Can Britons emulate Americans and start websites that slag off big companies?

Anti-company websites - which criticise, lampoon, lambaste or just plain rant at specific blue-chip companies - remain rare on this side of the Atlantic. But they are commonplace in the US. No big corporation can really count itself a bastion of capitalism unless an aggrieved customer has added "sucks" to its name and created a website complete with message board for fellow-travellers.

Everyone from McDonald's to Microsoft and Chase Manhattan Bank has been attacked in this way. Here, I know only of the telecommunications giant BT (www.btsuck.org) and Coutts (www.couttssucks.com, set up by an irate Worcestershire farmer who alleges he was overcharged £18,000 by the Queen's bank).

Some companies have tried to pre-empt the threat. After the Coutts experience, its parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland, bought virtually every domain name with "royalbankofscotlandsucks" within it. But in general, British companies haven't needed to. It takes a special intensity and duration of frustration or hatred to put in the hours needed to design and maintain such sites.

As disgruntled consumers we don't have the necessary application, it seems. As disgruntled employees, however, perhaps we do.

A website for unhappy staff at Ryanair, the budget airline, has taken off, receiving 525,000 hits from 51,000 visitors since its creation four months ago. The site, www.ryan-be-fair.org, was set up by the International Transport Workers' Federation as a forum for employees in the strongly anti-union company.

The picture repeatedly painted by cabin staff is of airborne sweatshops. As the federation puts it, they reveal "a shocking catalogue of misery, low pay and oppression".

One has to be a bit careful here. Years before the advent of the internet, John Lewis Partnership started publishing staff complaints and rants in its in-house magazine. It still receives dozens of letters a week, some of them dripping with poison.

Yet John Lewis is on the whole a rather decent and paternalistic employer. Anonymity is the enemy of accuracy.

The Ryanair boss, Michael O'Leary, dismisses the site as "generally just fiction". But if even half the messages posted on it are genuine, O'Leary has a real problem.

Readers who in their far-off youth pressured Barclays Bank into quitting South Africa may be interested to know that it is having almost as much aggro trying to get back into the country again.

Barclays pulled out of South Africa 18 years ago after a relentless boycott by students, who accused the bank of supporting the apartheid regime by operating there.

It finally capitulated only after seeing its share of the student market halve. Students are precious to banks: "Give me the child at 18 and I'll have his current account for life," is Lombard Street's answer to the Jesuits.

Barclays dipped its toe back into Johannesburg in 1995 with a small operation, but it now has much more ambitious plans, wanting to buy control of South Africa's biggest retail bank, Absa, for roughly £2bn. Absa would give it six million customers and 670 branches.

But even the promise of largesse for a new trust set up by Nelson Mandela has not smoothed the path for Barclays. First, the rand has risen sharply against the pound, making the acquisition much more expensive and difficult to justify to shareholders back home.

Now, the deal is said to be bogged down in a regulatory quagmire.

Patrick Hosking is investment editor of the Times

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