Rarely a week seems to go by when business doesn't get it in the neck for one reason or another.
Businesses are, variously, 'big', and full of 'fat cats', 'tax avoiders' and 'loan sharks', while that part of the commercial world known unfortunately as financial services is entirely responsible for the end of life as we know it.
It gets worse. According to a report by an organisation called the Directory of Social Change, businesses also appear to be responsible for some of the struggles that charities have been experiencing.
It's done an analysis which says businesses give a paltry 0.4 per cent of their pre-tax profits to charities.
The DSC's chief executive, Debra Allcock, says she's also shocked that charitable giving has gone down.
Other than a disastrous financial crash and a lingering downturn I can't think why that might happen either.
I'm being cheap and churlish, of course. The DSC has been around a long time, a testament, I think, the importance of what it stands for.
The commercial world is a powerful force and a profit-oriented outlook needs counterbalancing regularly as it's usually a product of a team effort – a team where some members don't profit as much as others.
But why the DSC thought publicly battering business round the head was a smart way of getting companies to give more is beyond me.
Pressure groups and politicians of all colours seem to think that it's OK to give business a regular kicking even though the behaviour they make such a song and dance about applies to a comparatively small number of companies, many of whom are not a million miles from Westminster and its adoring crowds of microphones.
Perish the thought that any of this is London-centric grandstanding for a London-centric media.
If it isn't, it's a pity that the DSC chose Westminster as the place to make its point.
The DSC says it has conducted a detailed examination of the charitable giving of around 400 businesses.
This is a chunky number, and I'm guessing there's a good cross-section of companies in their sample – small, medium and large, different parts of the country, different types of industry.
If there isn't – if it's concentrated on what critics like to refer to as 'big business' – then I wonder whether it tells a representative story.
If I tell you that there are more than 800,000 private sector businesses in London alone, you might see that sample in another light.
The problem is that most are small, don't have much of a voice, and probably don't earn a lot of money. It's the same here in Nottingham.
They are what are known as lifestyle businesses, set up by one or two people (some of whom had lost their jobs) as a way of earning their own living rather than being paid by someone else. Despite the image business has for being a licence to print money, most bring in the equivalent of a salary and a pension. It's no coincidence that the earnings threshold beyond which businesses start paying Corporation Tax is £75,000. Not exactly fat cat territory, is it?
There's more than a hint of headline-grabbing PR in some of the statements delivered by Debra Allcock. "Today we tell the truth", "they give so little and they give so badly", "the Great British Public is fed-up", she says. The killer punch is this sweeping criticism: "the vast majority of our companies in the UK have a great deal to be ashamed about".
The point she makes is that's not OK for companies to claim giving by staff as their own or to give so little. Some could give more – substantially more, and they know it. Corporate Social Responsibility has become an almost gruesome phrase which applies not only to earnest, long-term efforts to try to lift up the communities that businesses operate in, but to marketing-led PLC box-ticking.
But it isn't OK either to tar all businesses with a brush which suggests they are all irresponsible takers rather than givers. When you factor in the sheer size of the UK economy I don't think it's unfair to assume that most, in fact, do not behave like that.
Rarely a week goes by without the Post's columns containing an example of community activity by local businesses, whether it's the likes of Ikano sponsoring the Robin Hood half marathon, The Cooper Parry Corporate Challenge (which has raised £270,000 for charities in 10 years), or the boss of a small business in Mansfield called Hall-Fast raising £5,000 for a special school by doing a 15 kilometre assault course.
The DSC's chief executive says the poor giving is another example of "the lack of moral leadership that has been exhibited and exposed by our political leaders, our media leaders and our business leaders". Is modern life really that degenerate? Or have people got lost on an anti-business bandwagon?
Not for the first time, I'll point out a statistic which a few people in Westminster really ought to take on board. Of the UK's working population of roughly 30 million people, 80 per cent work in the private sector. When you kick 'business' you kick the part of the country that provides the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of the tax revenues that pay for the civilised society government tries to maintain on our behalf. Indeed, some of that tax goes from government to charity.
Parts of the business world should behave a whole lot better, parts of it could give a whole lot more. For many businesses, though, life can often seem punishingly hard, commercially uncertain and financially precarious. They have nothing to be "ashamed" of.
