Paddy's "Letter from London"

The malignant rise of gesture politics

2012-02-01T12:25:00.001Z

All is fair in love and war and, I suppose we have to accept, politics as well. ‘Twas ever thus perhaps – only someone seriously ignorant of history would say that politics has ever been free of cant and cover up and of posturing and play-acting. As Harry Truman said “If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen” – no doubt Cicero would have said the same. He did say “Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.” so he knew the stage on which the noble Romans did their stuff – and things haven't really changed much in a couple of millennia.

So if modern politicians believe, with Cicero, that the populace is unreliable, and that the electoral system cannot be relied upon to deliver the “right” result, then they must conclude that they have to rig it – literally in some cases (how many voting systems are truly democratic?). Manipulating the electorate, rather than outright corruption, is the preferred route – at least in what we in the richer countries call our “Western Democracies”. As I say it has always been around - but in the television and now internet age the manipulation takes a very overt and sometimes insidious form. It was in the 1960s that politicians not only became brands but began to be sold as smartly packaged icons with their “values” reduced to soundbites and visual imagery. Kennedy was elected in 1960 because he was better looking than Nixon – there were other reasons but JFK’s absence of five o’clock shadow swung it for him. But Tricky Dicky learned his lesson as Joe McGinniss brilliantly told us in The Selling of the President – his record of how the Nixon brand was successfully marketed in the 1968 Presidential campaign. Nothing has changed in 40 years and the approach that got Nixon to the White House – suitably updated to use modern media – is what every political candidate uses today.

But what about what happens when a politician is actually elected – when he has to face the reality that governing is a bit different from campaigning? Some never stop campaigning of course – Clinton and Blair were masters of this. Others embrace the responsibilities of office differently and actually want to do things – even things based on some belief or moral imperative. This is likely to be discouraged, at least in the British system, by the Civil Service. As Sir Humphrey put it in “Yes Minister” "Government is not about morality, it is about stability; keeping things going, preventing anarchy, stopping society falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow." The opportunity to “do things” comes rarely - the main imperative in Government is continuity which will not only be less of a shock to the system but also increase the chances of re-election – at least in the good times. Steady as she goes. Politicians tend not to be re-elected if they are perceived to have let their ideology run away with them. So when some of President Obama's opponents accuse him of being a “Socialist” they are consciously playing the “Beware of ideology” card even though the charge against Obama is patently absurd. In European terms Obama is pretty close to the Christian Democrat centre-right positioning of a Merkel, a Sarkozy or a Cameron - he is certainly no socialist. But his modest reforms of the indefensibly elitist American healthcare system are seen by some on the Right as too statist and in some way un-American. Unfortunately for him Obama has had to try and change healthcare at a time when the American economy is in peril so whilst nobody reasonable could charge Obama of doing something that is morally wrong (the reverse applies) the charge that it is unaffordable at this time is more credible.

Timing in politics is everything. Tony Blair was elected at a time when the British economy was improving – he did not inherit an economic mess from his predecessor. And from 1997 for ten years, and through three General Elections, Blair and his Chancellor Brown were secure because of the apparent strength of the British economy – if ever there was evidence that the message is “Its the economy stupid” this was it. The charge that Blair ran a Leftish government , recently made by a number of distinguished commentators, just doesn't stick – any more than the charge that Obama is a socialist has credence. Blair was also a Christian Democrat.

The main charge against Blair is not that he tried to shift the centre of gravity of British Government to the left (it stayed roughly where it was during his administration) but that he used the shock of 9/11 (and to an extent 7/7) to pursue ideological goals abroad. At home Blair was content to luxuriate in the warm glow that comes from an economy that has full employment, low inflation and seemingly plenty of opportunities for wealth creation – not least a buoyant housing market and a long share price boom. This allowed him to indulge an ideology abroad that we now see was as much his as it was that of President Bush. Blair may have been a junior partner in the military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq but he was no less committed to the neo-Conservative ideological driver than George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest. This was not gesture politics at all – any more than Margaret Thatcher’s taking on the Unions twenty years earlier can be so described. Blair did what he did, as Thatcher did what she did, because he believed it to be right. This is not to say that Tony Blair eschewed gesture politics – he almost invented the genre! He governed by soundbite – even when recognising that this might be counter-productive. His remark when entering into negotiations on Northern Ireland in 1998 was a revealing classic “This is not a time for soundbites. We’ve left them at home. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders…”. That you really couldn't make up!

Which brings us to David Cameron. I cannot recall a Prime Minister who made so many “profound” statements on such a wide range of subjects in such a short space of time. Even Blair couldn't cram so much into, say, a week as the present incumbent of Number 10. This might be harmless if it was just rhetoric and bombast – sound and fury signifying nothing. But sometimes its almost as if Cameron also believes that he has the hand of history on his shoulders. So after the riots of last summer he immediately said “We will not put up with this in our country. We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.” Five months on has anything really been done to reduce the “culture of fear” – not that any of us can see it hasn't. Or maybe that “culture of fear” was just a soundbite and the riots were a deplorable but one-off series of incidents that were unlikely to recur. Who knows? Its for sure that the Prime Minister didn't, and doesn't.

It is of course on Europe that we see David Cameron at his gesture politics worst. I have written elsewhere about how Cameron tried to ingratiate himself with the large number of Eurosceptics in his party in Brussels in December last year. At the end of this blog I said the following:

“Losing your rag can be quite effective - but you can only do it once if you want to be seen as credible rather than just a noisy troublemaker. And as these realties begin to become apparent to the Eurosceptics they will once again turn their fire on Cameron - and this time he will have no more cards to play”.

This is precisely what is happening now. Cameron did the big “Standing up for Britain” gesture in December and infuriated his European partners by his distancing insouciance. He has followed this up recently by lecturing the EU about how they should “sort out their problems”. In December Cameron’s actions could be hailed by those antipathetic to the “European project” as supporting their cause – and they did this with glee. Barely a month later these same applauders are now booing from the side-lines again. The Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan probably summed up the mood with his latest blog which said:

“So now we know: no repatriation, no renegotiation, business as usual. December's 'veto' turns out to be nothing of the kind; at best, it is a partial opt-out. Britain had asked for concessions in return for allowing the other member states to use EU institutions and structures for their fiscal compact. No such concessions were forthcoming, but we have given our permission anyway.”

In December Cameron said after the Brussels Non-Veto “I said to the people of Britain that if I couldn’t get a treaty that was good for Britain, I wouldn’t sign up to it, and I was good to my word.” This is empty gesture politics for two reasons. Firstly even if there had been a veto then it is a very particular and narrow definition of Britain's interests to say that it is in them to distance the United Kingdom from Europe in this way. Many in Britain may share the view that we can exist as a sort of semi-detached member of the EU. But the counter-position - that we are inextricably tied to Europe and that we should play a central part in European governance - is at least equally as credible. Second it was clear then, and is even clearer now, that Cameron was primarily concerned with his awkward squad Party members who were then using the call for a referendum on EU membership as a Trojan horse for their ultimate goal – of withdrawing the UK from the EU completely. Cameron was buying off this lot with his Brussels posturing but it was a pyrrhic victory and whilst he is not quite back in the Euromire he was in before Brussels he is not far away from it.

How to say sorry–and how not to

2012-01-08T17:59:00.001Z

Its been a foot in mouth couple of days what with Diane Abbott lumping all Whites together in a borderline racist remark and David Cameron saying that Ed Balls behaved in Parliament like someone with Tourette's syndrome. Not good. And both were forced to apologise. Here's what they originally said:

Abbott

“White people love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game."

Cameron

“He [Ed Balls] just annoys me… it’s like having someone with Tourette’s permanently sitting opposite you."

and here are their apologies:

Abbott

“I apologise for any offence caused. I understand people have interpreted my comments as making generalisations about white people. I do not believe in doing that.”

Cameron

"I was speaking off the cuff and if I offended anyone of course I am very sorry about that. That was not my intention at all,"

The Apologies

Now lets analyse these two apologies. Abbott's use of “Any” and Cameron’s use of “If” are both qualifiers intended to water down the offence by suggesting that there was doubt. The use of “Any” by Abbott suggests that it is at least thinkable that there was no offence. Paraphrased she was saying that there may, perhaps, be people out there who were offended. And similarly Cameron by saying “If” implies that there is doubt in the matter. If the two of them had approached the drafting of their apology statements from the premise that there was no doubt that they had offended (which was the case) then Abbott would have said “I apologise for the offence caused” and Cameron would have said “…and that I offended anyone…”.

We can go further. The second sentence in Abbott’s apology statement implies that that people who interpret her comments as “making generalisations” are wrong because “I do not believe in doing that”. But Ms Abbott has unquestionably just done that - whether she claims that she doesn't “believe in doing it” it or not. Her original Tweet emphatically did make generalisations. It wasn’t “Some white People” but “White people”. And the idea that because Twitter restricts to 140 characters there isn’t room to be more precise (an excuse that Abbott made) doesn't hold water at all. There was plenty of room for a qualifying “Some” in Abbott’s original Tweet.

Cameron has various excuses in his apology. Firstly he was “Speaking off the cuff”. Well! So it wasn't a pre-prepared statement or a speech written for him by someone else it was his spontaneous reaction to a question – which, incidentally, he had plenty of time on the train journey with the friendly journalists to retract. In other words, you might think, it was Cameron’s true feelings unfiltered by the spin doctors! Unfair? I don't think so. And was it a joke? Remember what is said about many a true word being spoken in jest. Not true, in this case, because it is per se “True” but because it may truly reveal what Cameron thinks deep down.

After the “If” in Cameron’s apology we have the use of the word “anyone” which is actually unnecessary - except as a suggestion that (again I paraphrase) most people would not be offended but some very sensitive people may inadvertently have been. Or put another way if your are normal and sensible there is no way you could take offence - but if your are a sensitive flower on the outer reaches of normality perhaps you were. That's the “anyone” excuse.

Cameron’s “That was not my intention at all” is equally bizarre. Has anybody suggested that it was Cameron's intention to offend? Not that I’ve seen. Why would the Prime Minister want to offend anybody (except possible Ed Balls - who can look after himself!). Here Cameron is apologising for something he didn't do. Of course he didn't intend to offend – so why apologise for it?

So what should they have said

Firstly the furore in both theses case cases comes because very large numbers of people indeed were offended by what they said. There is no doubt at all that is the case so that has to be recognised up front. Second there is the indisputable point that both Abbott and Cameron are decent people – she isn't a racist and he isn't a person who would make fun of handicapped minorities. Third there is the need to

Accept that they made a mistake
Apologise for it
Move on

So in both cases the form of words I would recommend would be as follows:

“I am very sorry that I said ‘XXXXX’ – this was both wrong and offensive and I apologise unreservedly. I apologise in particular to (those with Tourette's syndrome and their carers/those in our communities who are working to further inter-racial harmony) and I congratulate you for the great work you do which I fully support.”

Little Englanders will always be with us

2011-10-23T19:13:00.001+01:00

I was in my late twenties when the United Kingdom had a referendum on the question whether we should stay a member of the European Community. We hadn't been in long but Harold Wilson won an election in 1974 with a referendum commitment in his manifesto and it happened in the following year. Wilson was trying to contain rebellion from his (mainly) left of centre MPs and the bulk of the opposition to Europe in the Referendum campaign came form them. There were some Tories who didn't like Europe either (notably Enoch Powell) but the vast majority of them, including their new leader Margaret Thatcher, called for and voted for “Yes to Europe.

Over the years some on the left have remained anti EU (as it now is) but in the main the mainstream Labour Party and, in office, the Conservative leadership has not really wanted to rock the EU boat. Thatcher wished to appear a hard negotiator when it came to Britain's relationship with the EU and John Major did the same. But in effect the blindingly obvious - that the UK is better off in Europe rather than out of it has been the mainstream political position. Nevertheless in the same way that Wilson had to buy off his difficult left wing with a referendum pledge David Cameron did the same with his vocal Little Englander wing. Nothing has antagonised Cameron to this wing more than what they see as his reneging on a commitment to hold an EU In/Our referendum.

Real Politick is what happens when leaders move from opposition to Government. Even sincere Eurosceptics like Foreign Secretary William Hague now acknowledge that the idea that the UK can withdraw form the EU is fanciful and one best left to the small nationalist parties like UKIP. Hague, and Cameron, will argue that the UK/EU relationship needs constant care and attention and in that they are joined by the other main Party leaders. That some powers currently with Brussels might be negotiated to return is hardly a contentious suggestion. Indeed the EU has a commitment to subsidiarity which specifically endorses taking decisions at the lowest practical level in the hierarchy. At the same time even for some non Euro countries like Britain a greater degree of centralised cooperation on some economic issues is desirable. These matters are discussed with our partners and decisions are taken.

The European Union is sometimes characterised as an “Experiment that has failed” by its “Little Englander” opponents in Britain. I suppose that they will always be with us – but nothing could be further from the truth. Greater unity across the previously warring nations of Europe has been one of the great achievements of the post war era. It has its flaws and certainly current challenges. But the unravelling of the EU that could follow from a UK withdrawal is unthinkable and no responsible British Government will let it happen. Amen to that.

Wealth is Income – and vice versa!

2011-08-31T09:44:00.001+01:00

There is a very curious debate going on at the moment in (mainly) Tory circles about whether Income or Wealth taxes are preferable. For example see this article from Tory polemicist Tim Montgomerie and the graphic reproduced here that argue that Wealth taxes are (comparatively) good whilst Income Taxes are bad. Now I may not be a practising Economist but I have to say Mr Montgomerie’s arguments are both politically puzzling and economically illiterate. I’ll leave an analysis of what political game Montogmerie is playing to someone closer to Conservative circles – but the economics of his case are patently bizarre.

Lets start with the basic premise of the so-called “Mansion Tax.” Essentially the argument is that is you own a home which has a value of £1m or more you can afford to pay more tax and it is right that you should be asked to do so. Not a particularly contentious proposition in itself and I don't want here to argue its merits. But what I must do is point out the bleeding obvious - and that is that such is tax is not, in the short term, really a tax on wealth at all but a tax on income! Income tax by any other name. Why? Well the only way that most homeowners could pay such a tax is out of income. You may live in a house worth £1m but that value is tied up in its bricks and mortar. You cant sell off a room to pay a Mansion Tax!

In the same way that a tax nominally on an asset such as a property tax is a form of Income Tax so also excess income leads to wealth creation. If a taxpayer has the good fortune to have income in excess of his outgoings, and he sees no reason to increase his expenditure beyond its current level, then his main option is to turn that income into wealth. He may do this by buying a bigger house, or a painting to hang on the wall or by investing is a Pension scheme and/or stocks and shares. But in all these cases, and others, he is turning a positive cash flow into an asset – and that asset will in may cases be income generating as well as, if he is lucky, an appreciating one. This is the rich man’s virtuous circle – the more you earn the more you can invest which then increases the amount you “earn”. An upward spiral of personal wealth creation.

The main taxes most of us pay are related to our income (Income Tax on earnings, dividends etc.) our property (Council Tax) and our expenditure (VAT and duties). Income Tax is progressive – the more we earn the more we pay. Council Tax is a form of wealth tax albeit paid out of income. And VAT is regressive – a rich man pays exactly the same rate of VAT as a poor man. The common thread in the case of all of these taxes is that in any one year we have to pay them out of income (usually by PAYE for the earnings related tax) or, in some special cases, out of the cash generated by an asset sale. For some the Income Tax bill is met by relinquishing assets but I suspect that this applies to a small number of mostly fairly wealthy individuals.

If we believe in a truly progressive tax system which is built on the sold moral rock that the richer you are the more you should contribute to the cost of running the country (and to helping those less fortunate than you are) then Income Tax is the way to do it. If you see that both a Mansion Tax and its close relative Council Tax are really income taxes by any other name why not simplify matters by consolidating them into Income Tax (and maybe introducing a local Income Tax) rather than messing around with trying to generate property related tax revenues? As many have pointed out the fact that you live in a highly valued house does not necessarily mean that on a day to day basis you are rich – i.e. that you have a high income. There will be thousands of anomalous cases, as there are with Council Tax, that special tax exemptions will have to be applied to cover. A recipe for bureaucracy and intrusion. Keep it simple stupid. Use Income Tax - its the fairest Tax system we have.

Are we are losing the skills of reasoned debate?

2011-06-21T00:27:00.001+01:00

Politics has always been powered by invective and the trading of abuse that is Prime Minister’s Questions and the taunting and insulting that is the daily fare of politicking today is nothing new. As Harry Truman famously put it “If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen." But what is new is the fact that the online world and particularly social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer instantaneous and ubiquitous communications and, to some extent, debate.

In this new world it seems to me that there is a real danger that reasoned debate is reduced to soundbites and things are said , and said in a way, that would be unthinkable in a more personal forum. To illustrate that let me take a recent article available online by a columnist in The Spectator Hugo Rifkind (pictured) . The article has a headline “Ed Miliband was always destined to be rubbish – and he is”. Its a long time since I was in a Primary School playground but this headline comes close to being in the same category of insult that I recall 8-year-olds using. To support the “rubbish” charge Rifkind, who is not a comedian, chooses to quote a “joke” from someone who is - the Scottish comic Fred Macaulay. According to Macaulay the Leader of the Opposition “talks like he's got another mouth inside his mouth. which is trying to say something else”.

Whether you like Fred Macaulay’s joke or not it was just that – an attempt at humour. It is not about politics or policy or performance but, at a trivial level, about presentation. Rifkind jumps at the chance to make mischief. Miliband is “like the alien in Alien”. He “sounds a mess and is a mess”. And so on. And Mr Miliband’s colleagues on the opposition front bench get it in the neck as well. They, says our Sage, have the “air of the human dregs at the very end of a drunken wedding” they are “shouting old wrecks who don't remember where they live”

Mr Rifkind then refers to the “Miliband family drama” and suggests that other leading couples in the Labour Party (such as Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper) will have “conflicts in the future”. This charge is without any justification and is just gratuitous name calling.

Much of the rest of the article is anti Labour bile, with a bit of anti Tory bile as well - perhaps for “balance”. Maybe the author was having a bad day – it is certainly a very bad article. Because to use a phrase like “Labour isn't just in trouble because Ed Miliband is rubbish” is unilluminating. And I haven't quoted selectively – in quite a long piece there is nothing at all of substance. Labour has the “wrong people” because the “right people were scared off”. Who these wrong and right people are Mr Rifkind doesn't enlighten us.

It is naive to think that presentation isn't important in politics. The most successful politicians of modern times – Blair, Clinton, Obama, Salmond for example are masters of effective communication. And David Cameron is very good as well. Ed Miliband, a fundamentally decent, intelligent and talented man has work to do in this regard. But he isn’t “rubbish”, or an “alien”, or a “mess”. And his colleagues are not “human dregs” or “old wrecks”. You may not agree with their polices and you may not like them personally. But politics is, or should be, an honourable profession and I do not for one minute doubt that both front benches are comprised of honourable men and women. Let them disagree and let the commentariat hold them to account. But trivial, pointed over-personalised abuse takes us to a very dark place - and attempts at humour (if that is what this article was in part) are best left to the real comedians.

Wonga – the modern day loan sharks

2011-06-14T16:54:00.001+01:00

It’s late at night. You’ve parked your car a bit further away from the Cinema than ideally you would have liked and it didn’t look to be as secure a car park as you are used to. But you expect that it will be alright – an expectation that is swiftly disabused as you approach the area where your car is and you spot a seriously threatening bunch of young men around it. This looks like trouble – and it is. There isn’t much wriggle room – the power is all on one side, and it isn’t yours! Your choices are limited and for once your mind takes over. You know that you have only one desirable outcome – to get the hell away with your life, your health and your car intact. It’ll cost you and what was ten dollars for three hours parking swiftly becomes a hundred. Cash. Used notes. Handed over to the boss of the gang who graciously moves aside, wishes you well and points your route back to the highway. Extortion? Of course it was. And did you have a choice? Nah!

And that, in essence is the offer from Wonga.com. They will loan you money to tide you over when your cash flow is weak. Your payday is a week or so away and you haven’t the readies to pay the bills. The rent collector is at the door. The cupboard is bare. And the horse at Chepstow is still running! You don’t get the credit cards any more – not after that unfortunate County Court Judgment. You’ve got a job alright – at minimum wage - but outgoings, what with the young kid and the Partner’s mother’s problems don’t match to income. And that’s where the nice people at Wonga come in. They are the lender of last resort – well almost the last. There aren’t dudes in sharp suits and shades coming menacingly around every week to collect the repayment of your loan as once was the only option. No these Wonga guys work only online and it really is dead, dead easy to borrow. To get £100 to tide you over for a couple of weeks costs you a bit – you repay them £121.11 at the end of the fifteen days in that oh so brief period after you are paid when you’ve actually got some money coming in. So for every day that your £100 loan is in place you pay Wonga £1.40 – which means on an annual basis you’d pay £511 for that £100 loan. Loan £100. Interest £411. Interest rate a wee bit over 4000%!

But Wonga say their customers don’t keep their loans for a year or anything like that period. But that doesn’t mean that the interest rate is any different. They charge over 4000% whether you borrow for 24 hours or 24 days – or longer. The Wonga business model isn’t that interested in the individual – actually they don’t care at all. They know that to con one punter into paying £21.11 to borrow £100 for fifteen days is no big deal. It even, put like that, doesn’t sound too extortionate. But multiply that one punter by thousands and what you have is an institutionalised and highly profitable con trick. The interest rate applies to all – which means that the income stream accrues nice and reliably. Challenge anyone to borrow at say 3% (a couple per cent over bank rate) and loan at 4000% and they will make money – lots of it! The boss of Wonga, Errol Damelin, says that he is “debt averse” – that he finances his operation from equity and profits. Well no surprise there - obviously. The cash flow of the Wonga business is so extraordinary that there can be no need to borrow. But any accountant will tell you that the real value of the cash they loan is roughly equivalent to Bank Rate plus a small premium. 3% at most!

So just like the crooks demanding money from you to let you repossess your car Wonga preys upon the vulnerable that have no choice. Credit Cards today charge you around 17% – a bit more if they perceive you as a risk. Wonga charges you an interest rate that is around 250 times that rate. And the law allows them to do it! The modern day loan shark doesn’t work wearing dark glasses and with some heavies to threaten you on the doorstep. But they are no less venal and our society is much the poorer that it allows the like of Wonga.com to exist.

How I helped Sir Brian Souter and Stagecoach!

2011-06-11T11:44:00.001+01:00

I have a confession to make and I’m not sure that my progressive friends will forgive me. Today we learn that the controversial Scottish Nationalist Brian Souter, founder with his sister Ann Gloag of the bus and train giant Stagecoach, is to be knighted. These two are among the richest people in Scotland – and I have to admit that I played a part in getting them there! Here’s the story.

Back in the mid-1980s I was the Commercial manager for the oil company Shell in Scotland. My job was to manage Shell’s business with a wide range of industrial and commercial customers and I had a team of sales representatives and other staff focused on this task. It was in some ways a difficult time for business north of the border. Mrs Thatcher’s rule hit particularly hard on the Scots and many Scottish businesses, including some quite famous ones, went under. Various grades of fuel were crucial to keep the wheels of industry turning and my job was heavily involved in making judgment calls as to whether we should trade with businesses in financial difficulties. Few, even the largest, were immune from the troubles and the miners’ strike in 1984/5 brought particular problems across the whole business sector.

It was at this time that my Representative for the Dundee area came to see me with a ticklish problem. He was a good salesman and he had built up a good working relationship with a business which was growing quite rapidly and which was run by two clever and entrepreneurial young Scots - Souter and Gloag! Stagecoach in those days was a small Bus and Coach Company operating mainly in Scotland but hoping to benefit from the Conservative Government’s privatisation of the public transportation sector. Scheduled bus businesses in Scotland and the rest of the UK had been mainly publicly owned – often by local authorities. Stagecoach was predicated on the premise that this would change and that private companies, like theirs, would soon have the chance to get a share of the cake – if not all of it!

My Rep had done a good job in gaining a large share of Stagecoach’s business – including the crucial Shell credit card which the bus drivers used to buy fuel on long journeys when they were away from their home base in Dundee. For Shell it was good business. On the road sales gave a margin premium over bulk sales – but it was potentially a bit dodgy if transport operators got into financial difficulties, which they often did. Bad debts could build up rapidly if credit card use was uncontrolled. My reps story was as follows. Stagecoach had over-stretched itself. They had a lot of debt needed for financing their vehicles and high outgoings on fuel, leasing and staff costs. It was a well-managed business but in difficult times their ambitions were outstripping their capability to fund what they wanted. In short they were in a classic cash flow bind. The banks were being unhelpful and the company was seeking extended credit to keep afloat. I went with my rep to see Souter and Gloag and was impressed by their vision and by the fact that much of their business, in good times, was a cash business. Millions of low value transactions every day kept the money rolling in – but it just wasn’t enough at a time when the Bank rate was 12% and financing was really problematic. I had basically two choices. I could withdraw credit and ask for cash settlement for all transactions – that would almost certainly have forced the company into liquidation as fuel was such a high percentage of their outgoings. Or I could extend credit and be flexible over payments. I took the decision to support the company although it was quite a risk – the monthly outgoings were of the order of £100,000 and even more than that could have been at risk in the event of a default. However Stagecoach’s business model seemed robust and there was no doubting the energy and ambition of their two owners.

Well the rest, as they say, is history. My rep and I kept a close eye on Stagecoach for the next year or so but gradually their financial position improved and before I left Scotland in 1986 they were paying on normal terms – and their business continued to grow. Had they gone under in 1984 perhaps they would have re-appeared later in a different guise. Who knows? But many other Scottish businesses did perish and it was a long time before there was a truly healthy economic climate in the country. Souter and Gloag worked immensely hard to build their business and, in retrospect, I’m glad that I took the decision I did to keep them afloat. They were a significant employer in Dundee and across Scotland and that was another reason why it seemed at the time the right thing to do.

So Sir Brian I wish you well! I wonder if you remember the story I have told here. And whether you would acknowledge that a Sassenach from an Anglo-Dutch multinational played a wee part in your success!

The febrile world of post election British politics

2011-05-08T11:02:00.001+01:00

The results of last Thursday’s elections across the United Kingdom raise some quite intriguing questions about governance in these islands. The overwhelming rejection of the AV voting system suggests that there is a conservative streak in us which makes change difficult - or at the very least that we have to be rather better persuaded that change is desirable. This outcome was not unlike the result of the last General Election in which, although there was a large move away from Labour after 13 years in power, there was no ringing endorsement that change to the Conservatives was what we wanted. Votes for the smaller parties such as the Greens or UKIP were ideological. But votes for the Liberal Democrats, whose ideology was fuzzy at best, were more a “plague on both your houses message” to Labour and the Tories. Indeed this was Nick Clegg’s main positioning during the election campaign – the two big Parties were “old politics”.

So where are we now one year on? We now undoubtedly have an “Old Politics” Government – one that in its core values is little different from the ideologies of Heath or Thatcher or Major. It is more socially liberal – but that merely reflects the shifting of mainstream opinion in the country on issues such as Gay rights. However on matters such as the economy, governance, foreign policy, education and healthcare there is little that Cameron is doing that Margaret Thatcher would not also have done – or tried to do. This shift back to the pre “New Labour” right-wing policy imperative is ironically being endorsed by the very Liberal Democrats who argued for change away from the old political norms. It is also, and crucially, supported by the Conservative (large C) press with, as ever, only “The Guardian” and the “Mirror” Groups not backing the conservative (small c) line.

It was the antipathy to progressive change that meant that the conservative media and, overwhelmingly, the Conservative Party rejected AV. They were helped by a strange split in the Labour Party which saw a battle between a pro AV “Progressive” wing under Ed Miliband fighting an anti AV “Traditionalist” group under the likes of John Prescott and Margaret Becket. Many Labour voters, not unreasonably, looked at this and said if they cant agree how do they expect me to vote for change? Better stick with what we’ve got!

In the local elections in England the Liberal Democrats were punished hard for their duplicity and hypocrisy since the last General Election. That the Conservative vote held up well suggests that 2010 Tory voters have not been surprised at the direction that a Conservative led Government has taken and broadly endorse it - they are getting what they voted for. The same applies in the opinion polls which have the Tories at about the same level that they were in May 2010. For LibDem voters, however, the reverse applies. A minority of LibDems prefer the Conservatives to Labour – perhaps these are the ones that give the Party its current meagre 10% in the Polls. But most LibDem voters were left of centre and gave the Party support because they saw it as a more moderate, but still progressive, choice than the Labour Party. At the 2010 election the LibDems took 23% of the vote but well over half of this has drifted away – most of it to Labour - now the only credible home for Anti-Conservative voters.

Some commentators see last Thursday’s elections as presaging a return to two Party politics in England. And the rejection of AV has helped this in that it will continue to be impossible for a national third Party to get representation in Parliament proportional to its electoral support. A split in the Liberal Democrats could change this and the prospects for a LibDem Party purged of its most enthusiastic Coalition supporters like Clegg, Alexander and Laws could be quite good. A key player ought to be Vince Cable who, despite his problems, could attract back the lost LibDem voters if he led a breakaway movement. This looks unlikely though despite Cable’s recent criticism of his Conservative allies. Power is addictive and Cable and his fellow LibDem ministers seem to prefer being in the ring of the Government circus than outside it.

Meanwhile in Scotland the voters have rejected not just the Westminster Coalition partners but Labour as well and have voted for their own – the Scottish National Party led by the popular Alex Salmond. It remains to be seen whether the Union is really under threat from the SNP’s hegemony north of the border – my guess is that most Scots are comfortable with being part of a United Kingdom – especially now they have their own Parliament with substantial and increasing powers. The policy route taken by an SNP government with a majority will be interesting to observe – the main issue being whether they move to the Left or to the Right and what effect this has on support for the opposition. Ultimately the voters will make a judgment based on their view of the SNP’s competence rather than their ideology. If Scotland prospers under Mr Salmond then the SNP could be in power for a long time – but this is not the same thing as saying that the Scottish people will vote for independence.

With elections now behind us, the AV issue dead and buried and with the improbability of the LibDems in Government wanting to pull the rug from under Mr Cameron’s feet the ship of State could be heading towards calmer waters soon. The challenge for both of the two main Party leaders is to capture the support of those quite small number of voters in the grey margins between them. Ed Miliband has already stared courting disaffected LibDems and, as we have seen, this has been very successful amongst the electorate in the local elections. To give impetus to this reestablishment of the majority in the country that Labour enjoyed under Tony Blair it would help if a few national big name LibDems would defect to Labour – this seems likely sooner rather than later to avoid the charge of opportunism in the run up to a likely 2015 General Election. So under this First Past The Post election a straight fight between Left and Right, without the confusion of there being two left of centre parties with their eyes on power, seems likely.

When the history of these strange and febrile times comes to be written the Coalition Government experiment facilitated by Nick Clegg will be seen as having had two outcomes. First it will be seen as having been a clever stratagem by David Cameron to give him and the Tories power to pursue their right of centre agenda despite their failure in the 2010 election to get enough seats to go it alone. Secondly it will see the return of the Liberal Democrats to the fringes of politics from which they briefly emerged in recent General Elections. Reputations, especially political reputations, take a long time to build up. But they can be destroyed in the blink of an eye.

Who is behind all the Royal Wedding hype?

2011-04-29T09:43:00.001+01:00

I’ve struggled with the Royal Wedding. Not with my own feelings about the monarchy which the stimulus of the event has made me articulate here. No my problem is to try and understand why as a Nation we are going through the invasion of our privacy that the blanket media coverage of the Wedding has become. I sense very little bottom up enthusiasm - in the jargon of Twitter most of us are “Meh” to the whole caboodle. Despite what the publishers of the oleaginous book the cover of which is illustrated here claim this isn't at heart a “Very Public Love Story” at all. The public’s interest, such as it is, has only come about because there has been a pretty deliberate attempt to create it. So what is actually in play and why do I think that its an unwarranted invasion of my privacy?

The principal parties in the creation of the Royal Wedding hype are the Establishment, the Media and Commercial interests. What is the “Establishment” – a quite old-fashioned term you might think in an age when there is rather greater (if insufficient) social mobility than when the term was first coined by Henry Fairlie in The Spectator in 1955 ? The Establishment today is that loose group of people who set and police the norms of what we are as a nation. It includes politicians of all parties – at least the 90% of them that broadly toe the conventional line. So for example the Leader of the Opposition is part of the Establishment. Ed Miliband said in respect of the Royal Wedding “I’m delighted for Prince William and Kate Middleton and send them my very best for their wedding. The whole country will be wishing them every happiness.” I don't know whether Mr Miliband, the son of a Marxist refugee from Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, is really a closet monarchist but I very much doubt it. But as an establishment figure he has to issue anodyne statements like this - not least because the tabloid furore if he didn't would be huge! There is a strong element of the Emperor having no clothes about all this. A few of the usual suspects have used the Royal Wedding as an opportunity to voice anti-monarchy views – I’ve done this myself. But few of them are public figures and none of them is a leading politician. On this one the ranks are closed – the Emperor's nakedness goes unremarked upon.

If the political establishment is conforming to type so to is the Media. True there has been some coverage given to those who oppose the whole thing but they are mostly portrayed as eccentrics from the fringes of the real world – they are there just to confirm how right the mainstream is to be “celebrating”. The coverage on the print and television media is little different from what I recall when Princess Margaret got married 51 years ago – and every Royal Wedding since. The coverage then as now was deferential, uncritical and wall to wall. There is no escape. The media presumption is that the event is important and that it is legitimate to shovel away all the real news for a while as we wallow in saccharine. There is little or no real challenge to this presumption and so like a virulent virus the contagion spreads across all of our newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Even the social media are all atwitter as journalists who can normally be relied upon for balance climb onto the bandwagon. Why is this happening – it cannot be as a consequence of any sane editorial assessment of news values? The wedding is only a news story because the establishment says it is and the media happily agrees.

The most facile argument for this excessive media coverage is that the wedding is a “feel-good story” - a charming counterweight to all the terrible news of wars and famine, death and doom and destruction. This argument is offensive for two reasons. First there are plenty of “feel-good” stories around if the media wants to find them. Stories of heroism and sacrifice. Stories of human courage in adversity. Stories of challenges to tyrants and triumph against victimisation and oppression. But these are stories about unknown people and it takes some effort to find them. But the Royal Wedding is an “on a plate” story about ready made celebrities famous for – well what exactly? One of the couple is famous because of the accident of his birth – and the other for marrying him. But does it have real news value – no way, except in the trivial pages of “Hello” or “OK”. The second reason the “feel-good” story doesn't work for me is that the very premise of it is patronising and anachronistic. We the people are being force-fed a premise that not only is this a news event, so we’d better pay attention but also that it is good for us. I’ll decide what’s good for me thanks – I won’t be told by the media establishment that because there is a pseudo-glamour and pageantry and hyperbole therefore there is significance - and that only a killjoy could object. I wont be patronised – and I’ll also use my sense of history to say that we really should have moved on and learned our lessons from the past. Virtually every super-hyped Royal Wedding of modern times has been the first scene of what turns out to be a disastrous Royal Marriage. If the track record is so spectacularly awful wouldn’t you think they might be a bit more humble this time around and give it less rather than more hype?

Then there are the commercial interests. It’s good business to make a buck from any event where the media coverage is massive – wait for London2012 to see that in extremis. But the Royal Wedding isn't far behind. It will sell newspapers and magazines of course and advertising on television. It will sell all the tacky trinkets that commemorate the “Great Day”. Search for “Kate Middleton” on Amazon and you’ll be offered 1688 different products - from face masks to biographies (a biography of a 29 year old who is, shall we say, lowish in the achievement stakes!) And no doubt there will be a tame economist somewhere who will tell us about about the boost to the tourist industry that comes form the Royal Wedding and the figure will be unverifiable but will soon gain the credence of most urban myths.

So it is my contention that the public’s Royal Wedding enthusiasm – and I concede that it exists – is largely a creation of the establishment, the media and of people who want to sell us things. In itself the event is of little consequence and what there is is based on a pretty offensive premise not too far removed from the “Divine Right of Kings”. Across the channel our French allies have Liberté, égalité and fraternité and a Head of State who, for all his faults, they did actually choose. We have deference and obsequiousness and a presumption that the marriage of the grandson of our hereditary Head of State is a matter for rejoicing. We need to grow up.

The NHS is tens of thousands of stories like mine – every day

2011-04-19T16:12:00.001+01:00

The Story

Up until the moment I left the Royal Opera House the “Night at the Opera” went wonderfully well. Marvellous meal in the Balconies Restaurant with a couple of nice glasses of wine - and then a stunning performance of Verdi’s Aida. After the show Ann and I were making our way back to Waterloo when I suddenly felt very dizzy and within moments this turned into the world spinning in my head and violent and uncontrollable vomiting. I collapsed on the pavement near Waterloo Station vomited some more and lost orientation completely. I knew that this wasn’t something, whatever it was, that was going to clear up quickly. Ann wondered whether any passer-by would volunteer help but there weren’t many around - it was 10:00pm on a Sunday evening, not a busy time and those who were probably took a look at me bent over and motionless in a pool of my own sick and moved on rapidly. Who can blame them - superficially I had the appearance of someone who has dined rather too well and was paying the price.

Ann dialled 999 on her mobile and was assured that help would be on its way and in less than five minutes a paramedic on a motorcycle was assisting me. He took immediate charge asked some quick questions which included my (or more likely Ann) telling him that I suffered from Atrial Fibrillation – a heart condition which can lead to a stroke if not treated. He checked my pulse and blood pressure and said he was fairly sure that I hadn’t had a stroke or a heart attack and surmised that I was probably suffering from acute Labyrinthitis – a viral infection of the inner ear which interferes with the body’s balance mechanism. Whilst the paramedic was treating me an ambulance car drew up to check on progress. As I was comatose and obviously incapable of moving I had to be admitted urgently to hospital and this required an ambulance in which I could be laid flat and given further examination and treatment. Between them the paramedic and the ambulance car officer arrange for this to happen. The ambulance took a little while to come – there were reports of a shooting somewhere in South London and staff and vehicles were being diverted to this incident. But I didn’t really have to wait long and soon I was being gently loaded into the back of an ambulance. Inside I received further checks including an ECG and blood pressure. My head was still spinning violently and I was still sick and unable to focus properly. We moved off slowly to St Thomas’s Hospital which is very close by and soon I was in the Accident and Emergency area where I waited tended by the ambulance paramedics until a cubicle for the doctor’s examination was available – about a quarter of an hour.

The nurses undressed me, connected me to a heart and blood pressure monitor, took my temperature which was a bit low and tended to me as I was still being sick (not very productively by now). They took a blood sample and connected a device to a vein in my arm to allow drugs to be administered quickly if necessary. They did another ECG which they then showed the doctor who now arrived - he examined my eyes and asked me to do some hand and eye coordination movements and checked my hearing. He authorised an injection to help my nausea and sickness. To check that I had not had any cranial bleeding or a tumour I was sent for a brain scan. Further blood samples were taken and I was advised that I would be admitted and a bed was found for me on Mark Ward – a trauma ward primarily for stroke patients. In the ward a young doctor examined me and conducted further eye movement tests; meanwhile Ann was being looked after and found a taxi at about 3:30am to get home. Overnight I was still unable to move much – any movement of my head increased the unbalanced feeling and increased the nausea. The night nurses made me as comfortable as they could, gave me water (I was very thirsty by now) and gave me a bottle to relieve myself.

The day starts early on a hospital ward and well before seven there was a buzz about. Patients were checked and preparations were made for breakfast. I declined any food but the rest had helped and I was certainly a bit less dizzy and had stopped being sick. The big event was the ward tour by the consultant and, as St Thomas’s is a teaching hospital, his entourage of assistants and students - around ten people in all. All the other patients on the ward had had strokes and I watched as each was looked at and as the doctors related to them individually. The key was the consultant’s personal dialogue with the patient, his assurances to them about their prognosis and his hands on testing of their condition. Essentially what he seemed to be looking for was evidence, positive or negative, of changes since his last visit 24 hours earlier. In the main the patients were progressing positively. “You couldn’t do that yesterday” was the comment as a patient wiggled a toe or raised an arm. The consultant exuded confidence and knowledge and his communications style was clear and unequivocal. The takes must all have been “This man knows what he is doing and cares.” It was very uplifting. As far as I was concerned I was something of a novelty for the team and they spent quite a while with me.

The diagnosis tentatively made by the motorcycle paramedic was confirmed by the consultant. I was suffering from vestibular neuronitis which the medical dictionaries describe as “sustained dysfunction of the peripheral vestibular (balance) system with secondary nausea, vomiting, and vertigo.” Key to the diagnosis was “nystagmus” – an involuntary eye movement. One of the students also tested me for this – presumably so that they could recognize the symptoms in others in the future. I was told that I should stay in hospital another night for precautionary neurological monitoring. Accompanying the doctors’ team were two young women who it turned out were to play a very important part in the next step of my treatment and recovery. Laura was a physiotherapist and Anna specialized in occupational health. Simply stated their task was to get me sufficiently mobile to be able to go home. This started immediately after the doctors’ visit. My first movements were tentative and brought back the dizziness a bit. But with tips on how to cope I gradually began to move a little more freely – and even take a shower under supervision. Anna asked me quite detailed questions about my home – the configuration of my house, locations of lavatories etc. Clearly if I was to be released then they had to be assured that I could manage. After a light lunch, which I managed quite well, Ann visited me and brought me some headphones so I could listen to music and some magazines to read. I felt fragile but was certain that progress would continue to be made.

I slept surprisingly well that night. A ward is not a quiet place what with the nurses’ visits and the high tech apparatus which bleeps a lot! But although I felt rough I could understand what was happening to me and the it seemed that if the outlook was positive I would be allowed home the next day. Obviously I had to move reasonably freely and not look too helpless. The following morning followed the same pattern as on Monday. The doctors again examined me, seemed pleased with progress and the consultant said that subject to a positive mobility assessment I could go home. Laura and Anna got on the case swiftly – they needed to be sure that I could manage not just on the flat but the stairs as well. So there was a test on the hospital staircase, and all was well. I was discharged and around midday I was on my way home by taxi.

Some conclusions

We are all guilty sometimes of extrapolating from the particular to the general. One good (or bad) experience skews our views of an event and we may draw inaccurate conclusions. I will try not to do this but it is important to state up front, less there be any doubt, that I was entirely in the hands of the National Health Service (NHS) from the moment that Ann made that emergency phone call on Sunday evening until the moment I got in a taxi to go home around 1:00pm on Tuesday. Throughout I am absolutely certain that standards were being applied and procedures followed. True on the margin one is in the hands of an individual or individuals and we are all fallible – we all have good and bad days. That aside I had no sense that I was being treated any different from the norm – why would I be? The dominant characteristics of each of the players in the event were subtly different.

The paramedics were absolutely task focussed. Had I had a stroke or a heart attack? What was the most likely cause of my collapse? How should I best be taken to the hospital’s A&E? How could they make me confortable and be reassuring to Ann? What were the essential questions that had to be asked of me and Ann? The A&E staff had to stabilise me, assess the options and when the Doctors required it find room on a ward for me. The ward nurses had to make me comfortable, apply the necessary checks (temperature, heart, breathing, blood etc.) at intervals and “manage” me. The two young women were my friends – they were there to provide practical advice which would help me to recover – and to supervise the process. The doctors, and particularly the consultant, were in overall charge. Their writ ruled – as it had to. So whilst the consultant was at the top of the pile the rest of the staff was fairly unhierarchical. There was no real divide – it was a team effort.

I was exceptionally well treated throughout. Everyone seemed to do their jobs as they had been trained to do. Compared with a stroke patient I was perhaps easy – I had no impairment to my cognitive functions and once I was through the worst I was alert. That said, and although there were clearly repetitive processes underway, I never felt that I was just another patient. The nurses were the toughest of the various people around me – not so much with me but certainly as I observed with some of the other patients. A stroke is hugely debilitating and one or two of the victims were quite abusive, unintentionally I’m sure. The nurses handled this firmly but with consideration. One very cantankerous lady in the bed next to me was shouting and swearing a lot and she had to be firmly spoken to. She responded to this and quietened down! If the nurses were the hard-nosed cops sometimes the physio and occupational health young ladies were gentle and smiling at all times. They had to force one or two of the stroke patients to move – an essential part of early rehabilitation therapy I think. This was tough – but they did it with charm and skill. Horses for courses were everywhere.

So what did I come away with from this experience – apart for a deep gratitude to all of the medical staff who helped me so ably and caringly? Let’s take the paramedics of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) as an example of what I now feel. On the day that I was taken to hospital it was announced that in the next five years £53 million is to be taken out of the LAS budget of £262 million. In the next year alone this means 162 jobs will go, 130 of which are ‘front line’. Over the next five years 890 jobs will be lost, 560 of which will be from road crews, as front line as they come. So between now and 2015 the LAS will lose nearly one-in-five of its staff. If my attack had happened at the end of this process rather than before it begun what would the effect have been? Would a paramedic on a motorbike still have arrived within five minutes? Would my progress have been checked, as it was, by a supervisor in a car? Would an ambulance have been available to get me swiftly to hospital? Would I have been treated like a sick human being by caring staff who had time to look after me in the same way that I was? What do you think?

The NHS is an absolutely massive institution and I can readily imagine that when you look at the mountain that it is you can lose sight of the people who like me who, from time to time, are clinging on to it quite literally for dear life. And with the caveat already mentioned about not extrapolating from one event and drawing simplistic conclusions let me just say this. Every day there are tens of thousands of events across the length and the breath of Britain like mine. That is our NHS. Not a top down bureaucracy but a bottom up and patent focused jewel in our crown. It makes mistakes because it is comprised of humans and we are fallible. But it reduces these mistakes by having standards and procedures and good people to operate them. It was not a coincidence that I was well treated and I was not well treated by comparison with others. I was well treated because that is what the NHS is for. It must be patient driven and everything that happened to me in those two days has given me the feeling that it is – at present. So ask yourselves the question – will the London Ambulance Service be better for patients if it reduces in numbers by 20%? Are the cuts planned designed to improve the chances of patients like me surviving a traumatic collapse on the street? And apply the same logic across the board. The question is not can we afford the National Health Service providing the healthcare that it currently does. That has to be a given. The question is can we maintain patient care standards, or indeed improve them, whilst the same time being more efficient and cost effective? I don’t know the answer to this – but I know that it is the right and indeed the only question. And I know also that it is a subject about which we should all make our feelings clear and that we should march in the streets to defend our NHS if we have to. And when my balance is fully restored in a week or two’s time I’ll march with the rest!

Paddy Briggs

April 2011

The Heating Oil price hike – “Because they can”

2010-12-20T14:16:00.001Z

You know that slightly vulgar Q&A ?

Question: “Why do dogs lick their balls?”

Answer: “Because they can”.

Its pretty much a metaphor for the corporate world for much of the time:

Q: “Why do bankers pay themselves large bonuses?”

A: “Because they can.”

– and so on.

It is the “Because they can” imperative which helps us understand why heating oil costs have gone up by 50% or more in recent times (see graph):

Oil is often the only choice for many in rural areas without connections to the Natural Gas grid. It is usually Kerosene and sometimes Gas Oil – both middle distillates from the refining process. Because the rates of duty applicable to heating oil (as compared to road fuel) are minor there should usually be a close correlation between the ex-refinery cost of the oil and the crude oil price. In August (the low point on the graph) heating oil cost domestic customers 40p a litre. Today it is as much as 70p a litre - a rise of up to 75% . Over that same period the price of crude oil has gone from $76 a barrel to $86 a barrel - a rise of only 13%. British consumers pay for their heating oil in Sterling so we have to allow for the change in the £/$ exchange rate when making comparisons. In Sterling terms the price of crude oil per barrel has gone from £48.5 to £54.8 – still only a rise of 13%.

So what is going on? The body which represents the industry is the Federation of Petroleum Suppliers and they have issued a statement here:

STATEMENT REGARDING THE SUPPLY AND PRICING OF HEATING OIL DECEMBER 2010

Cutting through the obfuscation in this statement to the truth there is not one iota of doubt that heating oil suppliers are profiteering massively from the present situation. It is true that there will have been some minor extra costs associated with sourcing some supplies from less than optimal sources – in some cases. But in the main a Heating Oil supplier will source his products at Spot product prices on world oil market prices – and these prices are substantially driven by the Crude Oil price. His other costs (primarily distribution) are a much more modest part of the final customer price.

In contrast to the regulated prices of the gas and electricity industries there is no regulation on the price of heating oil. This price is determined then, apart from by changes in supply and distribution costs as above, by consumer supply and demand. If it is a sellers’ market (which it is at the moment) then the price goes up – and up! Heating Oil contractors are taking advantage of the cold weather and customers’ urgent need for oil by hiking the price as far as it will go – the law of the jungle. There is no competition so the market has no effect – they are all laughing all the way to the bank!

Who should step in? Well Government of course. But there is also a case for Refiners to pay a more active role. There is no reason why Shell, Esso and the other refinery operators should not take a position and encourage their distributor customers, in the public interest, to accept reasonable margins rather than the windfall returns that they are presently enjoying.

Other models for Tertiary education

2010-10-12T13:34:00.001+01:00

With University funding headline news let me tell you how I got my degree. In the mid-1960s I was recruited by Shell-Mex and BP, the UK marketing arm of Shell and BP, straight from school with a couple of moderate A levels (Two A levels was much more the norm in those days). After a couple of years of learning a bit about the business I was selected along with a handful of others to do a BA Hons degree course at Ealing Technical College (now Thames Valley University). The standard was academically quite high and it was a genuine Honours Degree in Business Studies guaranteed and monitored by the Council for National Academic Awards. I graduated in 1970 with a 2.1.

The incidence of corporations/private sector employers offering young employees the chance to do vocational tertiary education is I suspect low these days. But why not? On a “Sandwich Course” you learn about the business of your employer as well as doing proper vocational education. And when you graduate you go into a job with already an inbuilt loyalty to your employer. I stayed with Shell for the rest of my 37 year career.

There are other funding models for Tertiary education and other ways of getting there than traditional University courses. My Business Studies degree was almost entirely relevant to my subsequent business life. It cost me nothing and Shell got me – for better or worse!

Why doesn’t the Government encourage Private Sector employers to offer appropriate vocational Tertiary education to school leavers in return for these students’ commitment to that employer? Tax incentives could apply so that the net cost to both the employer and the taxpayer were kept low. Everyone would benefit.

The Tea Party phenomenon - a view from inside the Beltway

2010-10-07T15:25:00.006+01:00

My friend Sam is a Brit who has lived in the United States for thirty years – for the last decade or so in Washington DC. He knows his way around and is a shrewd observer of the US Political scene. I asked him about the Tea Party. Here is his response:

Sir Christopher Meyer is on his way shortly to America to investigate the Tea Party. I read his Tweets and as much as I admire him from his time here - very funny, very able - I fear he will not find the answer to the Tea Party in the salons of Georgetown. He needs to go to pretty much any city or town outside of DC to stand a chance - and I hope he plans to do that. Here my view of the Tea Party:

Who are they?

Predominately Independents, some Republicans and even a few Democrats. A sobering fact - a poll last week showed more people identifying themselves with the Tea Party than either Republican or Democrat

Why have they emerged?

They have certainly emerged from the bottom and in that respect scare both Republican and Democrat elites). Frustration and disgust with the dysfunctionality, corruption and incompetence of the Senate and the House. Surprisingly Obama himself holds up quite well. And fear of excessive deficits and exponentially expanding debt - and what that means for the middle class and for their children in terms of living standards etc. Probably also fear of losing the US's preeminent position in the world to China.

What do they stand for?

A difficult one to answer - it's a sort of value system - individual vs. big government and a desire to rebalance the public and private sector. Government may be an enabler and supporter but should not intrude into every aspect of one's life. It's not that different from what Cameron/Clegg are saying - if I understand them correctly - essentially changing the mindset of the average Briton from turning to Government to ask what are they going to do about it - to saying what can I do about it. Now the Americans are nowhere near as far down that road as the UK but the tea partiers think they are moving in that direction.

If I may paraphrase Tony Blair "The only way we progressives win is by being the party of empowerment, and that requires a state that is more minimalist and strategic, that is about enabling people, about developing their potential but not constraining their ambition, their innovation, their creativity."

The politician - Republican or Democrat - who convinces the voter that he/she stands for the above will prevail in the mid-term elections. I would also add - stop the spending.

Could a similar movement develop in Europe? - unlikely. The only way I see it happening is if there is a sense that the EU has become less and less responsive to the wishes of the people, the economy stagnates, the debt piles up and standards of living stagnate or fall. And that is not totally inconceivable.

I think what the Tea Party would support - at least in concept - are the Cameron/Clegg spending cuts. It will be very interesting to see the reaction when the details are fleshed out later this month.

Watch the Coaliton's smash and grab raid on your pension

2010-10-06T23:04:00.004+01:00

The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) annual conference in Liverpool won’t have grabbed too many headlines clashing as it does with the Conservative Party conference. But the subject of Pensions is sufficiently important for the Coalition to arrange for their Pensions Minister, Steve Webb, a LibDem, to address the conference and to answer questions. A number of the delegates wanted to quiz Mr. Webb on the detail of his plans to replace the Retail price Index (RPI) as the indexation reference for annual Pension increment calculations, by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Webb’s position has been summarised as “CPI is the most appropriate measure of inflation for state benefits, and it is appropriate to take a consistent approach for private pensions” and he confirmed at the conference that this is the case.

So the coalition government intends to use CPI for the uprating of state pensions, state benefits and also for the inflation-related increases built into the big public sector pension schemes. As the government tries to cut the record peacetime deficit the changes will lead to a huge saving in the state's pension costs. The CPI measure of inflation has generally risen by 0.7% a year less than RPI and in the next five years the gap between the two is likely to be at 1.2% a year, according to data from the recently established Office for Budget Responsibility.

The logic of saying that CPI should also apply to Private Sector pension schemes as well is a reasonable one - however quite what this will mean in practice is unclear. Many Defined Benefit schemes have written into their Trust deeds that RPI should be used as the minimum increase for pensions each year. "Pensions linked to CPI will be lower over a period of time - some estimates put the drop as high as 25%", said Dawid Konotey-Ahulu of Mallowstreet who was present at the Conference and who questioned Mr. Webb on the plans.

The Government has basically two options in respect of their plans for private sector pensions. Firstly they could pass legislation which will require Pensions Funds to amend their Trust Deeds and replace RPI with CPI. The logic for doing this, aside from the elegance of have only one index used for all pension increment calculations, is that the burden on businesses would be significantly reduced. It would particularly help those Fund sponsors who are faced with the need to fund rescue plans for underfunded schemes – British Airways and BT are two of the very big names who would benefit from this move. The second option is that Government could refrain from legislating to compel funds to replace RPI with CPI but they could actively encourage such a move – perhaps with some tax incentives. Many businesses would jump at the chance to reduce their funds’ liabilities and the policy could be sold as business friendly.

The missing link in all of this is the consultation which many in the industry believe to be essential. This consultation would have to take into account the views of Pensioners and their representatives – which is perhaps why the Government is reluctant to do it. For, as Mr. Konotey-Ahulu pointed out to the Minister, the consequences for individual pensioners of a change from RPI to CPI are very significant indeed over time. It is also the case that RPI has never been a very good measure of Pensioner inflation anyway – not, of course, because it exaggerates this inflation but because it underestimates it! The Office for National Statistics compiles a separate measure of pensioner inflation, though this is not used to set any pensions or benefits. This data shows that pensioner inflation in the second quarter of 2009, for example, was 4.3%, whereas the basic RPI was 2.2% - and this was not an exceptional quarter. Organisations like Age Concern have constantly pointed to the fact that RPI underestimates Pensioners true cost of living increases. A move to CPI will make the gap even greater and can only lead to hardship for many pensioners.

The Vainglorious Tony Blair

2010-08-10T10:56:00.000+01:00

Tom Lehrer famously said that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize" - we are in the same territory when we look at some of the things Tony Blair has done since stepping down as Prime Minister. Along with George W Bush Blair was the world leader most responsible for death and destruction in illegal wars across two Middle East countries - and yet he is a Middle East peace envoy. Blair was the leader of a political party founded on the principles of equality and social justice - and yet he has spent the last few years enriching himself courtesy of anyone who will pay. But it is his sanctimonious and intellectually illiterate Tony Blair Faith Foundation that is the most grotesque and vainglorious of his self-promoting initiatives.

The mission of Blair's foundation is to "show that faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.” - and that is where, intellectually, the problem begins. The corollary of this "mission" is that those without faith are likely to be less "powerful" - it doesn't matter what you believe - so long as you believe something. Faith, any faith, is preferable to none. The logical problem of this is that when you do embrace a faith by definition you reject and dismiss other faiths. Look, for example, at what evangelical Christians say about their faith - the "One true religion". The same applies to Islam "The True religion" - and to most other faiths. The point, of course, is that a true believer is also a true disbeliever. So for a Christian to imply that to believe Islam, or Hinduism or Buddhism is better than not to believe at all is irrational. Blair's foundation is also predicated on the view that inter-faith dialogue is important and that "to promote respect and understanding about the world's major religions" is worthwhile. This is a decent cause - but the starting point that in order to promote such understanding you have first to have signed up to one of the faiths yourself is baloney. As a non-believer in any established religion I have as much right to work to encourage dialogue between different groups as anyone else. I would enthusiastically support the value of encouraging different cultures to understand and respect one another - and this includes different religions. But I certainly don't need to be a Christian to facilitate dialogue between Christians and Muslims - indeed I would argue that it is far better for me to be unbiased by personal belief in order to do so.

But the greatest fallacy of Blair's foundation is its proselytising that "faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world". Many of us would argue that the reverse is true. If we look at the history of the world over the last fifty years or so it is not hard to find horrific examples of the damage that religion has done. Blair's Roman Catholic church has been misogynous, morally corrupt and is an institution based on hypocrisy and mendacity. The poverty in Catholic countries like The Philippines and much of South America can be traced directly to the church's obsolete ban on contraception. As can the spread of HVI and Aids in many parts of the world. The religious Right in the United States preaches creationism - a dogma bereft of reason and which arrogantly dismisses science. The extreme Zionist religionists of Israel and elsewhere commit or defend atrocities against Palestinians - only to be countered by the fervent terrorists of Hamas who are backed by a nation state, Iran, that has institutionalised Holocaust denial. And this is far from being the only religious war. Perm any two from the world's religions and somewhere they are fighting one another - Muslim against Jew, Hindu against Muslim, Christian against Muslim, Buddhist against Christian…

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation institutionalises the very premise that has arguably caused more suffering in modern times than almost any other - that religious belief is a "good thing" - and worth fighting for. In fact the most successful modern States are secular - in all but name sometimes. Freedom of religion, which was written into the American Constitution, originally meant freedom of Christian religion - there weren't many Muslims or Jews or Hindus amongst the Founding Fathers! But America is multi- religious just as it is multi-ethnic and that is one of its great strengths. The United Kingdom and all countries across Europe are the same. These countries are also secular in their legal systems and when a new law is under consideration only the narrow extremists would rush to see what the Bible says about it. Our secularity is essential to our freedoms - freedoms that include, of course, the right to believe what we want to believe and to worship how we choose to (within reason!). The logical extension of Blair's facile and dangerous love of Faith is to inculcate it into governance - if faith is so important then we'd better write it into our laws somehow hadn't we? A sort of multi-faith Sharia perhaps?

With Tony Blair history teaches us that it is always necessary to question his motives and take nothing on face value. Some would accuse Blair of practising a modern Crusade in his support for and involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. There was certainly something Old Testament in his vengeance against Saddam Hussein. That 9/11 was perpetrated by religious zealots is of course a fact - and for many of us this alone would be a warning against promoting "Faith" as Blair is doing. The more intellectually supportable position would surely be to promote the secular resolution of conflict - in the way that the United Nations was set up to do. For Blair to have enthusiastically leant his support to the many UN initiatives that seek resolution of conflict - whether it be national, religious, ethnic, territorial or ideological - would have been commendable. But Blair doesn’t have much of a track record in supporting the UN nor caring about it - and such an initiative wouldn't have given him a personalised, grandiose and named association with a cause, which his ludicrous Foundation does.

They are the masters now

2010-07-30T09:43:00.005+01:00

It was Herbert Morrison who declared after Labour’s landslide election victory in 1945 that “We are the masters now”. The “We” in that case went beyond Party and referred to a whole class – the working classes of Britain had their men in power for the first time in history. It is hard not to draw parallels with 2010 for it is now the more privileged part of the British (mainly English) middle-classes who hold the levers of power – slightly more precariously than their proletarian predecessors of 65 years year ago perhaps but there is a firm grip nevertheless. And the novelty is that this power is exercised by a coalition of political parties and by men (and a few women) whose alliance is based both on a common class affiliation and, more surprisingly, on a discovered common ideology. At the love-in which announced the formation of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition many commentators remarked on the extraordinary similarities between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Both educated at elite private schools, both from Oxbridge, both very wealthy and both young and bursting with health and energy. Their voices are also scarily similar – so much so that many have heard one speaking on the radio and thought that it was his twin!

Politics is about power and it would be naïve to think otherwise. A chance event – a hung parliament – gave Nick Clegg and his LibDems the first chance of power for their Party in living memory. They jumped at the chance with alacrity. Similarly David Cameron was not going to be denied the power he thought he had earned by the minor irritation that his Party did not command a majority in Parliament after the election. The deal with the LibDems was a no-brainer – especially when he realised that there wasn’t much that divided him personally from the LibDems leader. Indeed he must have quickly realised that he had more in common with Clegg than he had with much of his own Party. Cameron had had to jettison the Conservatives right wing in order to present a credible case to the electorate and the deal with Clegg meant that he wasn’t going to be in hock to them in Government either. The old-fashioned Tories like David Davis and John Redwood are still around – and at times they snipe from the fringes.

Whilst the very fact of the coalition suggests that there must need to be concessions to the partner – Cameron said as much recently in a letter to his MPs “… there have been compromises as a result of this coalition” – in reality there are few if any signs of this so far. Another parallel with 1945 is that this is a very ideologically driven Government indeed – more so even than that of Margaret Thatcher. Both Thatcher and her Tory predecessor Edward Heath had come to power promising to roll back the State but that did not really happen. Even Thatcher, her bombast aside, did not significantly change the socio-economic balance of British society that much. She inherited a mixed economy and she handed one over to her successor. It was smaller but ironically it was manufacturing which declined most during her watch not the public sector. Cameron is determined to do the opposite and he has persuaded himself that the huge job losses that will come from the slashing of public expenditure will be compensated for by increases in private sector employment. This seems optimistic if nor completely delusionary and it is fiercely ideological – the “Big Society”, which is the brand slogan of the coalition, is predicated on smaller government and more local decision making. That the idea has failed to grab the public imagination so far is hardly surprising - it hardly resonates like the revolutionary changes in the other direction that Attlee’s post war government introduced.

There is a great deal of goodwill around for the Cameron/Clegg coalition – partly because they have attractive personalities and partly because those of us who voted Conservative or LibDem (59% of the votes together) voted for change. We didn’t vote for the change we got – but we certainly didn’t vote for more of the same. Cameron is getting plaudits from the most unlikely sources – Martin Kettle, a liberal commentator in Britain’s foremost left of centre publication The Guardian, recently wrote an admiring and completely uncritical paean to Cameron in that newspaper. And it does seem churlish to criticise the Government too fiercely so early in its life. Nevertheless the coalition is an experiment and one that is far from guaranteed success. The marginalised Tory right are, as always, waiting gleefully to pounce if they see a weakness and the LibDem man and woman in the street may increasingly be uncomfortable as the public sector cuts bite.

Life is often about unintended consequences and I have a feeling that there could be a paradoxical unintended consequence of Britain’s coalition Government. One of the holy grails for anti Conservatives in Britain has been the much chattered about “realignment of the left”. This meant, or so we thought, some sort of pact, alliance or even merger between the Labour Party and the Liberals. The assumption was that there was a common ideological connection between us - and as a keen left-leaning political observer I went along with this, as recently as May this year in fact. However there is now an argument that the realignment may now be solely driven by the Labour Party as the LibDems either implode completely (perfectly possible) or become formally a wing of the Conservative Party. The Labour Party under this scenario would become the only credible home for all who oppose the Conservatives (in England at any rate). As this is almost certainly a majority of the electorate and providing the Labour Party elects a leader and shadow cabinet that is credible and competent, the prospects of their regaining power sooner rather than later cannot be denied!

Britain faces up to an unprecedented political change

2010-04-22T17:08:00.000+01:00

Three roughly equally supported parties in an election is a fairly unusual phenomenon in any country – but that is what we have in Britain at the moment – and the General Election is only two weeks away! Then three main parties are clustering around 30% each in the opinion polls with a little fewer than ten percent left for the minnows. In recent elections the Liberal Democrats have polled well – 23% in 2005 – but more than ten points behind the other two big parties. That seems to be changing in 2010, with profound effects in sight for both our country and our political system.

Anyone who predicts the outcome of this election with polling day still two weeks away is a seer not a political scientist. But let me have a go. My prediction for the percentage of the votes for the three main parties is as follows: Conservatives 36.5%; Labour 29%; Liberal Democrats 26.5%. This suggests that the LibDems will slip a bit over the next two weeks and that the Tories will be the beneficiary. Don’t ask me why – it’s just a gut feel. So Mr Cameron can start to measure up for curtains in Number 10 can he, and Gordon Brown can pack his bags? Not so fast sunshine! The outcome of my soothsayed election would give the following seat distribution: Conservatives 279; Labour 256 and the LibDems 83. With “others” taking 14 seats this means that the Conservatives, though the largest party, would be 47 seats short of an overall majority. Put another way if the two parties of the left ganged together they would have an overall majority over the Tories and the rest of 46.

Labour and the LibDems have much in common and the prediction in my scenario assumes that a fair number of Labour supporters would vote tactically to keep out a Conservative in a specific seat. If we say that this won’t happen then the Libs would get six fewer seats and the Conservatives six more – which doesn’t really change the outcome much. Still a very hung parliament!

So back to the political realities. Would the LibDems feel obligated to support the Conservatives as the largest party? I don’t see why they should. Would they feel obliged to keep Gordon Brown in power? No again. So is there a third way? You bet there is!

The outcome that many of us would hugely relish would be a formal Labour/LibDem coalition in which the power-brokers would be the LibDems. They would insist (I hope) on a clean sweep through the current cabinet. They would accept a Labour Prime Minister but not the current one – one of the Millibands is a likely choice. Vince Cable would be Chancellor and Nick Clegg Foreign Secretary – and very good they would be at their jobs as well I think. The rest of the cabinet would be younger and much less tainted than the current lot. It really is a mouth-watering prospect because it would not just be new for Britain in peacetime to have a formal coalition but the ideological drivers behind it would be sound.

The mould really could be broken this time...

2010-04-18T11:15:00.004+01:00

Clegg put a plague on both their houses in his references to Labour and the Tories in the debate. His physical position on the left of the three party leaders on the stage allowed him to turn to the other two and sweep them together as “old politics” with the LibDems being the only offer of true change. This is seductively attractive – especially to a new generation of voters brought up on the X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing. Remember this younger electorate chose John Sergeant ahead of real dancers and refused to be told not to. They will have no compunction about choosing the LibDems and Clegg for similar reasons. Headlines like “Cameron says it’s a two horse race” (in The Telegraph”) don’t help the Tories at all – it sounds arrogant and it patently isn’t true. Indeed for years it has been clear that the main thing that stands in the way of Cameron and government is the strength of the LibDems.

I first became interested in politics as a fifteen year-old at the time of the Orpington bye-election in 1962. Orpington promised that the old order could be shattered and it was very exciting at the time - but it didn’t happen of course. Then in the early 1980s I became one of the first members of the SDP who similarly tried to break the mould. That didn’t happen either. Now, for the first time potential mould-breaking may be happening during a General Election campaign. It may run out of steam and it may once again be a disappointment for those who want real change. But the chances of the mould being shattered for good are higher now than ever before in modern Britain. I hope that it happens.

The first TV election debate

2010-04-16T15:42:00.002+01:00

I think that we did see the real David Cameron on the first debate. He looked very odd indeed - and that's saying something when he was alongside Brown who, as Neil Kinnock has said, looks better on Radio. I can’t quite put my finger on why Cameron looked so strange – almost like an alien – but no doubt the clever folks at Central Office are on the case.

Cameron’s voice was OK – how has he managed to re-modulate away from the Eton accent? Quite an achievement. He didn’t go for the throat at either Clegg or Brown and at times he got lost completely. His pre-drafted peroration at the end was excellent – as a CV. But I doubt that it really worked with a very cynical electorate.

He made, in my view, two bad mistakes:

The “40-year-old black man” was an appalling description of the man he met in Plymouth. It throws together all non-Caucasians into one black pot. Far better to have identified where the man originally came from as a six-year-old (The West Indies? India? Somewhere else?) rather than just categorist him (vaguely) by his colour. The question was about immigration not about colour!

The “As someone who has got two children, one of whom started at a state school in London…” was bollocks. His daughter is at a Faith primary school in Kensington utterly unlike the vast majority of state schools that ordinary kids have to go to. And does anyone believe that when the time comes Arthur Elwen won’t go to Eton like Daddy? Of course not!

Shell shoots itself in the foot on Remembrance Day

2009-11-09T16:39:00.001Z

The real question to ask about Shell’s unbelievably crass decision not to allow the sale of poppies at their petrol stations this year is at what level the call as made. Ignore the statement from Shirley Cinco, at Shell’s “Customer Service Centre” in Manchester, that: “Rather than simply giving to worthy causes, Shell prefers to donate skills, time and knowledge as well as money. It is in the context of this strategy that Shell Retail will not be allowing any further charities, including the poppy appeal, to use its forecourt network to collect monies.” This is corporate speak of the worst kind and misses the real issue by many a mile. That issue is, of course, not about the decision itself but about who took it and about how it is perceived. The British Legion even uses a photograph of poppies projected onto Shell Centre to publicise the value of corporate partnerships!

I have blogged myself on the subject of Remembrance Day and in doing so I was especially mindful of the fact that even to write about this subject is problematic. There is no more important social and cultural phenomenon than Remembrance Day in Britain – an importance that this year is especially significant given the appalling loss of life in Afghanistan. And the Poppy is arguably just about the most powerful brand symbol here – certainly at this time of the year. There is no other charity that reaches the hearts and minds of the British population more than the British Legion and to risk alienating them is frankly absurd. Reasoned argument about Remembrance Day (which I tried to give in my Blog) should be fair enough. But you don’t take decisions that will turn war veterans against you!

The statement by Ms Cinco was not only the wrong thing to say and said at the wrong time but it was a statement made by someone far too low down the Shell in the UK food chain. If it really was necessary to take the decision not to sell poppies at petrol stations then the announcement about this should have been at a time when Remembrance was not so vividly in the public eye. It should have been made by somebody at a very senior level. And it should have been accompanied by something which would have turned a negative into a positive. Ideally it should have been a joint announcement with the Legion itself – indeed if the British Legion could not go along with the decision it should not have been taken. It’s that important.

Managing the brand and reputation of a big corporation like Shell is not easy but there are certain precepts that are inviolable. Most of these are commonsense – something that seems to be sadly missing in this instance. The “benefit” to Shell of not selling poppies in petrol stations must have been tiny – if there was one at all. But the damage to the company’s reputation is now very large indeed. In the coming days it will no doubt emerge how all this happened. If I was advising my old employer I would tell them simply to apologise, say it won’t happen again and make a thumping donation to the British Legion as a gesture of goodwill!

Has the new capitalism arrived? Not if David Cameron gets his way!

2009-11-04T10:37:00.000Z

“The culture in this country has become so overwhelmingly conformist that any alternative to capitalism is considered outlandish.”
Tariq Ali October 2009

Winston Churchill once famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He might have said the same about the primacy of capitalism compared with all other forms of macroeconomic management of nation states. The history of the Twentieth century can be seen unquestionably as the proof of the maxim that free markets, private enterprise and competition advances societies whereas totalitarianism, whether of the right or the left, sets them back. Command economies can of course achieve extraordinary things – the Soviet Union was only just behind the free enterprise United States in the race to the moon and China built huge scale projects, such as the Gezhouba Dam, under Mao Tse-tung’s malignant brand of Communism. But in the twenty-first century almost every country is substantially liberal in its economic model – even those previous temples of communism Russia and China.

But whilst the primacy of the capitalist model should not be doubted the idea that untrammelled capitalism, a society within which virtually everything is left to the market, has surely now lost whatever credibility it ever had. Even in the United States, capitalism’s most extreme example, there has never really been a totally free market for all goods and services. The state has intervened both in providing a safety net for the most disadvantaged in society and by substantial interventionist polices in times of extreme economic trauma – in the 1930s with Roosevelt’s New Deal and most recently as a response to the meltdown of the financial markets.

In his 2008 election campaign Barack Obama never questioned the broad merits of capitalism – not just because it would have been political suicide to do so but because, I am sure, he was like the vast majority of Americans, convinced that America is and must always be a liberal democracy – economically anyway. This has not stopped some on the loony right from recently branding him a socialist. Obama's policies are "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." House minority leader John Boehner has said and onetime Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff." Conservative commentator Sean Hannity has also derided the President’s agenda as "socialism you can believe in." Perhaps these gentlemen haven’t travelled much or read much history for if they had then they would have seen the failures of doctrinaire socialism around the world and they would also have seen that nothing that Obama proposes bears the slightest resemblance to that socialism!

What President Obama is doing is trying slightly to shift the social/democratic balance in the United States a bit away from the market and a bit in the direction of greater justice and utility for all – especially in his healthcare proposals. By European standards it is pretty unexceptional stuff – the creation of national health services happened just about everywhere in Europe in the second hall of the twentieth century, and they work - not perfectly perhaps but in general they are one of the main pillars on which civilized western societies are built. The same applies to America’s northern neighbour Canada and to many other parts of the rich world. If you look at the world’s thirty richest countries in GDP per capita the United States is the only one without a substantial degree of free healthcare for all.

So the debate about economic systems is not really about polarised beliefs in vastly different alternatives – as was once the case. Tariq Ali’s quote at the head of this article is rather wistful – there is no alternative to capitalism and he knows it. But what he is getting at, and I agree with him, is that whilst the capitalist system is immutable in principle it must be open to change in practice. Some things cannot be left to the market and it is seeking the balance between control and centralised systems on the one hand and freedom and more local solutions on the other that is the challenge for politicians and for those who advise them. A few years ago there was a term for the middle ground suggested in this search for balance – the “Third Way” – and it was particularly trumpeted by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as being a new form of politics. In reality both of these politicians were no less liberal free marketers and hands off than their nominally more conservative predecessors. The dysfunctional corporate management which led to the collapse of Enron happened on President Clinton’s watch and the underlying causes of Britain’s financial meltdown happened under Prime Minister Blair.

In October 2005 David Cameron made a speech in which he sought to secure the leadership of Britain’s’ Conservative Party. It was a speech full of soundbites and not a little fury. But within it he stippled out his personal philosophy and offered it to his Party, successfully as it turned out, as his mandate to be leader. It is worth quoting a brief extract from this peroration because recent history has shown it to be the absolute opposite of the truth:

“Everyone knows that business needs deregulation to compete with India and China. Who’s standing in the way? The great regulator and controller, Gordon Brown”. And who were Cameron’s heroes? “A new generation of business men and women, who are taking on the world, creating wealth and opportunity for the future”.

This was 2005 remember and Labour had been in power at that time for nine years. Can there be the slightest doubt that the problems in Britain’s financial systems, in banking and in the economy at large were not as Cameron believed attributable to the need for deregulation but in fact to the failure of too little regulation? Far from being a great “Controller” Gordon Brown as Chancellor was in fact far too laisser-faire! And the same applied even more so in the United States – would the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the failures in the mortgage markets have happened had regulation been more effective? Of course not. And many of the “new generation of business men” in the City of London that Cameron so hailed were driven by personal greed to cut corners, take unacceptable risks - and many of them brought their companies to their knees whilst paying themselves ever more obscenely high salaries and bonuses.

David Cameron has not budged much from his simplistic and wrong-headed belief that too much regulation is the cause of Britain’s economic woes. Indeed despite the evidence all around him he persists in trying to convince the electorate that too much government is the cause of all our problems. That Britain and the United States and most of the countries of the rich world have turned the corner with their economies, whilst still fragile, on the mend is attributable not to deregulation but to intervention – on a massive scale. And the Cameron-derided Gordon Brown has been in the forefront of this success story – indeed he led the way and gave others the courage to follow.

But what of the future? Perhaps here we may suggest that the “alterative to capitalism” that Tariq Ali sought has now actually arrived? It comes from two main stimuli – firstly that at last there has to be, whatever David Cameron might say, an acknowledgment that whilst our core model is a capitalist one the checks and balances must be tightened not loosened. The dysfunctionality of an ill-regulated financial sector has been laid bare and lets hope that this time (unlike after Enron and WorldCom) permanent legislative and regulatory action is taken. Secondly, for Britain at least, there is the benefit that being part of the European Union (EU) brings. When things have gone as dramatically wrong at a national level as has happened recently one must surely welcome the fact that the EU will bring not just common standards but international benchmarks and rules that will hopefully mean that such things don’t happen again. And on this subject as well the Eurosceptic Cameron is on the wrong side. In that same 2005 speech he criticised the passing of “…powers to a European Union that nobody trusts” - well these powers didn’t work very well did they Dave – any more than Gordon’s regulations did!

In the United States President Obama has a herculean task ahead of him to try and unravel the errors of the venal Bush administration on the economy. This challenges the free-enterprise worshippers – not least those who run around the capitalist temples in Enron land in Houston and blame Washington for everything! But in Britain the likely electoral swing in 2010 will bring to power a man who is deluded enough to adhere to a set of Thatcherite, Reagonomic and Friedmanesqee economic beliefs that recent times should have seen discarded to history. Fasten your seatbelts – it will be a very rough ride and we might need President Obama’s cavalry to rescue us!

The facile "principles" of David Cameron's "New" Conservatives

2009-10-27T09:16:00.002Z

Whilst nothing in politics is absolutely certain the high probability is that David Cameron’s Conservatives will win a comfortable majority in next year’s UK General Election – the Tories first taste of power since 1997. Analysing the reason for electorates’ choices in free and fair elections keeps psephologists happy and busy for years but it is reasonable to predict that the expected Conservative victory will be put down to three main factors. Firstly there is the “time for a change” imperative. One Party in power for longer than twelve years is rare in any proper democracy and Britain is no different. Second there is the Brown factor. He is not a popular Prime Minister and he doesn’t have the charisma to rally his own troops let alone the uncommitted. Thirdly there is the understandable feeling that there are just too many policy issues on which Labour has failed and that there is nothing to lose in giving the other lot a go. Fatigue, a leader with an unattractive personality and dissatisfaction with performance – a powerful negative cocktail against the incumbents.

Note that none of these factors is remotely ideological. Labour is not unpopular because it is too left wing any more than the Conservatives will be rejected because they are too right wing. Ideology will not drive the next election and on policy there will allegedly be precious few differences between the two main parties. Back in 1966 Alf Ramsey won the World Cup with an England football team dubbed the “wingless wonders” – his team rejected the old-fashioned style of having a left wing and a right wing whose jobs it was to belt down the touchline and cross the ball. And so it is with the wingless wonders of modern British politics. Tony Blair wasn’t left wing – not a bit. He played somewhere in the midfield and sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left. He was pretty good at it too and defenders found it difficult to stop him scoring goals – three election victories pay tribute to that. David Cameron admires Blair – as well he might. On the face of it Cameron will occupy the same part of the field of play as Blair did - another wingless wonder. Or is he?

Whilst the Conservatives have been out of power the party has been quietly shifting and doing this with absolutely just one objective in mind – to regain power. That means, of course, that the changes are principally about presentation and managing public perceptions. It is all very calculated and careful – even bland. The people are tired of the present lot so let’s not give them any reasons not to vote for us. Safety first! Remind you of anybody? It’s pure Blair/Campbell/Mandelson. So there is little or no playing down the right wing – at least not in the brightest spotlights of the stage on which the drama will unfold. But back in the dressing rooms and in the playwrights’ garrets some pretty nasty things are actually underway – this next Conservative intake, the new MPs who will give Cameron his majority, have some decidedly dodgy policy ideas in mind.

Let’s take as an example of the new Tories the man who has just won the right to stand for the party in Bracknell – a solidly safe seat. His name is Dr Phillip Lee a hard-working youngish (39) and popular General Practitioner in the town. Sounds a good choice doesn’t he? Someone who has done a noble and proper job – unlike his party leader, who faffed around in a phoney role with Carlton, a trashy TV company, before politics took over. So what are Mr Lee’s politics – well his website will tell you. His “guiding political principles are:

1. The value of small government
2. The value of low taxation
3. The importance of personal responsibility
4. The value of liberty
5. The supremacy of the Nation state

I wonder how many Tory candidates at the General Election will be standing on a similar facile, empty and prejudiced platform. These bland “principles” aren’t principles at all – they are ignorant right-wing claptrap. Why? Well let’s briefly take them apart:

1. Insufficiently interventionary Governments caused the financial crises in the United States and Britain. Smaller government would have made this worse not better.

2. Everyone would like “low taxation” but in a mixed economy taxes have to be at an appropriate level to maintain life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all – and you can’t leave those things to the market!

3. “Personal responsibility” is easy for those like Mr Lee who are professionals, personally committed to public service and comfortably off. It’s a bit more difficult for an ill-educated and socially-deprived single mother on a sink estate.

4. “Liberty” is a subjective concept. A basic principle of any society is that freedoms have to be curtailed to some extent. And that is the job of Government. To “value liberty” is a platitude – to propose where the line between personal freedoms and the public good should be drawn is much more difficult. Real Politik!

5. The “Supremacy of the Nation State” is another platitude and facile code for being a Eurosceptic. At the heart of the modern world is the principle that whilst the Nation State is of course supreme there is an unavoidable need for partnerships across national borders. Whether it is the UN or NATO or the EU some surrendering of national sovereignty is not just essential - it is morally right.

Mr Lee doesn’t seem to be an extremist and I don’t doubt that he will be a good consistency MP. But do we really want a parliament dominated by people with the type of politics that allowed him comfortably to secure the Conservative nomination from the good burghers of Bracknell? It’s Thatcherism if you think about it – Mrs T would have no problem with any of Mr Lee’s “principles” – and we need the return of Thatcherism in Britain like we need holes in our heads!

The "art" of opposition

2008-02-18T10:36:00.003Z

In Britain it is the constitutional duty of the Opposition to oppose – and I must say that Dave and his boys are pretty good at it – especially he and Osborne! With debating skills honed at Eton and St Pauls and Oxford this privileged twosome and the Rara brigade alongside and behind them can usually get the better of dour old Gordon and dull old Alastair. But then Brown and Darling have quite important day jobs – whilst all that Dave and George have to do is to search for the next jibe or epithet or riposte. So it would no doubt be a ripping wheeze to table a motion of no confidence and occupy a bit of parliamentary time and unnecessarily divert the Prime Minister and his colleagues from the important task of actually running something (the country, as it happens). “Running something” is not something that Dave and the boys know much about – never had a proper job you see! But then there was always a ready stash of cash available (still is of course) so they could concentrate on what matters – words not deeds!

Northern Rock in public ownership

2008-02-17T16:08:00.002Z

Let’s be clear about the key issue here – this is not a failure of Government it is about a failure of capitalism. Of course it does not mean that the Capitalist model is defective – it means that the capitalist model is vulnerable on the margins.

Northern Rock’s failure was a failure entirely attributable to greedy and incompetent management who had no feel for their “stakeholders” or for the world in which they operated. Greed? Well just look at the obscene salaries (etc.) that they saw fit to pay themselves. Incompetent? Of course, no vision, no alternative scenarios - no hope!

How has Government handled it? Well the thought that the ridiculous Branson could be anywhere involved just shows how much there was clutching at straws. Government had assumed that there were checks and balances in the financial systems that would preclude the possibility of a Northern Rock situation. There were not. When ignorance, greed and incompetence rules then even Government cannot cope.

There was no alternative to nationalisation. That was obvious ages ago (well said Vince Cable). But let’s lay the blame where it is right to do so. On a system that trusts entrepreneurs (why?) and on a culture that allows these parasites to reward themselves obscenely before retreating in the face of “events” to their comfy houses and their generous pensions.

Hewlett Packard's throwaway world

2008-02-17T09:48:00.003Z

To someone of my generation (baby boomer) today’s “throwaway” world comes as a bit of a shock. In short if something goes wrong you don’t repair it you replace it. Indeed in some case it doesn’t even have to go wrong – just be out of fashion or lacking in the latest features. Here’s a personal and to me a particularly damning example. About fourteen months ago my two-year-old Philips ink jet printer suddenly stopped behaving properly. The chap that helps me with my computing recommended that I junk it and buy a good quality replacement and the man at PC World recommended a Hewlett Packard (HP) “All-in-one” machine. It was £250, much more expensive than similar printers but it did a lot and was from HP, one of the global leaders in computer printers, so I bought it.

A few weeks ago the HP printer started to go wrong – after just fourteen months of use. PC World didn’t want to know - I hadn’t bought extended warranty from them so they washed their hands of it and they wouldn’t even look at it – at any price. The told me to get in touch with HP. I phoned the HP “help line” who gave me three or four numbers of “authorised” repairers to call. After an hour of fruitless phoning none of HP’s recommended companies would, like PC World, even agree to look at the printer. “We don’t do that model” was the usual reply. This for a standard top-of-the range printer that was only 14 months old! So I phoned the HP “help” line again and told them what had happened. “Try the Yellow pages” said the helpful assistant! Now at this stage I suspect that less dogged customers would just have given up and thrown the bloody thing away. But I decided to persevere and eventually found an HP repair specialist who agreed to look at the machine – in return for a diagnostic service payment of £52! A day or so later they phone back to tell me that the printer head was faulty and that it couldn’t be repaired at all.

When I wrote to HP’s UK MD to tell him the story (baby boomers don’t drop things lightly and we can’t bring ourselves to throw things away - especially when they are little more than a year old) instead of a detailed written reply I got a phone call from a oxymoronically named “Customer Service” assistant who informed me that as the printer was out of warranty there was nothing that they could do (I paraphrase, but only a bit)! He could give me some phone numbers to try…! Of course these were the same numbers that I had fruitlessly called a week earlier – as the Afghan proverb has it “Life moves in circles”!

Vote for Ken !

2008-02-15T09:51:00.001Z

I will be voting without a qualm for Ken Livingstone for the positive reason that he has an excellent record and the negative reason that I can’t think of any pseudo-politician that I would less like to see in the job than Boris.

Let’s start with the positives. Livingstone has devoted his life to London. Shamefully treated by Margaret Thatcher in the petty and vindictive fight that she chose to pick over the role of the GLC Ken has risen from this setback to be the man who more than anyone has made London the great city it is today. Livingstone is the type of man who makes me think that politics can still be a noble profession. Why? Because Ken does things that matter and that make a difference. Unlike those in the land of the bland who need focus groups and advisors to tell them what to do Ken does it because he believes in it. He isn’t always right, of course – that’s the risk that conviction politicians have to take. But he is more often right than wrong. There are plenty of examples but the Congestion Charge is the best. How all of Ken’s enemies were standing on the sidelines (their customary position) to jeer in expectation of failure. How many Telegraph pieces and saloon bar gossipers were saying that it wouldn’t work, that it couldn’t work and that, as a result, the Mayor’s days were numbered. But it did work without a blip. Since the London plan was introduced, in 2003, vehicle speeds in the city’s central business district have increased by thirty-seven per cent and carbon-dioxide emissions from cars and trucks have dropped by fifteen per cent. One of the world’s greatest cities has a traffic management system that is the envy of the others– and without Ken Livingstone it wouldn’t have happened!

Now the negatives about Boris Johnson. Anyone, like me, who was privately educated and grew up in the post war years on a diet of Bunter and Biggles, knows the type. We didn’t have too many at my public school, actually – maybe it was too minor. But Eton turns them out by the Daimler-load. For years the Conservative party was led by these patricians – a long almost unbroken line from Salisbury to Home had the Noblesse that only Eton or Harrow or Rugby can bring. Sometimes there was a bit of the “Oblige” with the Noblesse - generally when an election was in the offing. And now, in the depths of their distress at being out of office so long, the Tories have reverted to type. The Bullingdon boys, Cameron, Osborne and Johnson are on the march! I don’t doubt that they are clever – if you pay £25,000 a year for your education that’s the least that a parent has a right to expect. But will the sensible British public be seduced by the fluffy hair and the well-modulated voices? Will they be fooled into thinking that the ability to govern in modern Britain is somehow helped by a privileged upbringing? Or will they feel, as I do, that what we look for in our leaders today is more than an easy manner and a patrician smile.

Disappointing McCain

2008-02-10T13:08:00.000Z

Why does McCain need to spout the intellectually shallow conservative rhetoric that he now seems ready to opine? He’s got the nomination all but sown up without the need to compromise his values or try and unwind his positions. True the Bushies and (worse) the NeoCon fraudsters can’t stand the man. But by moving even an inch or two in their direction he risks looking no more than an opportunist. If the new Republican Party is going to be McCain’s then why would he try and keep on board those symbols of failure – the Texas mafia and the Wolfowitz mobsters whose days are numbered? Does he really think that the conservative Right is going to desert him come November in favour of Hillary or Obama? Does he really believe that the repulsive religious Right will do the same (therefore that he needs the shallow and foolish Huckabee as a running mate?)

If McCain does go pragmatist on us and start to try and embrace the remnants of Bush’s failed, discredited and fallen regime then he risks not just damaging his own status and credibility but of alienating the moderates who he must corral if he is to have a chance in the General Election.

Letter from London 28th Augusr 2006

2006-08-28T07:57:00.000+01:00

Letter from London 28th August 2006 for the "Bahrain Tribune"

In a speech in America on 30th July Tony Blair said that “…for modern politicians, many of the policy prescriptions cross traditional left/right lines…on policy cross-dressing is rampant and is a feature of modern politics that will stay. The era of tribal political leadership is over…across a range of issues, there is no longer a neat filing of policy to the left or the right”. This was a precise précis of the present political reality, one that sees the leader of the Conservatives seeming to be a liberal and the leadership of the Labour Party very conservative indeed, at times!

Superficially beliefs used to drive British political parties much more predictably than they do today but, in reality, the truth has always been that there are only two manifesto alternatives. You either propose to do “better things”, or you propose to “do things better”. Historically it was usually the former option which ruled, at least in the rhetoric. The parties were distinguished by their radically different ideologies and the “better things” that divided them were polar opposites – socialism versus liberal conservatism; public ownership versus free enterprise and so on. In government these ideological imperatives were usually tempered a little (or a lot) - although there were occasional reforming administrations which drove forward a radical mandate for change. The 1945-1950 Labour government (Atlee) and the 1979-1983 Conservative (Thatcher) period are rare examples where a strong measure of ideology ruled. But these are the exceptions and most of modern British history has been characterised by middle ground consensus. In particular once the welfare state was in place there emerged a consensus that it was worth preserving. The battle for government providing public services and a measure of economic security to its citizens was won – so the debate then became about how to make it work better, not whether it should exist all.

The Labour Party took a while to cast off its dogmatic socialist baggage but it was Tony Blair’s first great triumph that it did so to such an extent that he became electable. This was symbolised by the removal from the Labour Party constitution of its Clause IV which had committed it to “…the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” (i.e. to public ownership of much of the economy). In effect this change only formalised what had long since been the consensus – that Britain is a mixed economy and that it is not the task of Government to be directly involved in industry or in (most) of the service sector. The early Thatcher years, dominated by worship of the free-market and (according to her opponents) by greed had challenged this consensus, but under her latest successor (David Cameron) the middle ground has been reclaimed as Conservative territory. Cameron knows that the days when you could win elections from the fringes have probably gone for good and that by appealing to the prejudices of your core supporters (as all recent Conservative leaders have done on such matters as immigration and taxation) you make yourselves unelectable. So at the next election Cameron is most unlikely to run with any radical new policy initiatives – he is more likely to claim that he will do broadly the same things as Labour, but do them much more competently - that he will “do things better”, not do “better things”.

Letter from London 25th July 2006

2006-07-25T17:13:00.000+01:00

For the "Bahrain Tribune"

On the final day of the Lord's Pakistan cricket Test match a small part of the Grandstand was colonised by around a hundred or so noisy and unmistakable Pakistan supporters. These were not, of course, the equivalent of the travelling "Barmy Army" - here on a cricket supporters visit from Karachi or Lahore. No - they were nearly all young people of Pakistani descent who were, I suspect, mostly born, bred and living in Britain - and with British Passports tucked away back home. Now in a country with Britain's freedoms these Pakistan supporters are entitled to support whatever sports team they like. That is their right. I just wish that, in sporting terms, they could be committed to the country of their chosen future rather than the country of their ancestors. I wish that they shared the pride of many in their communities when a cricketer of Asian origins (Sajid Mahmood for example) gets into the England team.

Now before anyone tries to "Colonel Blimp" me for holding these views let me explain a little further. If, at my advanced years, I emigrated to Australia (a country I like very much) and even became an Australian citizen it would not stop me from supporting England in The Ashes. Contradiction? Not at all. You do not cast off your personal allegiances of fifty years or more just because you relocate to another country. Once a Pom, always a Pom. But if I had children born and educated and working in Australia I would expect them (encourage them) to support the Aussies.

Sport, even cricket, is essentially trivial but in the case of nationality and allegiance sport can be a force for good, binding people of different backgrounds and cultures together in a common cause. When Sajid Mahmood's cousin Amir Khan won a silver medal in the boxing at the Athens Olympics I rejoiced along with him and his family who, whilst of a very different background to me, are all now as authentically British as I am. And there is certainly no more patriotic Englishman than Nasser Hussain (and his father Jo for that matter) notwithstanding their Indian origins.

So sport can be a force for good in binding people together whether it be in the England team (with their disparate national and cultural backgrounds) or those who support them in the stands. So why if you were born and raised in (say) Bolton of parents who emigrated from Pakistan would you support Pakistan and not England? It is emphatically not the same as your choice as to whether to support Bolton Wanderers or Manchester United. The reason any of us supports one club football team rather than another are many and varied and rarely even remotely contentious. But to openly reject supporting the national football or cricket team - the one that represents the country of your birth and of your nationality is a very different matter. All too often the failure of a young person, born in England and who grew up here, to support our national sports teams is an act of protest and a sign that he is, to a degree, alienated from his country. And yes, notwithstanding the triviality of sport, that alienation does matter and is potentially very disturbing.

Now this argument begins to get a bit heavy. Had the young Yorkshireman (born and bred in Leeds) Mohammad Sidique Khan chosen to express his discomfort with the British way of life by wearing a Pakistan cricket shirt and cheering on Pakistan at Headingley this August few would have given his actions a moments thought. But that was not Mr Khan's choice - he chose to express his alienation as a suicide bomber on a Circle Line train in London on 7th July 2005. Mr Khan's actions were those of someone on the lunatic fringe of the alienated but they stemmed, nevertheless, from the same basic causal roots as the entirely innocent actions of those Britons who choose to support Pakistan rather than England at a cricket match.

I have never believed that, in Britain, cultures should be subsumed into some bland, generic "Britishness" that is predominately white and Anglo-Saxon and has broadly "Christian" values. I enjoy the diversity of modern Britain and don't want it to change. But I do believe that this diversity can co-exist with a common pride in our nation and our nationality that all can share whatever our backgrounds. And I also believe that to support our national cricket team, irrespective of our origins or roots, can be a spur to the reduction of alienation and to unity. The less alienated any of us feels the more likely it is that the extreme expressions of alienation, such as that which happened in London on 7/7/05, will be less likely to happen again.

Letter from London 6th June 2006

2006-06-09T10:59:00.000+01:00

For the Bahrain Tribune"

Shock horror in leafy London suburb – our neighbours are flying two red-crossed England flags from the windows of their car! My wife, who has this disarming habit of finding good in anybody, says that it must be for the children (they have two small boys). But in reality such things are not really done in the better post codes. The English class system of norms exists today as much as it ever did and (frankly my dear) the overt display of the cross of St George from your car is undoubtedly infra dig. Mind you it gives the chaps in the saloon bars or at the golf club another weapon against the great unwashed: “It’s the bloody white vans that always fly the things” a large G&T said to me at my local. “It’s very dangerous, they could fly off and injure someone” said the “pint of Best” standing alongside him. “True, true” I mused “but what can you do?”

Actually it is not just on the cars that this display of national fervour has broken out – the England flag is on houses, garages, pubs, shops – nobody wants to miss out on this opportunity to show our support for the boys in Germany. Aside from the chance it gives the more moneyed classes to pass scorn on the masses this overt exhibition of national fervour is quite an interesting phenomenon. Although England is quite a small country the regional differences are considerable. We were at a wedding in Yorkshire last week and although the social milieu was not much different from Surrey it was a world apart. People were naturally friendly to start with. I am a reasonably outgoing person and when I instigate a conversation with a stranger in the “home counties” I am often looked at with surprise and suspicion (Am I mad? Have we been introduced?). In Yorkshire there was no such reserve. Such regional variations of behaviour and attitude are very marked indeed and make it difficult to describe what “Englishness” really is.

The clichéd answer to anyone who points out that we are far from “One Nation” and that social rank differences and regional variations make us English far from homogenous is to say that we all bind together when we need to and that certain things always “unite us”. Such rhetoric is usually illustrated by some reference to when (in 1940) we “stood alone” and how the spirit of the Blitz was the true sprit of Englishness. I’m suspicious of all this because even sport (which you might think could be genuinely unifying) is actually quite strongly delineated along class lines. Rugby Union and Tennis are for the toffs or aspirant toffs of the middle classes. Football and Rugby League are for the worker ants (the ones that fly the flags from their white vans). Cricket and Horse Racing is for both, but a sort of social apartheid rules at the grounds and the racecourses with the middle classes drinking wine in the comfortable enclosures and the hoi polloi swigging lager on the terraces. Oh to be in England!

Letter from London 20th May 2006

2006-05-20T11:09:00.000+01:00

For the “Bahrain Tribune”

I attended the Annual General Meeting of Shell (the corporation that I worked for for nearly forty years) last week and suspect that I was not the only person present to wonder if I had wandered into a parallel world which had the superficial appearance of normality – but was, in fact, almost completely alien. The AGM was being beamed to us in London from The Hague where the head office of the “new” Shell is located. The video and sound quality was good so we could see and hear the board clearly – although we could not see the whites of their eyes. After a while I began to wonder if in fact some new digital technology was in use that had created images of people who did not really exist – animatronic directors who had been programmed to behave in a certain way that was superficially convincing until you realised that nothing that they said made sense at all. The computer programming was very clever because when someone from the audience asked a question there was a brief moment as the speech recognition software cut in before the programmed answer came from the director’s mouth. Sometimes the answer actually related to the question but more often than not it related to a question that the software thought that the questioner should have asked (rather that the one that he actually did).

Shell has been through a hard time in recent years with scandals and dysfunctional behaviour and management incompetence that almost defies belief (one project has escalated in cost from $8billion to $20billion over the past year – an increase roughly equivalent to the GDP of Lebanon!). And yet with oil at $70 a barrel the profits carry on in and the directors richly reward themselves for their “success” – even the CEO they fired for mendacity and incompetence a few years ago rolls along happily on a pension of $750k a year. So institutions like Shell seem to suffer from mid-life crises and hubris just like we do as individuals. Shell is a long way from resolving their crises (indeed they seem in denial that there is still a problem at all – no mention was made of the reputation damage of the past few years at the AGM by the robot directors). The same can be said of Tony Blair and his tottering British government.

A little under a year ago Blair had an impressive week when he was the crucial factor in getting London the 2012 Olympics, when he handled with dignity and determination the London bombings and when as President of the G8 he hosted world leaders in Scotland. That week seems distant history now and there is the whiff of decay around Blair and his team. The real problem is not (just) that some of his ministers are inept and/or morally weak but that Blair himself is saddled with the ghastly reality of his foolish decision to back President Bush over Iraq. Unless and until, Blair admits that he was catastrophically wrong to have done this then there will be no closure. But one common factor of mid-life crises is that those who are mired in them never apologise and never explain. Perhaps Blair should look for a place on the board of Shell when he finally does retire as Prime Minister – he would certainly be at home there!

Letter from London 10th April 2006

2006-04-10T11:07:00.000+01:00

For the “Bahrain Tribune”

The two lead items on the evening news here in Britain last Sunday were Iraq and the Italian elections. The first story was President Mubarak of Egypt saying that Iraq had now deteriorated into civil war. The Italian election story was how Prime Minister Berlusconi may win re-election as a result of his iron grip on much of the Italian media through his company's ownership of newspapers and TV stations. There is no obvious connection between these two stories - until, that is, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw unintentionally provided one. Iraq is not in a state of civil war, said Straw, on the contrary they are reaping the benefits of democracy.

The "D" word democracy is brazenly used by American and British leaders to justify their disastrous military involvement in Iraq, an involvement that has without question created the civil war conditions that Mubarak so accurately described. The tens of thousands of dead, dispossessed, orphaned and maimed Iraqi citizens are the price, according to this warped ideology, that has to be paid for the welcome benefits of "democracy". Meanwhile a western European country that has enjoyed these benefits for decades is ruled by a man with criminal convictions and whose brand of democratic government involves the effective suppression of the opposition parties' rights to a level playing field to communicate their messages in an election. That the democracy in Italian is a sham is a metter for the Italians I suppose. That the so-called democracy in Iraq is equally an illusion is in many ways the least of the problems brought to the country on the back of American and British armies of occupation.

I realise, of course, that there can always be the accusation that to criticise the American and British actions in Iraq can be seen to be wise after the event and to have been made in the light of the current civil war. But many of us who opposed this action from the start did so at least in part because we feared that in the vacuum created by occupation it was inevitable that Shiite/Sunni rivalries would burst into open conflict. I was personally on record in saying this, as were many other commentators who knew the Middle East well. To have lived in the region for many years gives all of us the opportunity not only to learn about the nature of the region and its many and varied communities, but also to see that the western model of government (which is what Bush and Blair mean by "democracy") has little place in the region. To suggest that a parliamentary style of government, based on political parties and an adversarial style is appropriate for much of the Middle East is just plain ignorant. And to impose it on a country like Iraq, and to justify this imposition even when chaos is all around, is not just naïve - it is criminal.

So the next time the benighted Anglo-Saxon politicians of each side of the Atlantic prattle on about how smart they are to have brought democracy to Iraq it might be right to ask them a question. Do they really truly believe that the imposition of this western governance model (which as we can see is deeply flawed even in their own backyard of Italy) has been worthwhile in the light of everything else that has happened? And (more importantly) whether it will endure five minutes when the American and British troops eventually scuttle home.

Letter from London 16th March 2006

2006-03-16T17:25:00.000Z

from the Bahrain Tribune

Back in London after my flying visit to Bahrain for the Grand Prix I regard myself as very lucky to have been part of the event and to have been able to report on it for Tribune readers. You will know that I was pretty enthusiastic about what I saw not just the excellent circuit and facilities but also the terrific hospitability of the Bahrainis and expatriates who looked after me. British F1 driver Jensen Button clearly thinks that Bahrain is a pretty cool place to chill out for a while (having bought a house there) and I can now see why.

My trip started well with an excellent flight with Gulf Air from Heathrow. In my once business career I was accustomed to Club Class travel and became a little spoilt. But in my new life as a (mainly) sporting hack it has to be travel in the back of the plane – and with Gulf Air very good it was as well. Gulf Air once had a pretty terrible reputation in the region, but in the last few years (judging from my experience) they have got their act together in a big way. Their sponsorship of the Grand Prix was exemplary and I found my flights to and from London comfortable and even enjoyable. Service was good and friendly and even the seats were comfortable and the food not at all bad. It is this experience (of which you old Bahrain hands are perhaps familiar) that prompts me in this epistle to give you some good advice if you are planning to visit Europe this summer. Be very careful with whom you book your internal European flights!

My wife and I travel frequently to Spain and the airport nearest to where we go in Catalunya is dominated by the Irish airline RyanAir. There are other ways to get to our destination, but Ryanair’s airport is by far the most convenient. If you travel frequently with this carrier you get to know their idiosyncrasies. Although their flights are cheap (if you are flexible on dates and times) they will always be looking for new ways to fleece you. Flying out to Spain we had a fair amount of luggage, but returning we had very little so we were clearly going to be well within the 30Kg allowance for the two of us for check in baggage. We put one suitcase inside the other to make handling for us (and the airline) easier and approached the check in desk at Girona. The bag was weighed and it was only 16kg – a big 14kg within the limit for the two of us. But no, RyanAir has a new rule that each passenger must be within the limit and a couple flying together cannot aggregate - so our one and only case was one kilogram over the limit! Have you ever heard of this scam before? No, nor had we. So we either had to pay excess baggage for one Kilo or take one of the bags out of the other one and check in two pieces of luggage instead of one. The two pieces would, of course, still weigh 16kg but would now be subject to twice the handling and take up twice the space on the plane.

Now all of us are under some pressure when travelling and even very frequent travellers like me can buckle under the pressure occasionally. I protested about the absurdity of this new RyanAir imposed rule whilst fighting to turn our one check in bag into two to satisfy them. My protest (which whilst not mild, was not an out and out rant) caused Miss Girona 1971 at the check in desk to tell my wife and me to go to the back of the line – and she called security to enforce this instruction!

The moral of this tale is please avoid the ghastly RyanAir like the plague (there are dozens more stories to be told, but space and my good humour precludes this). Enjoy Gulf Air and Bahraini/Arab hospitality during your summer vacation – but don’t be tempted by RyanAir. They are a cheap airline in more ways than one.

Letter from London 27th February 2006

2006-02-28T08:28:00.000Z

Published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

I voted for Ken Livingstone to be Mayor of London in the last mayoral election and I would vote for him again. This is for three main reasons two of which are fairly rational and one of which is more emotional and a tad mischievous. The rational reasons are that Mr Livingstone has really achieved something in his years as Mayor - not least improving London's transport infrastructure significantly. His introduction of electronic road pricing was brave and despite the dire predictions that the system would not work it has been a resounding success. The technology works reliably and central London is much clearer of traffic as a result. Some useful funds have been added to London's income as well. Ken has also greatly improved London's buses and he is also tackling the huge task of getting a better underground railway system. The second rational reason is that the Mayor is enthusiastic and unyielding in his pursuit of London's interests and is quite happy to take on Government or anybody else who he sees standing in the city's way. It was this enthusiasm that led to Ken's unequivocal support for the London 2012 Olympic bid - a key factor in the bid's success.

The emotional and mischievous reason for my veneration of Ken Livingstone is that the sort of people that oppose him are just the sort of people who it is always a pleasure to annoy! Ken is a hate figure for all of those who define personal freedom as the freedom to do what they like and when they like without "vulgar people like Ken Livingstone" interfering. So they are affronted that it now costs them money to drive their Four wheel drive gas guzzlers into London and by the various other "losses of liberty" that they see from the Greater London Authority's rulings. That the London bus service is improved is of no interest to this privileged mob as they wouldn't be seen dead on a bus anyway.

The newspapers of choice for the Ken Livingstone hate brigade are those owned by "Associated Newspapers" - the Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard. These newspapers have attacked Ken for more than thirty years, often in the vilest of terms. It was this history that led to the Mayor's intemperate outburst at a reporter last year - an outburst that has got Livingstone into trouble and for which he has now been suspended from office for a month. Whilst the Mail and the Standard and their petty-minded readerships will be crowing with pleasure this is not the position of the political world which has roundly condemned the fact that an unelected quango can remove from office a democratically elected Mayor. Livingstone's opponents may well rue the day that this suspension happened because Ken is at his best when his back is against the wall. He will turn this indignity to his advantage you can be sure - and I for one will cheer when he does!

Letter from London 11th February 2006

2006-02-11T11:21:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

The new leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is intent on imprinting on the minds of the electorate that he is to be the new master of the ideological and pragmatic centre ground – in effect Tony Blair’s logical successor. Keener students of British politics will not be surprised by Cameron’s stance – although it is unusual for a Conservative leader to embrace a broadly social democratic agenda quite so openly. “Social justice and economic efficiency are the common ground of British politics” Cameron said recently and modern history (not just Blair) teaches us that he is right. Certainly if it is power that you want then it is in the moderate centre ground where you have to be seen to live.

Apart from a brief dalliance with Labour when I was a student in the 1960s I have only once joined a British political party. That was in 1981 when I became a founder member of the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP) – a party which promised to “break the mould” of British politics. The party was formally launched on 25th March 1981 by the so-called gang of four (Shirley Williams; Bill Rodgers; David Owen and Roy Jenkins) all of whom were politicians I admired - particularly Jenkins who was my political hero.

The attraction of the SDP to me, and to the thousands of others who became involved in politics for the first time with the SDP, was that the policy positions of the new party seemed rational, moderate, pragmatic and unideological at a time when the main parties had vacated the centre ground. Labour had bizarrely elected the old socialist firebrand Michael Foot as leader the year before signalling a major shift to the hard left. And the Conservatives had in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a leader who had contempt for the consensus politics of the post war years and who was determined to instigate a radical revolution driven by her belief in unbridled capitalism and her conviction that there is there was “no such thing as society”.

In the 1983 General Election the SDP, now in alliance with the old Liberal Party, garnered nearly 8 million votes - more than 25% - but (scandalously) the “first past the post” electoral system gave them a paltry 23 seats in parliament. The party was never a force in British politics again and faded away. But its influence was dramatic because over the next years Labour reformed itself and colonised the centre ground whilst the Conservatives squabbled amongst themselves and generally, until Cameron’s arrival, positioned themselves well to the right of centre.

Twenty-five years after the SDP burst on the scene we now have a broad acceptance of a political ideology by both major parties in Britain that is little different from what the Social Democrats were proposing. So whilst David Owen and his friends never gained power they do have the consolation that the centre ground that they once occupied alone is now very crowded indeed!

Letter from London 29th January 2006

2006-01-29T11:32:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

The way that we greet one another in various languages and cultures says something about our priorities. “As-Salaam-Alaikum”, for example, is courteous as well as pragmatic. If somebody begins a conversation by wishing me peace that is both charming, and disarming - and it would be churlish of me to respond with anything other than wishing my greeter peace in return. The Chinese are also solicitous in their salute which roughly translates as “Have you eaten rice today?” This reflects the Chinese love of food and (perhaps) the fact that famines over the years have meant that all too many Chinese may not have eaten every day. In Britain we invariably mumble some remark about the weather (when, that is, we cannot avoid looking away in embarrassment). “Turned out nice again” or “Dull old day” are classic greetings as is the Scottish “It’s a bit dreich today”. “Dreich” is a word which conveys a feeling of dullness, dampness and gloom – so the Scots (who can be a trifle dour at times) like it very much. It is also a very handy expression in Scotland as it applies there for around 300 days a year - so you don’t really have to make much of a meteorological judgment most of the time!

Quite why we British are so obsessed by the weather I’ve never understood – most of the time it is fairly unremarkable and there are rarely extremes in any of the seasons. Mind you when it is a few degrees above or below the norm the tabloids will explode with hyperbolic headlines like “The Big Freeze goes on” (translates as “It’s cold”) or “Sweltering London” (“It’s hot”). Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Hong Kong negotiations with China called Britain a “cold and cloudy island” and wondered why the Hong Kong Chinese would want to trade “sunny Hong Kong” to come and live here. In fact this last outpost of the empire had a pretty terrible climate (hot and very humid for much of the year). By comparison, for many of us, the British weather is actually a plus not a minus.

Having lived in some extreme climates in my time I am actually pretty happy with what we have in Britain. In Scotland, it is true, you do need to have a phlegmatic personality to cope - but you will be rewarded if you are patient. On a sunny day in the Highlands there is no more beautiful sight on earth than to climb high and look across the Lochs and Glens. A little further south there are similar sensations to be had in the Lake District which so inspired Wordsworth and other English poets. But remember that Wordsworth also wrote of London that “Earth has not anything to show more fair…” than the view from Westminster bridge. The last few days have been cold but sparklingly clear and in the thin air the sun reflects magically from the surface of the freezing Thames. And spring isn’t too far around the corner and our wonderful seasonal cycle will begin again. Have a nice day!

Letter from London 16th January 2006

2006-01-16T14:45:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and most likely next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, recently suggested that we should create a "British Day" on which we celebrate our nation. Whereas most other countries have their "Fourth of July" or their "Bastille Day" the British do not - hence Brown's suggestion. On the face of it is a reasonable idea that we should have a "National Day" - after all we are past masters of nationalistic fervour and celebration when we feel like it. So a day on which we our encouraged let our hair down to fly the Union flag might be fun. The problem, however, is that none of us seem terribly sure what it in reality means to be British, which might cause a degree of uncertainty about what it is we are actually celebrating. This confusion about our identity has led to a plethora of recent initiatives that seek to define "Britishness", and to popular television programmes such as "Great Britons" which tried to identify who our most notable countrymen have been.

I am unsure as to whether all this ballyhoo about Britishness is a consequence of a national inferiority complex, or the opposite. Are we being asked again to indulge in that game once mocked by Ogden Nash when he said, "Englishmen know instinctively that what the world needs most is whatever is best for Great Britain"? Nash was writing at a time when Britain was most distinguished from other nations by its Empire. True a little local difficulty in North America in 1776 had meant that we had long since lost one of the Jewels in the Crown, but much of the rest of the world was still coloured pink. And we still felt confident to sing "Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be spread" to Elgar's great tune in "Land of Hope and Glory".

It is at least arguable that the reason that we have no National Day is that in our DNA is that character trait that, with varying degree of subtlety implies "The English, the English the English are best", and goes on "I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest". (Flanders and Swann). Why do we need a Day every year to simply state the obvious? This vanity can be mercilessly mocked as Noel Coward did when he said "It seems a shame when the English claim the earth, that they give rise to such hilarity and mirth" and we might feel that it has long since been consigned to history. But, to be serious for a moment, I am not sure that this is true. In the years since we lost an empire we have too often been reluctant to give up the conceit not just that as a Nation we are different (a truism that applies to all countries) but that we are "unique" and by implication better. Tony Blair has claimed a "unique" (his word) role for Britain because we are able to be both Atlanticist and European at the same time. The danger, of course, is that we end up neither comfortable with Bush's America (much of which is alien to many of us) nor with a more bureaucratised and united Europe. And so we bumble on professing our uniqueness and occasionally waving our flags but, it seeking to be friends with all, we are actually friends with none.

Letter from London 1st January 2006

2006-01-01T15:12:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

The arrival of David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party has injected a well needed bit of excitement into the dull and predictable world of modern British politics. Whatever your political views the status quo was beginning to get a bit boring. The Labour hegemony was secure with even their loss of seats in the 2005 General Election attributable solely to a switch from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. In a few cases this switch let in the Conservative candidate and the party did make some modest gains in the election. But in reality these were undeserved and it was Charles Kennedy’s LibDems that the Tories had to thank for their modest progress.

Since the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 the Conservatives have had a succession of inept leaders none of whom has captured the public imagination other than as a satirical figure of fun. The party has lost members, votes, seats and any vestige of credibility as a government in waiting. Whatever Tony Blair did (and he did some pretty odd things) Labour seemed secure in office. That has now changed, and whilst the Conservatives still have a mountain to climb, at least they have a leader, who has broken the mould of the succession of faceless, and hopeless, men who preceded him.

Much of Cameron’s current rhetoric is insubstantial and clearly designed to set a tone rather than an agenda. This is shrewd of him - he is well aware that there will not be a General Election in Britain until the year 2009 (at the earliest) and that there will be plenty of time in the years ahead for manifesto building. For now he needs name recognition (the media is helping him willingly to get this) and to establish himself as substantial in the public imagination. It is precisely the route followed by Tony Blair between July 1994 (when he became Labour Party leader) and May 1997 (when he won his first General Election). Cameron and his fellow members of the “Notting Hill” set of Tories are closet admirers of Blair and it is no surprise that they are adopting Blair’s successful methods.

As with Blair and the Labour Party, Cameron does not need to pander to his Party’s core grass roots supporters. In the same way that Blair would never get the vote of Tunbridge Wells man so Cameron will never make progress in the Labour heartlands. So what he needs to do is to win the backing of those who are not natural Conservatives, who have supported Labour and the Lib Dems in recent elections but who are open-minded to the possibility of a Conservative government. By pitching himself as “caring and concerned” he might persuade these floating voters to give him a chance, something his predecessors were quite unable to do. Michael Howard fought a shoddy campaign in last year’s election pandering distastefully to the prejudices of his core supporters (who no doubt loved him for it) whilst putting everybody else off! Cameron’s rush away from the lunatic fringe of Torydom to the very centre of British politics is the opposite of his predecessor’s approach and is wise and pragmatic - but whether it will succeed or not it is, of course, much too early to say.

Letter from London 19th December 2005

2005-12-19T14:58:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

I was at a Sports Journalists’ lunch in London last week when Sebastian Coe made a brief appearance before moving on to a meeting at the House of Commons. He was received by all of us in the packed room with enthusiastic applause which I know was genuine, because there are few more cynical gatherings than the hard nosed hacks that make up the British sporting press. If they put their hands together it is not because they feel obliged to or are being polite. They do it because they mean it! Coe’s achievement in securing the 2012 Olympic Games for the city of London was without any question London’s big moment of the year, and Coe, although born in London, is really a Yorkshireman! And without being over emotional about this, that really is symbolic of why London’s bid eventually prevailed. London is not a parochial regional city but genuinely international. To be a “Londoner” is to be a citizen of the world, and for hundreds of years the city has welcomed and nurtured people from everywhere - even Yorkshire!

In the Olympic bid Coe and his team pitched that London would be an Olympics for the youth of the world, and he had with him a group of children from the London area to symbolise this. This was not contrived, some artificial “rainbow city” confection designed just to win the Games. It was genuinely (albeit cunningly) real and it showed what those of us who live in the city know, that if London is not your first home (as it is mine) it is, or can be, everyone’s second home. And it is this multi-cultural element that really does make us different. The football ground that I most frequently visit is “White Hart Lane”, the home of Tottenham Hotspur. It is not the easiest of grounds to get to and I usually get the tube to “Seven Sisters” and walk – that takes about half an hour and involves passing Jamaican fruit sellers, Halal butchers, Jewish bagel makers, Thai cafes, Cypriot grocers and many many more. If Tottenham is home to peoples from all around the world it is no more so than most of the London districts. That this multi cultural city works without too many problems and that it remains a magnet for travellers and for those (especially the young) looking to improve their life is part of its history and part of its present.
Sebastian Coe’s pitch to the IOC was, of course, designed to emphasise what it good about the city. And to the sceptics the London bid team said (as Ralph McTell wrote in his song “The Streets of London”) “Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London, I’ll show you something to make you change your mind”. And that something is not the Beefeaters in the Tower, the grand buildings or the parks and the boulevards. It is the people.

Letter from London 4th December 2005

2005-12-04T15:09:00.000Z

As published in the "Bahrain Tribune"

Whether the English are unique in their reserve I cannot be absolutely certain (maybe there is a tribe deep in the South American rain forests similarly aloof) but we do tend to hide away. Our new neighbours have been in their house for three months now, but contact has been restricted (so far) to the odd embarrassed wave. “They seem very nice”, says my wife, an opinion based, presumably, on the fact that they haven’t encroached across the line between our houses nor played loud rock music late into the night. They may be crypto-fascists or planning a revolution, but if they keep themselves to themselves that’s alright.

We are close now to the time of the year when the English are traditionally obliged to actually have some contact with their “friends”. We send, on average, a hundred Christmas cards per household - it’s a chore but it does allow us the illusion that we are “in touch”. “Have you seen David recently?” I said to an old colleague I met by chance. “We exchange Christmas Cards” he said - which presumably meant that there was prima facie evidence that David was still alive. The Christmas Card list is a curious thing. On it, of course, are remote family members and the (for most of us) small number of people that we do regard as close friends. But then there are also the random names who have maintained their card priveledges because they always send us a card as well, and it would be impolite to stop. When we lived abroad the increased postage involved meant that this latter group dwindled to a hard core, but since we have been back in London it has crept up again and some people have mysteriously reappeared. Who the hell are “Jim and Sophie” I asked when looking at this year’s list “Tuscany ‘92, big blonde girl” the wife replied – “Ah that Sophie” I agreed, “yes we should keep in touch with her alright!”

I think that it was when home computers became common that the “Christmas letter” really caught on. These “round robin” epistles are frequently stuck into the Christmas Card envelope and generally itemise, in tedious detail, the events of the last year. The longest I received was eighteen A4 pages using quite a small font, not as you might expect from Tony Blair or David Beckham, but from a retired schoolteacher and keen rambler in Tunbridge Wells. The page and a half in great detail about the repair to his central heating boiler left little to the imagination.

The Christmas letter is, of course, for the benefit of the writer not the recipient. The content is usually less then modest, especially where children are concerned. “Sarah’s second year at Oxford has gone well and she is well on route for a “First”. Where does she get the brains from?” The self-deprecation is usually ironic in such letters. But whilst Christmas letters are almost always awful, they are perhaps better than no contact at all. Maybe we should push one through our new neighbours’ door (or, better still, copies of our last five years letters so that they can really get to know us!).