IN FEBRUARY the Institute of Directors (IoD) made Lady Barbara Judge their new chair. The IoD said that “her professional achievements speak for themselves.”

Indeed they do. The IoD, an influential business lobby, will argue forcefully for “lighter touch” regulation during the election — a subject Judge understands well. US-born Judge works both there and in Britain. From 2008 to 2010 she was a director of US coal firm Massey Energy, resigning from the board a fortnight after 29 miners were killed in an explosion in one of the firm’s West Virginia pits.

Only two miners survived the explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine. It took four days to recover the bodies of the miners who were killed deep underground in a pit with a high methane gas build-up due to poor ventilation.

Judge was a member of Massey’s safety, environmental and public policy committee. During her time on the committee and preceding the explosion, US safety inspectors fined Massey over $382,000 for safety violations at the Upper Big Branch Mine.

Inspectors also closed all or part of the mine 60 times in two years. Many of the fines related to improper venting of methane gas, build-up of coal dust and incorrect fire-fighting equipment. Massey was also fined for fatalities at other sites when Judge was a director. In October 2008 an apprentice was crushed to death by a mine railcar thanks to what inspectors called “minimal training.”

After Judge left Massey the firm was bought out by a competitor, who paid out over $200m to settle claims resulting from the 2010 explosion. Inspectors found Massey liable for the lethal blast — the worst US mine disaster for 40 years — due to flagrant safety violations.

In 2011 an independent report commissioned by the West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin was published. It tells a remarkable tale about Judge’s firm. Massey broke many basic safety rules but the firm was “Too big to be regulated.

As the largest coal producer in the Appalachian region at the time of the disaster, Massey Energy used the leverage of the jobs it provided to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system.”

The report states that “many politicians were afraid to challenge Massey’s supremacy because of the company’s superb ongoing public relations campaign,” and that lack of regulation kills workers.

Judge had problems with regulators at the start of her career as well.

In 1992 she paid a $51,000 fine to settle charges over her involvement in a financial scandal. She was then a lawyer working for Charles Keating, the boss of many “savings and loan” firms.

These were the US equivalent of building societies which were allowed to become banks under a US deregulation promoted by Ronald Reagan’s Republicans.

The “savings and loan” crisis of the ’80s was a bit like our current financial scandals — many newly deregulated financial institutions cheated customers and then collapsed, forcing a multibillion-dollar bailout on the government.

Keating was imprisoned for fraud after his business destroyed thousands of US citizens’ savings. Judge, who was named in congressional investigations into Keating, paid the fine to settle charges that she had intervened with regulators to help Keating.

The IoD could have picked no better person to help them make the case for deregulation.

SOMETIMES all this fretting about how to to and shift power away from the boss class can be hard work.

So I recommend that Morning Star readers watch out for the next album release from Thee Faction, Britain’s leading socialist RnB band.

Then you can worry about how to shift power from the boss class along to some 1-2-3 guitar tunes.

Their third studio album ReadingWritingRevolution is coming out soon, and shows that the band is still in command of their particular take on rock and soul.

Second track [You’ve got the] numbers [why don’t you use it] references the Undertones song You’ve got my number (why don’t you use it).

But Thee Faction’s song is a call to arms where the Undertones was a “call me” plea to a girl from a boy. Thee Faction does have something of the

Undertones’ pop-punk mix of garage thrash and sixties beat combo dynamics.

The band also often reaches back to just before the Undertones and the other poppier punks for their musical form, turning to a slightly earlier buzzsaw guitar sound. You can hear strong echoes of the stripped back RnB of Eddie and the Hot Rods, and above all of Dr Feelgood. Only they are more of a Dr Feelred.

Thee Faction are a tight and bright live act. You can hear the efficiency that comes from a long time playing together on the CD. And there is a perfectly good place in the world for a thrashy poppy guitar band to spill your beer to. But here is where things go sideways, in a good way — bolted on to this down-to-earth guitar band is a series of political speeches which have been blowtorched and hammered and bent until they form pop lyrics.

This means good shouty slogan songs (Rent Strike and Police State), but also — as far as is possible to squeeze into the rhymes of a three minute guitar pop tune  — lectures about socialism and a special enthusiasm for the ideas of GDH Cole.

The politics always comes with good humour as well as force, and special mention goes to the brass section who give extra colour. So when the band belt out a song called Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, it actually turns out to be somewhere in the area of early Dexy’s Midnight Runners, with the killer chorus “I’m loving Engels instead.”

Thee Faction will also be playing the 100 Club in London on April 22nd, and at the Tolpuddle Festival in July. Watch out for news of ReadingWritingRevolution’s release on their website www.theefaction.org so you can buy the album, then learn the lyrics and sing along at Tolpuddle.

Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @SolHughesWriter