Many thanks for posting this.
Am a retired teacher but in retirement/lockdown I created a blog for A level students of my former subject. It attracts between 1500 and 2000 visitors a month, sometimes more. That figure will include repeat visitors, but it’s still a decent audience.
One of the topics covered is Business Ethics.
Think I may be able to use what you wrote to explore the issue of the limits of corporate social responsibility, specifically whether the sole responsibility of a corporation (or the corporate executives running it) is to make profits for its shareholders, or whether they have a wider obligation to stakeholders i.e. anyone affected by the activities of a company, for example, employees, suppliers, the local and wider community and, of course, customers.
As an admirer of Thatcher, Truss is presumably a neoliberal in her economic outlook. Neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman believe that corporations only have moral obligations to their shareholders.
Reckon it could therefore be time for me to corrupt a few impressionable sixth-form minds with some thinking of the sort that gets Daily Mail readers fulminating about 'lefty' teachers.
Spent about three years working as an auditor before I went to university (left school at 16 and started working for Thornton Baker, the firm of chartered accountants that eventually became Grant Thornton). During that time I was therefore able to observe at close quarters the frequently profound character deformations and emotionally stunted behaviour of the shallow bean counters that make up that profession. Though not all of my former colleagues were like that, a lot were, and like Truss they would probably have failed an empathy-detecting Voight-Kampff test.
After graduation, I did some temping in accounts and actually ended up at Shell for a while. Not sure if Truss was there when I was, but if I had been in possession of powers of precognition I would have found a way to piss in her coffee.
