoric . That doesn't surprise me in any way, shape or form. It feels like the axis of British political rhetoric on immigration has shifted alarmingly far to the right to the point where you have a Labour Prime Minister invoking the language of Enoch Powell. So if you start from that position, it makes sense that the extreme right is now advocating that immigrants be attack ed by midges. It just feels like that's where we are in twenty twenty five in Britain at the moment. So reforms problems don't stop there. More offensive social media posts, which are believed to be authored by Robert Kenyan have been uncovered . This time though, Carol Vorderman is the victim . I've been contacted today by a number of national newspapers concerning the comments that Rob Kenyan reforms candidate in Maker Field has been making about me . They're disgusting comments . Rob Kenyan is a misogynist in my opinion and he's built as this local plumber . No he isn't. He's an online abuser . So it's strong language from Carol Volderman and it's but it is entirely justified when you actually dig into the comments. So the posts unearthed by the IPA found that Kenyan did claim that women who have abortions get them for vanity purposes so they can shag anyone they want. And if you're wondering about her use of the word misogynist , I mean, it's not a million miles away from the words Kenyan usnes to describe himself because a separate investigation by the Independent found that he posted that women can't ref drive or give directions that women presenting rugby games on TV aren't up to the job and only there to tick a box, and he also declared I',m sexist, sorry, but I am. I don't think that's a real apology. Can I just put that out there right now? It doesn't feel like I don't think that's genuine remorse. I'm sexist, sorry, but I am. Yeah, no, I would agree. That doesn't feel that doesn't feel real , does it? So Danny Kruger, the former Conservative MP who joined reform last September , you know, he said, look, it was clearly wrong for politicians to talk in that way, but added he was not a politician at the time. He was an ordinary man from an ordinary place . It's important to remember that Danny Kruger is enormously posh, he was educated at Eton and I think that really tells you what he thinks about the working class, doesn't it? Like this so called party of the working class clearly thinks that ordinary people are just bigots, right? Bigots to be manipulated. I'm sorry, I know a lot of ordinary men and they don't talk to women like that. It's just not really acceptable. They're not just out here saying horrible things. Another reform spokesperson said these comments are little more than locker room banter. If you're in locker rooms quite a bit as someone who plays football, does that sound right to you? Well, first of all, I'm not in the locker rooms. Okay, I shower in my house. And I'll tell you why I shower in my house because I'm not an eight year old boy at school. Okay about I'm not showering in the locker room after football. Are you joking with me? I go to train and then I go to my house and I shower because I'm forty years old . But I think it is really worth pulling out cocoa. I think you're really right to draw attention to this idea of ordinary man from an ordinary place because it really drips with a kind of contempt for working class people and the North of England. Danny Kruger in sort of implying that essentially working class people from the North of England are intrinsically misogynist has somehow, I think, managed to show how low his opinion is of working class people, the North of England and all women. It's actually almost elegance in the maximalism in the groups that it manages to offend. My goodness. It's yeah, very, very disturbing. So look, reform isn't the only party with vetting issues. So last Thursday it was announced that Chris Kennedy would be the green candidate for Maker Field, but he dropped out of the race the same day. The Times later reported it approached him for comment about sharing a post calling an anti Semitic fire bomb attack in North London a false flag. Spokesman for the Green Party said Mr Kennedy had. apologized for causing offence, adding these views don't reflect the views of the Green Party. So the party said it stood by its earlier statement on the withdrawal of Mr. Kennedy which said we wish Chris the best and understand that family has to come first. Sarah Wakefield, who's a Manchester City Council and charity director has been announced as a Green Party's new candidate, and she said that she's proud to represent the Greens. She said, It is vital in a democracy that voters are given a choice of who they want to vote for. I'm still really taught about all of that. It's very tricky, isn't it? Because if the Greens are, you know, the Green Party is presenting itself as a viable candidate to form the next government of this country , you can see why they can't get into situations where they are not standing candidates to give a labour candidate a better chance of winning. That being said anything that could potentially lead to reform winning this seat is something that makes me deeply concerned. And to be honest with you, it's something that should make all of us deeply concerned because I mean as much as we're talking about the Green Party and reform and two parties that maybe are struggling with a vetting pro cess because they don't necessarily have the infrastructure of other political parties . We've at least seen that this green candidate has dropped out . And at the time of recording on Wednesday at ten AM on the twenty seventh of may , Reform party has spent the best part of the last few days not withdrawing this candidate and instead standing by the various offensive comments that he's made . And I think that, you know, it is worth noting that there have been two very different responses to , you know, ostensibly comparable situations. Yeah , I sometimes worry that everyone involved in politics, labour, greens, everyone who's a progressive is not facing up to this the terrifying threat that is on our doorstep, right? And if we look across at France and what they did essentially with the new front popular, put on my French is so bad. Letiscotech . That's the extent of my French. Anyway, look , you know, what we saw there was a coalition and that was enough to push back what was a very, very scary threat coming from the far right and that's what we're facing now. And so to not see that happening or conversations of that, or even just kind of I understand that maybe things might be happening behind closed doors, but the presentation of a not united front does genuinely really scare me. Anyway, moving on. So on Monday, Farage's claim that a Russian hack and leak oper ation was behind the Guardian report into the five million pounds gift he received from Christopher Harborne has been described as without any merit by the former head of the National Cybersecurity Center Kieran Martin. So over the weekend, a reformed UK source claimed analysis of Farage's phone by counter espionage experts suggested Farage's phone, email and bank accounts were compromised by hostile actors almost certainly linked to Moscow using spear fishing tactics and that's fishing with a pH . Sorry, so I shouldn't laugh. Why is that funny? I don't get why it's funny It's funny because because a lot of the detail that I've read of this, it feels like there's a heavy inference to me that Nigel Farage has just clicked on a dodgy link from an email . So Reform UK told the Mail on Sunday that only four people knew of the gift with Farrage adding that the alleged Russian activity was deeply concerning and highlighted the threat they posed to British security. Kirin Martin said that the reform UK leader had yet to provide a shred of evidence to support the clips not like Nigel to make wild unsubstantiated claims. It's also understood that Farage has yet to ask the NCSC to investigate this belief . He did describe it as a serious foreign policy and national security allegation, which if true, would have massive implications of British policy towards Russia. Listen, maybe evidence will be given over and maybe this has happened. My instinct was when he said, Oh, Russia hacked my phone and that's how the guardian have obtained this. It was to discredit the reporting, right? To make the guardian look dodgy, essentially. But I had to chuckle to myself because famously reformers always cozied up to Russia . You know, Nigel Farage was always a bit more friendly to Putin than certainly other leaders of parties. And in fact, their man in Wales got a conviction for taking bribes from Russia. So when I first heard this, I thought, what do you you mean they're spying on? Mate, aren't you their friend? But again , where is the evidence? It just sounds like just trying to discredit the reporting. So look, the rise of restore Britain, as well as vetting owned goals from reform and the greens certainly seems like a gift to Andy Burnham, you know, would help him with a healthy start to his campaign so we'll be checking back in next week for the latest there Pod save the UK is brought to you by Aura Frames. Finding the perfect gift can be hard, there's no doubt about it, which is why I usually end up finding Aura Frames as the answer to my gift struggles. The summer season is almost a pot us and if your family is anything like mine, they're probably desperate for updates and for photos. 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Support the show by mentioning us at the checkout terms and conditions apply. Pod save the UK is brought to you by BT . We talk a lot on this show about the big things shaping Britain the economy, public services, business, technology, for so much of what keeps the country moving is the infrastructure we barely even notice. Exactly. The system's quietly working in the background, keeping homes connected, businesses running, and services operating, they only really get attention when they stop working, which is why companies like BT matter ? For one hundred and eighty years, BT has built a legacy of engineering excellence, helping power the connections that modern Britain depends on. BT's network is in many ways the silent engine of the UK building and maintaining the resilient infrastruct ure that keeps communities connected and the country moving forward . And security is a big part of that. BT helps protect homes and businesses by shielding the UK from around four million cyber threats every day, providing a vital layer of defense that most of us never even see. It's that combination of reliability, resilience, and specialist expertise that's made BT the most trusted network, supporting more homes and businesses than any other. BT behind Brilliant things. Search YBT to find out more . Just briefly while we're on the subject of we've talked a bit about the things that might be helpful to Andy Burnham. One sort of spectacularly unhelpful thing to Andy Burnham might well be that again, as we recall on Wednesday morning on the twenty seventh of may , a lot of the newspapers , the news websites I still. refer to them as newspapers like I've opened my front door and the paperboy has thrown it onto my front stair . So the former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair published a sort of five thousand seven hundred words open letter to the Labour Party essentially engaging with where he feels labour and the kind of United Kingdom is sort of is fucking up basically. And listen, if I sound ill tempered, it's for two reasons reason number one, I got a train back from Bristol to London last night that was delayed by two hours and so I got home at three in the morning . So already I'm in a pretty bad mood if I'm being completely honest with you. Just look at the platform being like nationalise this you wait till I nationalise you Great Western I mean the same thing all the time to prefer. If you want to have a political discussion about it, you know, we keep talking about the sort of immediate impacts of the climate crisis. What had actually happened was the extreme heat yesterday caused various, I think, train signals to melt, basically. Oh my God If I sound in a bad mood, it's because I've read all five thousand seven hundred words of this Tony Blair essay. Okay. And there are things in it that I do think are astute pieces of political analysis. There is a section where he talks about the fact that voters are sort of being increasingly drawn to wards parties that are promising radical change and that incremental change isn't really going to cut through with the electorate anymore. But Blair's solution to all is first of all, there is something that really irritated me about here. And I know that this shouldn't be the focal point, but there's a point where he sort of justifies his intervention by saying that the Labour Party is currently trying to puzzle out how to win a second term. And the one thing ruled out was learning from the only time in the Party's one hundred and twenty year history it has ever done so. Now the Labour Party has won second terms in office, right? I know that this is like a really minor point to get hung up on, but if we're going to talk about the history of the fucking Labour Party, then you have to get your facts right about the fucking Labour Party, right? And my second issue with it is that he keeps on proposing that Labour adopt this position from the radical center for Razer uses repeatedly is the radical centre . Blair's definition of the center in nineteen ninety seven was a coherent one and that perspective was based on the sort of same principles of third way social democracy that Clinton had come to power on in the states in nineteen ninety two. Blair's version of the radical center in twenty twenty six is essentially low regulation, low taxation and abandonment of net zero principles and instead a kind of commitment to use all of our oil reserves in the North Sea. And he said the push needs to be for cheap energy rather than clean energy. And listen, maybe it's because I've only had three hours sleep because extreme heat yesterday caused the train tracks to melt or whatever the hell was going on on my route from Bristolback to London. But it seems like a spectacularly idiotic intervention. And it also seems to be advocating this idea that he's come up with this new political philosophy, whereas actually, if you actually drill down is the detail of what he's saying . This low regulation of business , low taxation and embrace of AI is essentially the political platform that Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are running on. And it seems that the centrism of Tony Blair in twenty twenty six is not actually a coherent political philosophy. It's essentially seeing where the other parties are aligning themselves and trying to pick a midpoint. It's just from an intellectual perspective, it does not seem to have any basis whatsoever . I'm not sure what Blair thinks he's achieving and that sort of gets down to the kind of key point here, which is that when we were kids at school and they presented us with a source in history, we were always told who has written this? And you need to think critically about where that person may be coming from when they give you the information. Now, a lot of the reporting of this article that I'm seeing is describing it as the work of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair . But we also need to remember that the former Prime Minister is just one of Tony Blair's careers and that in more recent years, Tony Blair consistently cozied up to the AI industry. His institute has continued to advise and receive money from the government of Saudi Arabia after the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And Blair has been working with the Trump administration as it seeks to resolve the situation in Gaza. So again, I would ask people think critically about the information that you're receiving and think critically about where it might be coming from. Is this coming from former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who presumably has the Labour Party's best interests ? Or is this coming from the head of the Tony Blair Institute , a man who is up to his neck in dodgy money? He has been Tony Blair Head of the Institute a lot more recently than he was Tony Blair Labour Prime Minister, right? And I'm urging people as they engage with this five thousand seven hundred word piece of verbal diarrhea , engage critically with the content and engage critically with the source. Listen, Nisha, I just want to take a moment to thank you for reading that . I mean, to be fair, it came out just as I was, you know, packing my son up to go off to the charminder. So you know, didn't get the opportunity, but even what does that radical sent to mean? You're just advocating Trump's policies and advocating being closer to Trump. That's fine, but don't call it the center. It's not the center of everything. What's going on here? I have not had enough sleep to deal with this bullshit. Well, I was going to say I saw one of the write ups and in the reference to the radical left, I' was like, oh, thats it, that's what I've done now. The idea that the vast majority of labour voters are radical left now. Like why? Why are you saying these things about people that vote for you? They just want to have the trains national ise and the water to not be full of shit. He's arguing them. Why are you pretending they're extreme? Like they're not just crazy. He's argued that the increases to the minimum wage that ' ssort of scrapping of the non domestic is the provisions for workers' rights. He's argued that those are bad things that the Starmer government has achieved, right? And they need to be, and this is a direct quote, go all out for making business feel respected supported. The language is sort of cleaned up, but the platform and the political philosophy he seems to be advancing is effectively Trumpism. Like it's pretty it's pretty close to where the political right is these days. So which again is fine if you present it as such, but don't masquerad that as you know as centerism. A pig in a suit is still a fucking pig. Also, you know, just like , you know, here in twenty twenty six, can you really talk about business without regulation, you know, aside from the global financial crash, but everything that's going on in terms of the just sheer amount of wealth that is held by those one hundred families in the rich list, this concentration of wealth. And as many economists have said, it's an illusion that we can just make more money . If people are getting , if they are hoarding that wealth, it's coming from somewhere. It's been extracted from us, right? And that's why we can't afford homes and blah blah blah. I just find it laughable that he would say this. And even on the point about being pro business , what kind of business? Because if you want to be pro SME, for example, which I think lots of us would be , we want to see local entrepreneurs, we want to see the high street full of local businesses, people a part of our community . You can't support big business and support small business at the same time. Big business eats small business. That's how it works. That's monopolies, right? To look, just to wrap up what I imagine has been a barely coherent tirade by a man who has only had three hours of sleep to match a barely coherent tirade that's five thousand seven hundred words long and been published on the internet by a former prime minister. I would say we need to really focus on two things. One , scrutinize the source of the information. And the other thing that I think is really important that sort of I think slightly been left out of the conversation is this idea about where labour is losing support from and what flank of the party it needs to be appealing to. So this is a direct quote from the Blair essay. It is one thing when an opposition to indulge this perennial delusion that when we lose seats to the right the, country is really signaling it wants labour to move left. It is dangerous to do it in government. Now there may well be points that I'm sure there are where that has been absolutely a correct appraisal of the Labour Party's pol itics historically . However, I would urge you to disregard Tony Blair's analysis of these events because it does not seem to come with any factual substantiation , whereas the pollster John Curtis, who is apolitical and is simply working hard to interpret statistics , has said that there is a danger for labour in tacking to the right because actually when it's losing seats to reform based on his forensic study of the data. It's because it's depressing its vote from the left and losing votes to the green. So its vote is being diluted and reform is winning. It's not losing votes to reform. I would urge you if you are using analysis on electoral results to take that analysis from the elections stats guy and not from Tony Blair who in this specific case I think has an axe to grind. And I'll round it off on this and I'll say no more about this forever, hopefully , but it's really important that when you're taking your statistical analysis, you take it from someone who's actually looking to analyze statistics. It's also really badly written. Again it's really badly written . The one thing Blair definitely has been historically is an excellent communicator, but the writing style is garbled. I honestly wouldn't, be surprised if you used AI to write it because it has that slightly garbled generative AI feel to it . But there is a bit in it where he advocates he sort of effectively advocates that the UK should have got involved in the war in Iran. And this guy 's just so much. That's just like the last thing to go. That's like the boxers punch, it's the last thing to go. Tony Tony Blair advocating illegal wars in the Middle East. That's just put us back here in two thousand three. We get it, mate, we get it. You love war, right? Let's pop get it. Let's pop scrubs episodes on . Wear big jeans and listen to Toby Blair advocate for war in the world. I've actually just done an article about Mystique getting back together It's back, baby. It's back, baby. You know, the temperature's been up, the sound of UK garage is coming out the windows , and you know for a minute you feel hopeful and then you get reminded that Tony Blair wants us to go to war in the Middle East. So dangerously so scandalous . We just want to know Tony Blair. Won't you tell us why? Coming off after the break, yes , please write in with your mystique puns. That'd be great. Coming up, we'll be speaking to the journalist Hetty O'Brien about how private equity is quietly buying up the services we can't live without turning vital services into profit extraction machines. Hetty breaks down their formula and suggests what can be done about it. Pod save the UK is brought to you by Vanta. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation really are ramping up, and these days customers expect proof of security before they'll do business. That's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates compliance and brings compliance, risk and customer trust together on one platform. 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My cousin is on a European excursion at the moment and she's using Wise as she moves from country to country like Jason Born. Download the YSAT today or visit wise. com terms and conditions apply . Who owns the things we use? The nurseries, care homes, water companies , hospitals, even vet practices. What if I told you that it's a bunch of companies you've never heard of that increasingly own all of that and a lot more? Now, whilst it might sound a bit conspiratorial, private equity firms are increasingly influencing almost every aspect of modern life. That's the argument of journalist and author Hetty O'Brien. In her new book The Asset Class, Hetty Dives headfirst into the secretive world. She unpicks how the private equity industry has quietly bought so many of the services we all depend on and why that is a massive problem. I'm pleased to say she joins us now, Hetty, welcome to Podsafe the UK. Thanks for having me . It's great to be here. It's a fantastic book, Hetty. Absolutely brilliant. I will say the full pull quote is it did not make me want to shit myself . I don't know if that I don't know if that's something you want to put on the paper bank . Yeah, I'd love to use that for the paperback post very much Really great to get an unexpected blurb. When people hear things like private equity, they tend to switch off because I think sometimes , you know, with a lot of economic stuff it seems abstract, it seems complicated . It's hard to directly explain how it affects our day to day lives. I think one of the things the book is so good at is it does walk you through the kind of how this is impacting all of our lives as readers on a day to day basis. So just can you explain to our listeners what private equity is and how it's managed to have this outsized influence? Yeah, and I think you're completely right. I mean, it's just so often that the things that seem kind ofed remote and ab stract and a little bit dull were actually the things that are kind of most scandalous and I kept coming up against that during the kind of course of writing the book . It felt as though I'd almost hit upon what felt like it could be a conspiracy because it was just so gigantic the scale of this industry and the kind of secrecy with which it operates . It's basically guaranteed that private equity funds or investors will have an interest in some part of your life. You just don't really know it yet if you weren't already aware of it. So that might be in the care home where your elderly relatives live, in the student accommodation, where your child who's at university is renting , the dentist down the road, the vet down the road, the children's home down the road, all of these things have been bought up by private equity . Anything that can be owned, private equity will almost certainly have a stake in it . And it is just astronomic, both the scale of this but the extent to which it has grown so significantly after the two thousand eight financial crisis . I think when I was that was partly why I first got interested in this because it just seemed as though after two thousand eight there had been this kind of quiet shift of power away from banks and towards this really unregulated or lightly regulated industry that nobody was really talking about. When we think about finance, we tend to think about banks and the big short and those kind of images. Private equity actually gets away with being relatively unscrutinized. And I think that's really important because it's actually making really significant decisions about the places where we live and work and also die in the case of care homes. And it's also making decisions about everything from how much people get paid to how much we end up paying for our public services and to ultimately the kind of quality of lives we're able to lead. So to me it did feel at times like I had hit upon this conspiracy. Obviously having said that the book is not conspiratorial and it's all very factually reported and carefully and meticulously so, but I do think there is an aspect of that I found really intriguing. Without getting too technical , how does it work? So you rattled off there , these scenarios that will be familiar to anyone listening to this from student accommodation to nurseries or whatever it is. How does it actually work that private equity, this kind of unregulated lives in the shadows money people, how do they have a role in, you know, fairy tales first or whatever how does that happen? Yeah, I mean the basic mechanism at the heart of most private equity deals invol ve something called a leverage buyout. And so that how I explain it or think about it is that if you or I were to buy something using a credit card, say something online, we would expect to eventually pay back the money that we had borrow ed on our credit card. That's how debt functions for most people . A private equity fund uses debt in a very different and altogether more scandalous way. So when a private equity fund buys a company , say a nursery down the road , it will use a portion of its own money. So maybe five percent, maybe ten percent, maybe a little bit more than that. And then it will borrow the rest of that money . That's all makes sense. But then the thing that it does that is different is that it puts all of that borrowed money onto the balance sheet of the company that it's just bought. So it makes all of that debt somebody else's responsibility and that has a number of really significant consequences. It means that a company that is heavily indebted has less money to spend on other things, whether that's caring for children or putting on nice lunches for children in a nursery or caring for an elderly person in a care home or even just making nice tasty burgers . It means that more and more of the money that the company that the company is generating ends up being spent on servicing that debt and those interest payments . But also all of that debt ultimately can make those companies much more weak. And so it contributes to a much kind of more a less resilient economy overall when you get that massive build up of leverage. But ultimately it's also a way of yeah, outsourcing consequences to other people and outsourcing risk taking. If you a private equity fund manager have put a lot of debt onto a company, you're not responsible for paying it off. And if that company goes bankrupt, it's not really you who has to deal with the consequences. But look, you know, I've said listen , I like to watch an old gangster movie. I'm aware of how the mafia works and you have to pay the mafia . And eventually you have to pay the mafia so much that the company folds. I get it. But in this case the mafia had baseball bats and they would come out, come around to your house and threaten you . Private equity, surely they don't have the ability to threaten businesses in this way . Businesses can just refuse their help, right? Businesses can , I don't know, like renegot iate something else. How do they get stuck into this and why do they even join it in the first place? Well, there's a number of different reasons and I think that part of the reason that private equity has been so interested in UK companies is because those have been historically undervalued. They've also had more difficulty raising money from other sources such as from pension funds. And so actually when a private equity fund comes along and says, yep, we'll inject x amount of capital and will help turn around the business and we will install these new managers who are incredibly gifted at what they do . It can sound really, really attractive and that's why you have this kind of phenomenon whereby U. S. private equity funds in particular have really kind of aggressively sourced out opportunities in the UK, both in our public and our private sectors . And I think that that's part of the reason. But when you look at actually what those deals involve, the myth of private equity is that it's a superior way of running an economy, of running companies. It involves giving more power to really, really smart people who know exactly what they're doing . And actually , often what it involves when you read the academic literature and people who've really run the numbers on this stuff is a sustained build up in leverage. It means that rather than it being this kind of superior form of management . It's just a way of heavily indebting companies and allowing quite a small group of financiers to walk away with fabulous profits as a result of doing that. So I do think there's a kind of narrative but you have to kind of really be critical of that narrative and to think, okay, is it actually doing what it sets out to or claims to be doing? Hetty, it's rare that I read a book about economics or finance and see a term that I'm familiar with. I'm normally just like slowly wake away and the book is great because it explains everything and goes into detail in all of these things. Unfortunately because I have been following with great interest the relative fortunes of Manchester United Football Club in the twenty first century, I am unfortunately very familiar with what a leverage buyout involves, and it's how the Glazer family were able to buy the club and do it by loading the club with debt, which obviously as you've laid out it is insane that that was ever allowed. But the problem obviously, as you said is it , you know, contributes to a deterioration of the actual service or product at the heart of it. And you know, in the last couple of years, you know, if you go to old traffic, it is in a dilapidated state. I mean, the football ground flooded a couple of years ago. Obviously, when that happens to Majesty United, I imagine a great majority of the country, a great percentage of the country finds it deeply funny and is hugely entertained by it. But the problem is that when it's not football club, but when it's a care home and And the servicing of the debt is causing a decline in service. That result, I mean, there's a horrendous there are a couple of horrendous stories that you mention in the book where , you know, people were taken to hospital, caked in dried feces , and that person's official death certificate features the phrase death through lack of care . And so it's horrendous when it involves care homes. It's horrendous when it involves children's homes. So last month, the FD reported the provision of children's homes has become a goldmine for investors. So over the last decade, private equity firms have been investing in children's care and the top ten biggest providers are being now all being backed by private equity . While that has happened, fees for those homes have risen by two thirds in real term since twenty fifteen . Even whilst as the FT reports , the children have been poorly served . So the end result is things get more expensive but also worse in quality. And that's a problem when it's a football club. But it's a catastrophe when it 's children's care or elderly care, right? Yeah, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. And I will say it's really remiss of me that I didn't include any football related stuff in the book. That's partly because I just have to say that I know so little about football, that's very embarrassing. But I think no, look, you're completely right. And this is the thing that I think I was grappling with while I was doing this research was that it's one thing for us to end up paying higher prices or experiencing a worse quality of, I don't know, the kind of coffee we buy in the morning or something. It's like we can maybe put up with that to some extent , but actually when it comes to life and death stuff, that's when you really feel as though something has gone really wrong. When this industry is relied upon to provide the services that vulnerable people need, that's really, I think, very problematic. And interestingly, something that people within the industry that I spoke to who had made money by investing in care homes really felt actually there's something that's gone quite wrong in this and maybe this shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place. So kind of pointed the finger at the government for allowing that to happen . You mentioned social care and I think that's a really important area, particularly in Britain, because it's something that we're all really affected by. And there were some studies that I came across that were really shocking on what happened to the care homes after leverage buyouts. One in the U. S. found mortality rates increased by eleven percent after a leverage buyout , and another in the UK that found during the first wave of COVID that care homes with a really high amount of leverage had a death rate that was almost twice as high as those with no leverage at all, and so you can see how that leverage really does have life and death consequences in some sectors . But also I think that ultimately this is about the price that we pay for public services or for the price that councils pay. And you mentioned children's care homes. And these are care homes that are dealing with , again, really vulnerable children, children with severe learning difficulties or needs, and that really you should not expect to see private equity investors getting into this sector. And what's happened is that I think the FT report, which was incredible , found that the average cost of one of these care home places for a child had risen to something like three hundred between three hundred and three hundred eighty thousand pounds per year charged to a council . And you're thinking, hold on, this is kind of an insane kind of misallocation of resources. This is so inefficient. Why are we allowing things to be run in this way? It's just crazy. People listening to this podcast might think, well, this is sort of isn't this just sort of what capitalism has consistently delivered? Isn't this always how it's worked that in order to maximize profits, you start cutting corners. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I was really keen to do when I was researching this is not just come at it from a kind of this is capitalism doing what capitalism has always done perspective and instead really speak to people who would kind of consider themselves arch defenders of the idea of capitalism and what capitalism should be about . And I think private equity really undermines that idea in a number of ways. First of all, it's really secretive. It discloses as little as possible in terms of information to the public and to regulators and to journalists and so on. And that causes a lot of problems in terms of both holding power to account but, also ensuring a kind of level playing field. And second of all , a lot of its kind of activities , although a lot of the kind of private equity industry would argue that those are helping to create value and they're entrepreneurial and so on , they increasingly look more and more like finding clever ways of moving money around on spreadsheets and not really contributing to what we think of as kind of productive economic activity. And so when you think of where what capitalism was sort of supposed to look like for most of the twentieth century was that it would be this pie that grows bigger every year and it means that everybody has this kind of ability to have a stake in the capitalist social democratic economic model . But actually , with private equity and similar kind of leverage driven investment strategies , it doesn't really look like that anymore. The pie isn't really growing and inst,ead people are finding really clever ways to siphon money up wards towards a smaller group of people . And that means that capitalism is sort of failing to deliver on its promises, but also it's really the legitimacy is really entirely being lost from the system, I think. And so I'd say that, you know, even people I spoke to who really there was a short seller that I spoke to who said, I'm a real died in the wall conservative and ultimately believe capitalism is a great thing. But I think private equity is absolutely terrible. It's pushing the idea of living a good life further and further out of reach for a huge number of people . So I don't think you have to be a kind of leftist or somebody who's really an anti capitalist to see the problems with this . And it's not because it's not only funneling money upwards, it's funnelling it outwards, right? You know, you look at Thames Water , a lot of people who were not in Britain got quite rich out of that. I get really frustrated about Thames Water because listen, competition, I get it, I get how that works. But the thing about the River Thames is there's only one of it only one River Thames, it's so clear that privatizing it was going to fail enormously. It's not set up to be in that space. And no wonder it's declined so much. But that's right, isn't it? That the private equity allowed people to get very wealthy in Australia, I think maybe in Canada . And at the end of the day, now in Britain, we're paying the price. It's worth noting that the company is on the Verge collapse has got seventeen billion pounds worth of debt. It was owned by the investment bank McQuerium when a private equity firm bought it up, its debts rose to ten point eight billion . Eddie is it's the easiest thing to point to to explain to people the kind of catastrophe of private equity because there's three hundred hours of raw sewage leaking into the waterways in twenty twenty four. I mean it's a useful it must be a useful starting point for you when you're trying to explain when somebody says to you what was your book about, it must be a helpful thing for you to just say Well , how familiar are you with Thameswater and shit in the water ? Yeah, and when I was writing the book and doing the second draft I was looking out of my window in Southeast London and just looking at Thameswater digging up the road and the local WhatsApp group was like totally ablaze with all of these kind of comments and really angry messages about the fact that all of these improvements were now happening, but hadn't we already paid for these improvements historically and also we were now going to need to pay much more in terms of our bills going up in the next few years. So water is becoming so expensive but also as you say, it's a kind of no pun intended a shit show . And I think that was Thameswater was, I mean, it was really interesting learning more about McQuarry, actually when I was researching the book, I spoke to people who used to work there and when it first it was an Australian bank, it was an Australian branch of a British bank actually that went bust in the Big Bang of the nineteen eighties. And it's this British bank Hill Samuel, it's kind of Australian outpost lived on in this slightly zombified state. And then it basically became really really, successful and quite aggressively started pursuing opportunities that were emerging because public sector assets had been sold off in various different countries, particularly in Britain. And so effectively the kind of Australian version of this old British bank was sent back to Britain to start buying up the things that were coming on the market for sale, including water, but also things like airports. I think the M one that goes through Birmingham , various kind of assets that just you really want to be really boring. You don't want these things to be run in a way that is kind of financially really ingenious and involves really complex structures of debt and all sorts of things. You really want these to be super dependable, super boring assets . And what we've seen with Tem's Water is that a lot of debt was laid in to the company and that was supposed to fund these various forms of improvement in terms of the service and infrastructure and so on . But it wasn't really used to finance that and instead now as a result of that, we're paying in England and Wales, I think it's something like twenty eight percent of our water bill s today goes on financing the debt and the dividends that were taken out previously. And also these companies really are verging on the kind of precipice of financial well environmental insolvency, I think is one phrase used to describe this because they're basically financially ruined but also they can't afford to borrow the money that would be needed to actually finance the improvements that would help to raise the bar in terms of the service they're delivering. So it's a really tricky situation and it also puts the government in a really tricky position because it just means that there's this huge thing that kind of needs to be paid for based upon bad decisions that were made in the past. And who pays for that now? Yeah. And it's difficult, isn't it? Because obviously the government's in a situation where particularly if you're looking at like care homes and children's care homes , well. Well who the only client for a children's care home is the state, right? Yeah. And so they can price gouge as much as they want. And it can be a negotiation, but fundamentally, what is the government going to do? They can't say okay, well, we're not going to use these care homes. So yeah, I keep returning to thought about the mafia and how you know the mafia they always want to do the bins because it's reliable. You know, it makes sense that if you wanted to run a racket, if you wanted to price gouge, if you to use the state, of course . I did want to return to your thing about management. So when we think about a service like a nursery, you would imagine that good management is serving the children and the parents, right? Not so. The one above that is serving the invest ors. And if that means lower standards for the kids and the parents, this doesn't matter. They have fulfilled their aim . Which is a long way of me asking, are there any examples where actually this promise of the better managers has worked? I mean, I'm sure there are and I do think also a lot of this comes down to the amount of leverage that's used in a deal. And when I was looking for kind of examples where this had worked, I think that some of the deals I came across were those where there was a smaller amount of leverage and more equity, i. e. more of the fund managers investors' own cash put up front to begin with. So I think that kind of answers the point as to what a kind of good version of private equity if such one exists would look like . I think part of the problem you mentioned is with investors this idea that you've got a fiduciary duty to investors . Private equity has really been struggling to actually service its investors. A lot of its investors are pension fund s and a lot of those pension funds basically investing the money of workers perhaps like you or I or often public sector workers actually. So firefighters, teachers and so on. And when you look at the amount of fees that the industry has creamed off of those pension funds, it's really quite astronomical. One of the examples I came across was that the Maryland State retirement system, so that's in the east coast of the US , had paid one point, I think it was one billion in fees to Wall Street over a period of sort of maybe a decade or so and that amounts to you might think that that's a kind of abstract number and it comes back to the point about finance and economics. These things these things feel kind of abstract and remote and, you know, who cares? It's just numbers . But actually that amounts to something like five thousand dollars a year per pensioner that was going out to Wall Street fund managers in the form of their fees that they charge, which amounts to something like four hundred dollars a month. So that really has starts to have a super tangible and really granular effect on the people who are supposed to be the so called investors in these funds. So it's a kind of way of I think come to the conclusion that it can sometimes resemble a way of squeezing workers in two directions, both in terms of the money those workers are saving for their future retirement and also in terms of the companies that those workers actually work for . And so I think it's kind of a bit of a paradox really that you say about this fiduciary duty, but actually it doesn't even seem to be delivering on those returns that it has promised to its investors. Het Ity',m going to ask a question that I'm guessing that was on my mind through the book that I'm guessing is on the mind of everybody listening to this right now . Why is this allowed ? Like on every level, why is it why is the opacity allowed? Why are they allowed to buy why are they allowed to buy things on these sorts of leverage buyouts? Why is there no regulation? Why is there no oversight? What's going on ? I mean I think it's a really , you know, it's a funny thing because people always ask that to me when I kind of speak to them about this subject and it's like why was this allowed to happen? And there's a kind of series of answers that you could give. One of them involves like the sense in which there are just all these loopholes that can be used in clever ways, whether that's limited liability or whether it's kind of particular forms of like company structure and so on. And you know, private equity touches upon a lot of those things in a way that we could reform some of those things and not only would you solve the problems with private equity, but you'd also solve a lot of other problems as well. But also I think particularly in Britain, when you're thinking about the things that we depend upon, the portion of your bank account the portion of money that goes into your bank account each month that goes out on things like where you live and your energy and your water bill and all of those things, that kind of portion of essential spend ing has really come under attack from this industry because of the fact that we decided to rely so heavily upon private providers to do the job that was previously done by the state . And there was the interesting, I think maybe it was in that FT investigation that you mentioned into children's social care that France doesn't do this in the same way about relying so heavily on sa pfrievate providers to deliver those children's care homes. So why does Britain in Britain, we have this acceptance of public austerity, the idea that things can't be afforded and also this embrace of private leverage . People have accepted this political argument that you can't do various forms of investment or you're struggling to borrow because of fiscal rules that you've imposed upon yourself or so on and so forth. Those costs get paid further down the l ine because we end up paying more for services that are delivered by highly leveraged private capital and private investors. Ultimately, I think that's what's going on here in Britain, and that's partly why, I suppose. Do you think there's like a willful blindness to this? The reason I mentioned look, you know, the book outlines so many examples. One that is personally close to me is childcare fees. Obviously I'm a new mum . And you know, the thirty hours of free funding that has come from the government is obviously very welcome. There's just in the last sort of seven days they've announced that there's going to be a review into the other fees that parents get charged around like nappies, consumables, X, Y, Z to see if that essentially is being used as a way to extract money from parents in this system . Look, I mean, we don't need to get into my thoughts on the cost of napp ies, but I wonder if like, you know, even talking to you now, it seems to me that so many of the problems around childcare is probably related to private equity. And even if you're in a nursery that doesn't take private equity funding . Well, you know, everyone's always thinking about market rate, well that nursery down the road charges that so I should be charging that and it kind of lifts it lifts the floor and lifts the expense for everyone having this kind of nefarious influence in the sector at all . Do you think that as part of this review , you know, they would be willing to face up to private equity? I just wonder if there's if we feel that actually this is a nettle the government's willing to grasp. Yeah, I think I mean, you mentioned childcare fees. That's one that's really close to my heart as well, partly because I'm about to start paying for nursery fees . And they're astronomically expensive, reduced now thanks to the thirty three hours, but when I was looking at nurs eries where my daughter could go in southeast London, there were four nurseries close to close to like within walkable distance of my home and three of those were owned by private equity funds. It was really interesting because actually I looked at the prices compared to other independent nurseries locally and the prices actually weren't that different . But that's because this is a kind of early stage that we're witnessing. And what tends to happen is a private equity fund will engage in what's known as a kind of roll up strategy. Which looks a bit like a kind of attempt to build a monopoly. So once you've got a monopoly of nurseries, you've bought out all the nurseries within a given location, you can start to set that pricing floor you're saying. And I think that's really that's really concerning. So I'd be curious to know how much those nationales will be charging, say, in five years' time. I suspect it will be a lot more. But I think there is, I mean, I was really glad to see Bridget Philipson grasping that nettle. And I do think there is a kind of real public anger in a sense that actually this is something that needs to be tackled and it's quite fertile ground for labour actually. The problem is that there is quite a lot of mixed messaging from the government. So on one hand you have Phillipson saying to the competition regulator, you need to look into this. And on the other hand, was it last year you had Rachel Reeves saying the competition regulator needs to take a kind of quote unquote lighter touch approach to regulating monopolies because this is part of its sort of growth strategy . And so on one hand you have this attempt to deal with private equity and on the other hand you have Kirstarmer announcing on LinkedIn very excitedly that Blackstone's gonna do various forms of investment in Britain and isn't that fantastic . And I sort of think that the Labour Government doesn't really know or really have a strategy when it comes to these problems. You get individual attempts like and this childcare review is really good . But the bigger picture is one of, I think, quite confusion and mixed messaging. There's a bit in the book where you refer to an anecdote about Rishi Sunak whilst Prime Minister being at an office opening and making a joke where he essentially says which one of these is going to be my office and I will that is one of the bits of the book where I sort of my blood ran cold for a second because that is one of the moments where you realize, oh the sort of lobbying tentacles of this are so far in our government that attempts to push back on this are going to be massively complicated . Yeah, and it was I really went to the National Archives to look through the old papers of the British Venture Capital Association, which was the lobbying body for private equity. It'sper interest suing ing see them writing letters to various ministers within Thatcher's cabinet back in the day. So they've been up to this for a long time as have so many other industries with lobbying bodies. It's not, say, unique to private equity . But it is definitely there is a kind of close affinity between private equity and the sense of actually money pouring into politics. And I think that is problematic. We don't want ultimately people unelected financiers to be dictating various policies , but also I think when you look at something like the carried interest loophole, which is basically a huge tax break that the industry was granted back in the nineteen eighties . That was really the result of a big lobbying effort. And actually it was one of the biggest tax breaks that are sort of successes in terms of lobbying that I think we can kind of think of in terms of tax lobbying. And that occurred in kind of closed rooms . And some of the kind of bureaucrats or civil servants who were working at the inland revenue at the time were really skeptical about it and were really worried about it, but they felt that they couldn't push back against this because actually ministers would then it would create more problems further down the line. And it would be better just to kind of say yes to the requests of the industry. And I think you can kind of see that dynamic play out today actually is a real worry that in doing anything that the industry doesn't like will mean that it goes off shore to Luxembourg or elsewhere . And so you have to give the industry what it wants because in some shape or form it's going to be really conducive to economic growth within the UK, which is obviously what everybody wants. Everybody wants growth. And so the industry has presented itself as one of the keys to delivering that. But it doesn't have a track record of it though, does it? It's presented itself as that, but the evidence would tell you the money will be funneled up or funneled out. I mean, come on, let's let's talk on some facts here. I just wanted to mention a small thing, and I want to come back to something hopeful on this because your book does talk about like the fight back and I think a lot of that's inspiring and I do want to cover it. But you know, Nish you were talking about how you've had to learn about PE, I believe is what they call it, the insiders because of Man City. I had a similar thing ca Co, I'm going to stop you quickly there, man United because again, as we say football, there is nothing that makes people more angry than football. No . And if we if we allow Man City to go uncorrected, I would be I would dread to see the state of your inbox. I can't go to Manchester again. I think that 's done for me now . But for me, the first time I started really understanding it and just the kind of tentacles of it and how far it goes was just the music festival scene, right? So like lots of artists were saying, I'm going to have to pull out of a music festival because it turns out they've received money from KKR PE firm and that PE firm was also giving cash injections to like , you know, drones that were killing Palestinian children, basically. And these festivals would be like, they don't have any influence on us. We have nothing to do with it. You couldn't escape the fact that there was probably an amount of money that is going to continue to be paid out to this firm. That will go on and do nefarious things elsewhere. Some people might be comfortable with that chain of events, but other people were not so comfortable. I was not so comfortable and you know, I had to not go to some festivals and you know how much I love raving . It's so upsetting. I mean, you just have this moment you think PE, you take everything from us. You take the football, the water, and now the raves. I'm coming for you. So how do we fight back on this I love that story. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't go to your festivals . No, I think I did want to kind of not if we're not just to be kind of doom and gloom. And so I tried to write the book in a way that was like hopefully fun to read, but also that did kind of give a sense of some of the fightbacks have occurred. And I loved the fact that a lot of the people that I kept encountering who were doing the best work in this were pensioners who were kind of, maybe it's because they had more time on their hands. Maybe it's because they were kind of, you know, increasingly politically enraged about various things, but there was this great group of kind of retirees and pensioners in the Yorkshire Dales who'd done so much to hold their water company to account and had recruited the help of this incredibly gifted scientist who just happened to live up the road to design a testing program that would help kind of expose what was going on in their local river. And I just found that really really inspiring actually . And the same actually in Denmark, there was a kind of fight back against Blackstone's entrance into its housing market. And that was really, really interesting to wit when I was out there . But I think that these kind of things can , you know, occur on a perhaps a less effective on an individual level. Unfortunately, I admire the fact that you didn't go to the festivals, but I have I probably didn't have that much of an effect in terms of actually that individual decision. If more and more people do that, obviously that perhaps would be more effective. But I think that the real action has to come from government. And I do think that really there needs to be a bigger conversation in the UK about providing public services in a way that is kind of decommodified , i. e. in a way that are affordable, accessible, and I think that would start to do a lot to resolve some of the issues we've seen with the cost of living crisis. If you looked at the kind of structure of ownership of who owns what in the UK and whether we're actually getting value for money for those things, whether that's councils or individual consumers or water bill payers . I also think there's like there's a point as well in terms of that public austerity point. One of the things that kept coming up when I was looking at the water issue was the parlor state of the Environment Agency, which had been completely defunded and sort of disempowered . Its staff told me that they 'd sort of been encouraged not to actually do the job that they're supposed to do and they go into working for the agency to do, which is to investigate some of these kind of problems with sewage dumping and so on. And I think that there needs to be much more of a sense of backing regulators and empowering them to do their jobs and resourcing them properly to do those. Because I think actually we have a lot of the rules and laws and everything that would that would deal with some of these problems. It's just the problem is that those aren't enforced enough . And so that I think is a particular issue in Britain. Well, look, thank you so much for joining us today, Hetty. Hetty's book The Asset Class How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself is out now in the UK and if you're an American listener it will be out in June. Also if you'd like to hear more from Hetty, she's about to start a new job. She will be writing the first edition newsletter. It's the early morning newsletter out from the Guardian Nish and I swear by it. So you'll see her name in the inbox soon. Swear by it and sometimes because of it depending on content . Yeah, I'm very excited about that. Also, I never liked PE when I was a kid and I don't much like it as an adult based on what I've read in this book. Same, same