 So you've probably heard the word carillion over the last 24 hours repeatedly having never heard of it before it's a large company 40% of its turnover was coming from government contracts in 2016 employs 20,000 people in the UK it's involved in a bunch of things like catering cleaning construction in the public sector feeds kids in 900 schools and it's helping build HS2 now there's a lot of things to be angry about when it comes to carillion first and foremost the fact that it was subject to three profit warnings and yet the government still awarded 2 billion pounds worth of contracts everybody knew the company was facing problems which is why hedge funds now stand to gain more than 200 million pounds from shorting the company's stock repeat the government was giving this billions of pounds worth of contracts while hedge funds were shorting it and yet ministers didn't think anything of it but perhaps even more galling than that is the fact that the company's CEO one Philip Green no not him was given a CBE for services to business in 2014 he was even advising the prime minister guess what for business responsibility from 2011 to 2016 but even more galling than all of that more galling than the hedge funds the CBEs and the advising prime ministers is the fact that Philip Green was one of 103 signatories in a letter on the front page of Daily Telegraph ahead of the 2015 general election imploring the electorate to vote for Cameron's Tories over Labour because of their economic competence and because of jobs and because of growth well the next time you see a business leader or one of the greats in the good on the front page of a paper or in the news or on the television saying don't vote for Labour vote for the Tories remember this when they say competence they mean keeping a rigged system when they say inevitability they're talking about political choices that we can change if we want to create a country where everybody has a chance at living precisely the kind of life they deserve to live it can and will be different