I was invited on BBC radio recently to offer my view on the collapse of Swindon-based Farepak, a Christmas-hamper operation that had gone down the pan along with the Christmas aspirations of some 150,000 savers. Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) was being fingered as the Scrooge of this scenario, having foreclosed on the wretched Farepak, while the likes of Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons were the Spirits of Christmas Yet To Come After All by piling in with cash to rescue otherwise spoilt Christmases, to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

As a former expert, I could picture the scene in the boardrooms of these retail chains. Do we have a commercial obligation to bale out these savers? Of course not. Moral obligation? No. But what’s the PR cost likely to be if we resist the calls of Labour politicians to do so? Considerable. And is there good PR mileage in doing so? Yes. Okay, let’s do it. 

I hope that’s cynical of me. I really hope some of the gestures of compensation arose from genuine compassion for those families who suffered considerable financial strain just ahead of Christmas. But the trouble is that such uplifting gestures are obscured by  posturing, hand-wringing, holier-than-thou politicians. The supportive retailers looked like they were being forced into it.  

Actually, I expect most of the other retailers were behaving thoroughly decently. The problem that the finger-wagging politicos created was largely the consequence of their thoughtless choice of vocabulary and their wilful misunderstanding of how business is done. MPs said “Christmas had been cancelled” for Farepak’s investors. Well, only if you believe that Christmas is exclusively about the retail experience. And only if you believe that individual friends, family and strangers, rather than companies and Government, aren’t going to rally round at Christmas to ensure that the dispossessed aren’t excluded from the celebrations. 

MPs on the radio were saying that these savers were “decent, ordinary, hard-working people”, the implication being that those who work for big retailers and banks are villainous, pampered layabouts. MPs chose to sneer at bankers. What are bankers supposed to do? Continue to back failing companies until the banks go bust too? If so, I suspect the same MPs would be on radio saying it was a disgrace that thousands of small HBOS shareholders and pensioners should be treated this way. 

For some politicians, there is some arbitrary point at which the profits made by a company, operating within the law, cease to be about prosperity and become about greed. I heard one saying that he was campaigning for Farepak customers and against HBOS “because he was a socialist”. Not enough of a socialist, however, to campaign for the banks to be nationalised. But then it’s acceptable to make lots of money and give it to politicians in exchange for peerages.

George Pitcher is former industrial editor of The Observer, co-founder of Luther Pendragon and is now Curate at St Bride’s, Fleet Street.