A GHOST STORY RETAILED
ACT I: LITTLE SHOPS KNOW HORROR
The narrative arts are apt to organise their material into three acts. The first sets out the status quo – the situation, the characters, the mise en scène. The second introduces development – change, challenge, conflict. The third offers resolution – a return to the status quo (the sentimental happy ending) or, in more mature work, a new and perhaps superior accommodation or a reluctant reconciliation or a new realism.
Real lives are lucky if they ever reach a third act. Most of us spend our youth finding out who we are and the rest of our adulthood more or less regretting that precious little of what we found out in youth may still be relied upon. This pattern is so common and predictable that you would think the human race might have devised strategies for dealing with it by now. But no. As with walking and talking, so every generation has to learn anew that there are no eternal verities and that our projects and prospects are grand edifices built on foundations of balsa wood.
Take shops. Even twenty years ago, it would have seemed unimaginable that the retail parades around which every community of any size grew up in Britain as elsewhere would now be well into a long and slow but evidently irrevocable decline. If you’d asked people half a century back what would be going strong and confident a decade into the next millennium, they might not have cited the trade union movement or the nuclear family or the railways or horse-drawn traffic or the bobby on the beat or the British Empire or the printed newspaper, but they surely wouldn’t have marked the high street as one for the bonfire of history.
Fifty years ago next year, my father closed for the last time the factory that he had managed for most of three decades. The story of the secret takeover of the business by city slickers who eventually went to jail is a yarn for another day. But Dad had known only one trade – boots and shoes – ever since he left school at 14 and it was clear what he must do. Aged 50, he drew the dole for precisely one week and then opened a shoe shop: Stan Gilbert Footwear Ltd.
It was hard going. Footwear was the county trade and everyone for miles around had a family member who could get hold of free or at least cut-price shoes. My mother and I worked long hours to help – I was a teenager – and, by degrees and shrewd use of trade contacts, Dad made it pay and survive for twenty years. It helped a lot that, though a narrow, unimaginative and prosaic man, he was transformed into a poet with a well-made shoe in his hands. The first pair that I owned as a child was wholly fashioned by him, by hand, from scratch. I still have the lasts on which he made them.
Aside from the product, no one had to teach my father (or indeed my mother and me) the rudiments of serving behind the counter. That was what it was – a service – and we knew it when we received it, which was pretty much everywhere when shopping. We all lived instinctively by Gordon Selfridge’s dictum: “the customer is always right”. No task came before attending to a customer; and shops, especially independent ones, generated dozens of tasks, some daily, some weekly, some seasonal (the annual ritual of stock-taking was a real three-ring circus). Anything that might interfere with one’s readiness to serve a customer was done before the shop opened or after it closed. Everything had to be in place at opening time. Nobody stacked shelves or cleared the till or (unthinkable!) yakked on the phone while there were potential spenders on the premises.
My father had his particular ways of doing things, but most of what we all did as retailers was to reproduce what we knew from our own shopping. So you called customers ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ (even if mere teenagers), or you addressed them as Mr or Mrs So-and-So if you knew them (in a medium-sized town, those you knew by name made up a high proportion of your trade). You judged how far they wanted to browse unhurriedly, whether they might demur at the offer of assistance, when to clinch a sale and when to wait for them to reveal an inclination. There were always time-wasters, those who came in for a warm or a chat or to pass the time of day, those who wanted to check your stock or were just nosy about what you had to offer. In a one-trade town, there might also be the low-level equivalent of industrial spies who popped in for a quick shufti and reported back to a rival. All of these you treated with the greatest courtesy, restraint and patience. The customer was always right.
When they found nothing that suited, you described the lines on order and what might be in soon. You never let them leave the shop feeling that you were indifferent to their custom. When they made a purchase, you showed them the price tag and offered a shoebox and/or a paper bag to carry them in. If they made more than one purchase, you added up the prices in your head and checked your calculation against the till when you rang up the amount. You took their money (keeping notes in view until the sale was complete so that they couldn’t dispute the denomination they had tendered) and – absolutely standard, this – you counted the change coin by coin, note by note into their hand. (When I worked in a bookshop in the early ’90s, I found that the by-then novelty of counting out change was greatly appreciated by the customers). You gave them a receipt, thanked them kindly but not profusely and hoped to see them soon. You certainly didn’t remark “brilliant!” just because they’d had the gumption to pay for their purchase.
By the by, prices even then were generally one penny below a round figure – for instance, 19/11 (that’s 19 shillings and 11 pence which is the equivalent of 99.5p today). The reason for this sort of pricing was not to bamboozle the customer into imagining that the price was a lot less than £1. It was to oblige the shop assistant to open the till to make change, given that passing few customers would be carrying exactly 19/11. Hence the transaction would have to be recorded on the till and the shop assistant could not pocket the money and keep the sale a secret from the shop owner which, when the correct money – say £1 – is tendered, is perfectly possible.
Something else to note about Dad’s shop is that he only sold shoes and a few strictly footwear-dependent items, like laces. He didn’t stock phone cards (remember those?), DVDs, lottery tickets, postage stamps, bunches of alstrœmeria or sandwiches. He wasn’t part of a chain so he determined his own prices; several he marked down as loss leaders, cutting profit margins to encourage a higher volume of sales. He didn’t have piped muzak in the shop.
In those days, all transactions were made by cash or cheque. No one had credit cards. Hire-purchase (known as ‘the HP’: payment by instalments) was much more widespread and, when money was tight as it was for many in the post-war years, people would ask if they could get things on account. Indeed, many shops (though not Dad’s) displayed signs that read: “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends” (yes, really). I recall a fish-and-chip shop owner crossly turning to me, then just a boy of seven or eight, to tell me that his previous customer, a young woman leaving as I was arriving, had had the nerve to ask for “sixpenn’th of chips on tick”.
Premises like Dad’s, the founding stones of the high street, have been swept away. The phenomenon of the sole-proprietor shop has dwindled to a vestigial few. This is partly due to their drift from true notions of service and specialist expertise. Further, the family business notion was eroded by myriad factors – among them, more mobility and awareness of other options, less deference and sense of obligation to parents. As young people learned to aim for further education, seeing the world and moving away from the limitations of a small town, they were less attracted to the idea of working in and eventually running Dad’s ailing jewellery shop or the green grocers’ staffed by successive generations of brothers and sisters.
While these little shops died, the small and medium-sized chains struggled too, not without their own casualties, Woolworth’s and Habitat being, I suppose, the best-known and most mourned. The survivors all look rocky when even the pre-Yule rush never properly materialises. Unthinkable just a few seasons ago was a sight that greeted us on our own high street this year: the Oxfam shop having a sale throughout the very run-up to Christmas.
Much, much more responsible for the death of independent retailing and the decline of the high street has been the relentless advance of the behemoths. I’ll come onto the superstores in another posting, pausing merely to remark here that through their bulk buying and preferential access, their bullying and their undercutting, the supermarkets force all the smaller, more specialist shops to the wall.
Consider an area of the market of particular interest to me as a sometime journalist. It is only relatively recently that the big stores started to stock newspapers and periodicals. They began with the national dailies and a few television and women’s magazines. When this worked well, they expanded their displays to include pretty much everything at the popular end of magazine publishing, the stuff that is an easy sell. They aimed to catch the impulse buyer who spots a headline or a strapline or who always meant to take a look at Heat or Hello! (there must be such people). They also entice the shopper happy to pick up a paper or a TV Choice without bothering to go to the newsagent’s. But with the more specialized publications the supermarkets naturally do not bother. That would mean supplying a service and going to trouble for specific customers rather than snaring random, passing trade.
The independent newsagents do carry arcane magazines or order them for regular customers. But the supermarkets have cut a vast swathe out of the newsagents’ main source of income: newspapers, popular magazines, soft drinks, sweets and cigarettes. As one after another newsagent goes out of business, the specialist magazines that depend on them for their sales lose their outlets. So their narrow profit margins are squeezed until they too fold. And that’s the death of another source of income for a writer like me.
Our one-time newsagent in north London told us how he would walk past the local supermarket on his way to open his lock-up shop at some unearthly time in the morning. The supermarket would be closed for hours yet but its stock of newspapers was already waiting tied in bails at the door. His supply, however, would not be there when he opened; it would turn up at some unpredictable juncture after many customers had left empty-handed. Every independent newsagent has the same experience; multiply that across the nation. Great! What a clever ploy of the newspaper distributors to favour the big boys even though it loses them precious, dwindling sales.
Stocking papers and popular mags is just part of the move to diversify that has comprehensively disfigured the retail trade. Now everybody stocks everything. How I long for an age when shops did one thing surpassingly well instead of lots of things in a mediocre fashion. I am so old that I remember when Boots was a chemist’s.
As with so many other baleful developments, television played its part in the retail trade’s decision to spread itself thin. For the item that was seized on by the widest variety of shops was the newly desirable videotape in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Far more than in any other country, home taping took serious hold in Britain from the moment VCRs hit the shops. And, while only large or specialist shops could hope to make a go of selling movies on tape, blank tapes could be sold by anyone; and they were. Early in the ’80s, we came across a peculiar combination in Exeter, a chippie selling videotapes. He called himself Fish’n’Flicks. Somehow, I didn’t fancy buying a videotape misted with the spray of chip fat: how much damage would it do to one’s recorder? I hardly imagine that he’s still in business, not at any rate for tapes.
The ubiquity of tape has long since been overtaken. Indeed, for a Luddite taper like me (I have way too many stored videos to change now), blank tape is almost impossible to find and the odd but (for me) useful lengths extinct: 120, 195, 210, 300 minutes. I could only be sure to find any blank tapes locally in a video shop whose prices were the highest I had encountered in more than 25 years. But it’s closed down now. Inevitably, one is driven to rely on internet shopping for tape.
The diversification into unrelated goods roared on. In the wake of tape, petrol stations started selling food (even less appetising than fat-sprayed videos), butchers sold cheese and eggs, post offices stationery and greetings cards, bookshops DVD’s and coffee, lighting shops furniture (we once bought an occasional table at Christopher Wray’s), florists ceramics and knick-knacks and so on. Were Stan Gilbert Footwear still going, I suppose he would have to major in trainers and offer sidelines in handbags, luggage, socks, roller skates, skis, hiking maps and ointments for athlete’s foot.
Superstores now routinely stock supposed fashion, down-market books, toys, bed linen, firewood and electrical goods and offer dry-cleaning, insurance and banking. Surely coming soon to your local Asda will be: ayurvedic massage, care for the elderly, tarot readings, dog-training, escort services, yoga, line-dancing classes, personal bodyguard hire, pro bono legal advice, endangered species as pets, landscape gardening, group therapy, dentistry, armaments for any eventuality, car boot sales and cosmetic surgery while-u-wait. (I’m joshing but you’ll tell me of any branches that do indeed offer some of these). Such vast diversification by the stores with limitless pockets puts pressure on every small business to augment the line that was once a matter of expertise and comprehensive service.
When I moved to London to become a university student, I found a city crammed with fascinating stationery shops. I soon learned where to buy those left-field items that any writer relishes: typing paper in quarto size (handy for short letters), box-filing cards in quantity at a reasonable price, two-tone typewriter ribbons, varying shades of carbon paper, all kinds of covers for manuscripts and documents, a vast variety of graph and ruled paper, felt-tipped pens of the idiosyncratic style that I favoured.
It couldn’t last. Along came a chain called Ryman’s that one by one squeezed all the individual stationers out of business. Ryman’s stocked none of those quirky items that I so liked and they killed off the shops that did stock them. I loathed Ryman’s. One day, passing a branch, I caught sight in the window of a neat little photocopying machine designed for a small office. I had always dreamed of such an addition to my workspace. Taking a deep breath, I crossed the hated threshold and soon emerged carrying the photocopier. It was indeed so light that I carried it home on foot. What a fool for making an impulse purchase from the enemy. The copier never worked reliably and, when I ran out of paper for it, I found that the particular paper it required was grotesquely expensive. Only Ryman’s stocked it and they dropped it not long after. And the rule with a chain is: when head office cancels a line, no branch carries it. I knew it was futile to protest at the branch where I bought the damned thing.
The last time I was in London, I found that the one great independent stationer’s left, Osman’s of Wardour Street, had finally but inevitably gone. The death of the stationery specialists, along with the decline of newspaper shops (whose trade has also been hard hit by the reduction in demand for smoking materials), is just a small symptom of a much greater malaise: the death of variegated retail.
Part of the process of decline of the high street was that every town centre became identical to every other town centre because the major chains were the only retailers who could afford the rentals. Nor is it just the case in Britain. Go to towns and cities in Europe and even further afield and the same fascias gaze down upon you from shops that used to be unique and local.
And as the small independents died, what was striking was how the most likely new tenant was a hairdresser’s, a “beauty salon”, a bistro or a fifty-kinds-of-coffee hangout. In country towns like the one nearest us, the other most prolific businesses – at least until the recession set in – were estate agents.
In taking over and standardising town centres, some of the chains overreached themselves and found that they had to cut back again. Even some of the superstores fell back and Safeway and Somerfield are gone. I certainly don’t miss our local Somerfield. On the few occasions that I found myself driven to enter it for lack of any more desirable shop, it was hopeless. The prominent “ten items or less” sign at one of the checkouts was never enforced and I never saw the so-called “express checkout” actually open. I used to refer to the place as Slumberland. It’s now a branch of the Co-op and, as far as I can tell, not much better.
Ah yes, the superstores … TO BE CONTINUED.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
ONCE in UNREAL DAVID's (BIG) SOCIETY
The Prime Minister has declared Britain “a Christian country … and we should not be afraid to say so”. It’s not unusual, of course, for politicians to make assertions that have no basis in fact. Sometimes this is done out of ignorance, sometimes out of dishonesty, sometimes out of self-denial, sometimes out of malice, sometimes out of hubris, sometimes out of simple foolishness. It’s hard to know which – if not all – of these is the wellspring of Cameron’s announcement. But, whichever way you cut it, it is not true.
In the most recently published results of the British Social Attitudes survey, those accounting themselves as Church of England were below twenty percent. Non-denominational Christians were under ten percent and Catholics less than nine percent. Those who said they had no religion of any kind numbered a little over fifty percent. In other words, Britain is not even half a Christian country. Indeed, considerably more people are certainly not Christian than voted for the parties comprising the coalition government. For whom does Cameron believe he is speaking?
Cameron's Christmas cards don't do religion: this was last year's, emphasising his parental orientation
Given that he must know – his advisors anyway must have pointed out – that his claim would likely alienate and repel rather more listeners than it would please (and besides, those pleased would be overwhelmingly dominated by those whose support is already assured), what did he think he was up to? Can he have been fending off in a subterranean way those filthy foreigners in the non-C-of-E European Union: Catholic France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Poland and Ireland, Lutheran-Calvinist Germany? Could it have been a low piece of point-scoring against the Jewish Ed Miliband? Was it a crude attempt to identify himself with the spirit of Christmas? If this latter, he’d have done better by volunteering to switch on the lights in Oxford Street or accepting a cameo in the Christmas Day editions of either Downton Abbey or Absolutely Fabulous. The seasonal worship indulged by the vast majority of the British electorate is of those great gods, Retail and Telly.
The obvious question arising from Cameron’s asseveration is: does this supposedly Christian nation have a Christian government? Well, let’s just consider how far it measures up to the more obvious of Christ’s teachings and tenets. To begin at the beginning: “I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:24]. Two-thirds of the Cabinet are millionaires, several of them (including Cameron) multi-millionaires. So ministers – all of them, it’s fair to say, because even the non-millionaires are rich by most people’s standards – are booked for eternal damnation; which rather reduces their credentials as Christians, wouldn’t you say?
On the subject of damnation, Matthew has another pertinent passage for this government: “Then shall [God] say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:/For I was an hungred [i.e. hungry], and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:/I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not:/Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger,or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?/Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me” [Matthew 25:41-5].
You notice how Christ does not suggest that we are all in it together or that helping the deprived is too expensive because of the “mess” that God inherited or that there needs to be a “stranger” quota, at least among those from outside the European Union. It is a given that the “least” must be “ministered” to. Neither does Christ suggest that the top rate of tax ought to be lowered. The government clearly does not subscribe to the philosophy as expressed here in Matthew’s account.
The government’s constant harping on eliminating the deficit puts it on the side of the Pharisees whom Christ excoriated: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone./Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” [Matthew 23:23-4].
Nor did Cameron bear in mind, when he exercised the summit veto the other week, another dictum of Christ’s quoted by Matthew: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” [Matthew 19:19]. Nowhere do the gospels suggest that Christ advocated putting the British interest first. Funny, that.
This year's secular card manages to smuggle in very ostentatiously a touch of flag-waving
Of course, one can make a case for pretty much anything, however perverse or unchristian, with selected quotes from scripture. But these I have cited are widely-known and understood, even among those like me who find no place in their lives for supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It seems to me that those who publicly profess their conviction ought to act in a way that does not readily undermine the credibility of those convictions.
In sum, Britain is by no stretch of the imagination a Christian country. And nor does it labour under a Christian government. I wish all my readers a very cool Yule.
The Prime Minister has declared Britain “a Christian country … and we should not be afraid to say so”. It’s not unusual, of course, for politicians to make assertions that have no basis in fact. Sometimes this is done out of ignorance, sometimes out of dishonesty, sometimes out of self-denial, sometimes out of malice, sometimes out of hubris, sometimes out of simple foolishness. It’s hard to know which – if not all – of these is the wellspring of Cameron’s announcement. But, whichever way you cut it, it is not true.
In the most recently published results of the British Social Attitudes survey, those accounting themselves as Church of England were below twenty percent. Non-denominational Christians were under ten percent and Catholics less than nine percent. Those who said they had no religion of any kind numbered a little over fifty percent. In other words, Britain is not even half a Christian country. Indeed, considerably more people are certainly not Christian than voted for the parties comprising the coalition government. For whom does Cameron believe he is speaking?
Given that he must know – his advisors anyway must have pointed out – that his claim would likely alienate and repel rather more listeners than it would please (and besides, those pleased would be overwhelmingly dominated by those whose support is already assured), what did he think he was up to? Can he have been fending off in a subterranean way those filthy foreigners in the non-C-of-E European Union: Catholic France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Poland and Ireland, Lutheran-Calvinist Germany? Could it have been a low piece of point-scoring against the Jewish Ed Miliband? Was it a crude attempt to identify himself with the spirit of Christmas? If this latter, he’d have done better by volunteering to switch on the lights in Oxford Street or accepting a cameo in the Christmas Day editions of either Downton Abbey or Absolutely Fabulous. The seasonal worship indulged by the vast majority of the British electorate is of those great gods, Retail and Telly.
The obvious question arising from Cameron’s asseveration is: does this supposedly Christian nation have a Christian government? Well, let’s just consider how far it measures up to the more obvious of Christ’s teachings and tenets. To begin at the beginning: “I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:24]. Two-thirds of the Cabinet are millionaires, several of them (including Cameron) multi-millionaires. So ministers – all of them, it’s fair to say, because even the non-millionaires are rich by most people’s standards – are booked for eternal damnation; which rather reduces their credentials as Christians, wouldn’t you say?
On the subject of damnation, Matthew has another pertinent passage for this government: “Then shall [God] say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:/For I was an hungred [i.e. hungry], and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:/I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not:/Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger,or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?/Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me” [Matthew 25:41-5].
You notice how Christ does not suggest that we are all in it together or that helping the deprived is too expensive because of the “mess” that God inherited or that there needs to be a “stranger” quota, at least among those from outside the European Union. It is a given that the “least” must be “ministered” to. Neither does Christ suggest that the top rate of tax ought to be lowered. The government clearly does not subscribe to the philosophy as expressed here in Matthew’s account.
The government’s constant harping on eliminating the deficit puts it on the side of the Pharisees whom Christ excoriated: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone./Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” [Matthew 23:23-4].
Nor did Cameron bear in mind, when he exercised the summit veto the other week, another dictum of Christ’s quoted by Matthew: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” [Matthew 19:19]. Nowhere do the gospels suggest that Christ advocated putting the British interest first. Funny, that.
Of course, one can make a case for pretty much anything, however perverse or unchristian, with selected quotes from scripture. But these I have cited are widely-known and understood, even among those like me who find no place in their lives for supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It seems to me that those who publicly profess their conviction ought to act in a way that does not readily undermine the credibility of those convictions.
In sum, Britain is by no stretch of the imagination a Christian country. And nor does it labour under a Christian government. I wish all my readers a very cool Yule.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
POOR’s SHOW
Ever since the decline of European Socialism in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the ’90s, capitalism has considered itself king of the world and has behaved accordingly. In Britain especially, the triumph of capitalism has been celebrated by successive governments, whether Conservative or nominally Labour. Under the spell of the Chicago school of economic theory, Margaret Thatcher played a key role, greatly accelerating the switch from a manufacturing to a service economy begun by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. This switch was in part motivated by a desire – yelled by Tories, whispered by Labour – to “smash” the unions that had, in the Westminster demonology, “held the country to ransom”.
This melancholy history reaches its latest chapter in the exercise of the veto by David Cameron at the European summit that was designed to save the euro, the Eurozone and indeed the national economies of the member states. Cameron’s sound-bite summary, parroted endlessly by ministers, is that he stepped out of line “to protect the national interest”. Even were that the whole story, it hardly presents Britain as a welcome player in a mutually beneficial alliance of nations, as communitaire.
But of course his stance does nothing to benefit you and me. Cameron’s only desire has been to protect the interests of the city, which is to say the interests of his party’s paymasters. The banks feared new regulation from Brussels. Cameron claims to intend to impose his own regulation but we will believe it when we see it – don’t hold your breath.
There is nothing in these quixotic dramatics that bodes any good for Britain’s dwindling manufacturing sector, or indeed for our export drive and hence our growth prospects. And as for realpolitik, it is a blunder of astonishing puerility. If the Eurozone does not quickly recover its equilibrium, Merkel and Sarkozy will persuasively blame Cameron. If the Eurozone climbs back onto its feet, no one will thank Cameron and it will occur to no one to reward Britain with increased trade. It’s a lose-lose result. As former President of the European Commission and Italian prime minister Romano Prodi put it, “Britain has gained freedom and lost power”.
The financial sector continues to bewitch politicians, not just in Britain but across the globe. In Durban, the climate change talks inevitably reached the conclusion that international short-termist capital wanted: ineffectual muddle. Despite menacing and even sometimes angry noises from governments, the money markets continue to enjoy a lack of supervision that must make the black economy green with envy.
Why is this? Is the path being made smooth by under-the-counter “considerations”? Or is the general run of ministers too finance-illiterate to know how far the speculators and their accountants and lawyers are taking them for patsies? Why is it that nothing uttered or threatened by banks and financial consultants is taken with a whole sackful of salt? Do politicians not understand that, of all the lobbyists and vested interests with which they deal day in and day out, the city is the most powerful and the most sophisticated, with deep enough pockets to set any hare running, however fantastical, and confidently to expect the desired outcome?
Consider the credit ratings agencies. The best-known, largest and most powerful is Standard & Poor’s, but there are others: last month, the US government tripled the number of such agencies that it recognises. S&P’s has been busy of late. In August, it set the markets on their ears by downgrading the United States from its triple-A rating, the topmost rung. A couple of weeks ago, it downgraded France’s rating. And on the eve of the Eurozone summit, it declared that it was considering the ratings of fifteen of the member countries of the eurozone. These credit ratings determine the cost of governmental borrowing. Downgrading a nation’s ratings heaps vast extra expense on that nation’s costs.
So who are these people at Standard & Poor’s? Why should anybody pay them heed? Well, S&P’s finds its origins in charting and invigilating the books of America’s railroads. For getting on for half a century, it has been part of the portfolio of the dynastic publishing conglomerate McGraw-Hill. It makes its home in Manhattan, a short hop from Wall Street.
It’s important to note that S&P’s is just down the road from the speculators. It is not based in St Patrick’s Cathedral. It is not the voice of god. Nor is it infallible, as Archbishop Dolan would doubtless decree if it were indeed emanating from the Archdiocese of New York. Commenting on the agency’s musing-aloud about the Eurozone, The Wall Street Journal (prop: Rupert Murdoch) noted: “Less than five months after it made its dramatic decision to downgrade the biggest economy in the world, S&P’s has again put itself in the hot seat”.
Despite the ratings agencies’ edicts being unveiled by the news media as if they were carved in stone, these pronouncements are not only the frequent subject of dispute but also sometimes agreed even by the agencies themselves to be mistaken. For instance, Standard & Poor’s conceded a $2trillion error in the calculation that led it to downgrade the US rating. That ain’t peanuts. Perhaps to save a little face, S&P’s cleaved to its downgrade in spite of the error. But it speedily reversed its downgrading of France after the Élysée angrily rebutted the basis for the decision.
A long-term agency decision has occasioned a damaging disenchantment with credit ratings across the world’s markets, especially those in Europe. This was the maintenance of Greece’s status as a good risk for several years before the habitual imprudence of successive Greek governments was finally recognised in 2009 when the country had already experienced several months of civil unrest. Greece’s most supportive agency was Moody’s, another of the so-called Big Three in the credit-rating market (the third is Fitch). Moody’s, be it noted, was being paid half a million dollars a year by the Greek government. How far does a fat cheque condition the fixing of a favourable rating, do you suppose?
I repeat that the ratings issued by the self-appointed agencies do not have the force of either moral law or statutory application. They only become powerful because powerful people pay them heed. I do wonder what exactly constitutes the appeal process against a rating that costs a nation many millions of dollars in increased charges on national debt. Could a government sue an agency for damaging its economy and its freedom to trade? Is it possible to gain reparation for agency findings that impacted the finances of enterprises and individuals? After all, the agencies played a leading and inglorious role in the collapse of the American subprime mortgage market that led to the US government taking over the two leading government-sponsored enterprises in the mortgage field, popularly known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The overarching problem with the world of financial services is that everything therein is driven by subjective readings of more or less subterranean manoeuvrings. We are routinely told that the markets are “nervous”, that capital is “in flight” from this or that enterprise, that traders “don’t like” this or that enactment of governmental policy. Those of us who live in a rather starker world of fixed prices and incomes, plying our various trades according to what we can get rather than what we would ask, are apt to lose patience every time the city is in the news. “Man up” we think, reluctantly using a phrase that the boy racers of the markets will perhaps understand.
Why is the security of national economies allowed to depend on the whims of consultants and speculators who anyway have their own axes to grind and who, for all we know, are delivering their verdicts with only the lining of their own pockets in mind? Regulation? We should elect a few governments who are ready to tear down the paper castles of the financial sectors and instead dedicate national economies to the welfare of the people. We should expect our representatives to reclaim what used to be called “the commanding heights of the economy”. Oh dear, I think I may be calling for a revival of Socialism.
Ever since the decline of European Socialism in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the ’90s, capitalism has considered itself king of the world and has behaved accordingly. In Britain especially, the triumph of capitalism has been celebrated by successive governments, whether Conservative or nominally Labour. Under the spell of the Chicago school of economic theory, Margaret Thatcher played a key role, greatly accelerating the switch from a manufacturing to a service economy begun by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. This switch was in part motivated by a desire – yelled by Tories, whispered by Labour – to “smash” the unions that had, in the Westminster demonology, “held the country to ransom”.
This melancholy history reaches its latest chapter in the exercise of the veto by David Cameron at the European summit that was designed to save the euro, the Eurozone and indeed the national economies of the member states. Cameron’s sound-bite summary, parroted endlessly by ministers, is that he stepped out of line “to protect the national interest”. Even were that the whole story, it hardly presents Britain as a welcome player in a mutually beneficial alliance of nations, as communitaire.
But of course his stance does nothing to benefit you and me. Cameron’s only desire has been to protect the interests of the city, which is to say the interests of his party’s paymasters. The banks feared new regulation from Brussels. Cameron claims to intend to impose his own regulation but we will believe it when we see it – don’t hold your breath.
There is nothing in these quixotic dramatics that bodes any good for Britain’s dwindling manufacturing sector, or indeed for our export drive and hence our growth prospects. And as for realpolitik, it is a blunder of astonishing puerility. If the Eurozone does not quickly recover its equilibrium, Merkel and Sarkozy will persuasively blame Cameron. If the Eurozone climbs back onto its feet, no one will thank Cameron and it will occur to no one to reward Britain with increased trade. It’s a lose-lose result. As former President of the European Commission and Italian prime minister Romano Prodi put it, “Britain has gained freedom and lost power”.
The financial sector continues to bewitch politicians, not just in Britain but across the globe. In Durban, the climate change talks inevitably reached the conclusion that international short-termist capital wanted: ineffectual muddle. Despite menacing and even sometimes angry noises from governments, the money markets continue to enjoy a lack of supervision that must make the black economy green with envy.
Why is this? Is the path being made smooth by under-the-counter “considerations”? Or is the general run of ministers too finance-illiterate to know how far the speculators and their accountants and lawyers are taking them for patsies? Why is it that nothing uttered or threatened by banks and financial consultants is taken with a whole sackful of salt? Do politicians not understand that, of all the lobbyists and vested interests with which they deal day in and day out, the city is the most powerful and the most sophisticated, with deep enough pockets to set any hare running, however fantastical, and confidently to expect the desired outcome?
Consider the credit ratings agencies. The best-known, largest and most powerful is Standard & Poor’s, but there are others: last month, the US government tripled the number of such agencies that it recognises. S&P’s has been busy of late. In August, it set the markets on their ears by downgrading the United States from its triple-A rating, the topmost rung. A couple of weeks ago, it downgraded France’s rating. And on the eve of the Eurozone summit, it declared that it was considering the ratings of fifteen of the member countries of the eurozone. These credit ratings determine the cost of governmental borrowing. Downgrading a nation’s ratings heaps vast extra expense on that nation’s costs.
So who are these people at Standard & Poor’s? Why should anybody pay them heed? Well, S&P’s finds its origins in charting and invigilating the books of America’s railroads. For getting on for half a century, it has been part of the portfolio of the dynastic publishing conglomerate McGraw-Hill. It makes its home in Manhattan, a short hop from Wall Street.
It’s important to note that S&P’s is just down the road from the speculators. It is not based in St Patrick’s Cathedral. It is not the voice of god. Nor is it infallible, as Archbishop Dolan would doubtless decree if it were indeed emanating from the Archdiocese of New York. Commenting on the agency’s musing-aloud about the Eurozone, The Wall Street Journal (prop: Rupert Murdoch) noted: “Less than five months after it made its dramatic decision to downgrade the biggest economy in the world, S&P’s has again put itself in the hot seat”.
Despite the ratings agencies’ edicts being unveiled by the news media as if they were carved in stone, these pronouncements are not only the frequent subject of dispute but also sometimes agreed even by the agencies themselves to be mistaken. For instance, Standard & Poor’s conceded a $2trillion error in the calculation that led it to downgrade the US rating. That ain’t peanuts. Perhaps to save a little face, S&P’s cleaved to its downgrade in spite of the error. But it speedily reversed its downgrading of France after the Élysée angrily rebutted the basis for the decision.
A long-term agency decision has occasioned a damaging disenchantment with credit ratings across the world’s markets, especially those in Europe. This was the maintenance of Greece’s status as a good risk for several years before the habitual imprudence of successive Greek governments was finally recognised in 2009 when the country had already experienced several months of civil unrest. Greece’s most supportive agency was Moody’s, another of the so-called Big Three in the credit-rating market (the third is Fitch). Moody’s, be it noted, was being paid half a million dollars a year by the Greek government. How far does a fat cheque condition the fixing of a favourable rating, do you suppose?
I repeat that the ratings issued by the self-appointed agencies do not have the force of either moral law or statutory application. They only become powerful because powerful people pay them heed. I do wonder what exactly constitutes the appeal process against a rating that costs a nation many millions of dollars in increased charges on national debt. Could a government sue an agency for damaging its economy and its freedom to trade? Is it possible to gain reparation for agency findings that impacted the finances of enterprises and individuals? After all, the agencies played a leading and inglorious role in the collapse of the American subprime mortgage market that led to the US government taking over the two leading government-sponsored enterprises in the mortgage field, popularly known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The overarching problem with the world of financial services is that everything therein is driven by subjective readings of more or less subterranean manoeuvrings. We are routinely told that the markets are “nervous”, that capital is “in flight” from this or that enterprise, that traders “don’t like” this or that enactment of governmental policy. Those of us who live in a rather starker world of fixed prices and incomes, plying our various trades according to what we can get rather than what we would ask, are apt to lose patience every time the city is in the news. “Man up” we think, reluctantly using a phrase that the boy racers of the markets will perhaps understand.
Why is the security of national economies allowed to depend on the whims of consultants and speculators who anyway have their own axes to grind and who, for all we know, are delivering their verdicts with only the lining of their own pockets in mind? Regulation? We should elect a few governments who are ready to tear down the paper castles of the financial sectors and instead dedicate national economies to the welfare of the people. We should expect our representatives to reclaim what used to be called “the commanding heights of the economy”. Oh dear, I think I may be calling for a revival of Socialism.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT
Through a mist of tears, I caught up with the conclusion of My Transsexual Summer, Channel 4’s four-part fly-on-the-wall series. Seven strangers, ranging in age from 22 to 52, were brought together for four weekend “retreats”. The only common factor between them was transitioning – three from female to male, the rest the reverse route. Their progress along these transitions varied greatly: from a few weeks to four years of “living as” the gender opposite to the given, from hormone treatment but with no plans for surgery to undergoing genital “correction” during the first programme.
That the seven individuals were necessarily self-absorbed was no hindrance to an immediate atmosphere of mutual support. Hugging and weeping soon became the lingua franca but that was no bar to laughter and the odd interesting undercurrent. Those of them – the youngest – who could not utter a subordinate clause without prefacing it with the syntactically redundant “like” or adding to it the rhetorical “d’you know what I mean?” may, having seen themselves on the box, attempt to eradicate this dreary verbal tic. For the viewer, it was a modest price to pay for their candour and courage.
Lewis
Putting hitherto obscure people under the media spotlight is as old as broadcasting. What has changed radically over the years is the way that obscurity is mediated. Half a century ago, producers took a disciplined, even puritanical approach to pointing microphones and cameras at people in the sanctity of their lives. Charles Parker’s wonderful and imperishably influential Radio Ballads tapped into a rich oral tradition and linked it to ordinary people’s experiences as expressed through their music – literally, folk music. Parker’s approach was pursued in television in various ways by Philip Donnellan, Denis Mitchell, Charlie Squires, Harold Williamson, Edward Mirzoeff, Paul Watson, Roger Graef and others.
These film-makers were also tapping into the traditions of documentary-making for the cinema in the Soviet Union and, in the west, by Robert Flaherty and the Grierson school. Although their methods could sometimes be suspect – staging, scripting and even faking scenes – the intention was to create the sense that the people momentarily in the spotlight were there on their own terms.
Sarah
Though there has been a surprising revival in documentary for the big screen – especially in the States where serious non-fiction seems still to be greatly encouraged by PBS and independent cinema companies – swathes of routine documentary-making for British television have descended to a bankrupt aesthetic. Commissioning editors seem to believe that the audience will accept nothing unless it is said or shown by a supposed celebrity, however self-evidently unqualified to pontificate on the subject (or indeed on anything else). The audience cannot be trusted to watch and appreciate a stranger; an introduction must be effected by someone both viewer and stranger have (theoretically) heard of, even though the viewer and the stranger usually have rather more basis for a rapport than either has with the intermediary.
Frequently, also, members of the public only earn their place on the screen alongside the “stars” by dint of their utter singularity. This is “freak show television”, epidemic across the channels. The more grotesque and humiliating the disability, the more unusual and distorting the condition, the better the commissioning editors like it.
Fox
And then there is the most unspeakable genre of all, the crassly misnamed “reality television”, whereat people both unknown and known (though not mixed) submit themselves to situations that are very far from real. Indeed, the programmes depend for their (apparent) appeal on the increasing inordinacy of both the situations and the behaviour of the participants: a diminishing prospect, they will surely discover,
The premise of My Transsexual Summer might have cast it into the “freak show” category or the fringes of “reality television”, but thankfully in practice it did not. Producer Helen Richards had contrived a mechanism that permitted sufficient freedom for the participants to learn a little about and from each other and to get comfortable with each other and with the camera. The retreat venue obviously allowed for ease of filming but did not impose its own characteristics. More importantly, the forward planning allowed for judicious moving of the production away from the communal set-up and into the individuals’ environments.
Fire-eating is one of Donna's accomplishments
This expansion added greatly to the reach of the series’ engagement with the participants. In the matter of any kind of search for identity among the young, the role of the parents is central and Richards was lucky or shrewd (or both) with her casting, which opened up a range of parental reactions and methods of dealing with their offspring’s dramatic developments. If the estranged father of Lewis suddenly found a warmth and sensitivity towards his son because the camera was on him, so much the better for the camera and for Lewis.
Those parents – and an adorable grandma – who gamely took part did themselves great credit. Others were eloquent in their absence, including the 20 year-old daughter of the 52 year-old former policeman-cum-lorry driver. Is changing sex more difficult, more testing, more traumatising – both for the transsexual and for those close to her or him – when the changer is middle-aged? Clearly the subject does not lend itself to too many generalities. It depends on the case.
Max
Even so, during the course of the series, I could not help wondering whether the transition from female to male is easier, more satisfactory, more … do I mean “natural”? … than from male to female. Among the seven we met, at least, the women became very convincing (if camp) boys, whereas the men tended to face the problem of seeming like, in the words of Sarah in Programme One, “bad drag”. Vocally, becoming female is especially taxing, whereas hormone treatment appears to lower the transitioning women’s voices considerably. And of course facial hair helps a lot.
A couple of the group spoke shrewdly about the crucial matter of moving convincingly, especially walking, and (by implication) the larger picture of demeanour, of presentation. Genital surgery clearly assists here, obliging the transgender person to walk accordingly. But both the programme and my own observations of drag entertainers and transvestite civilians convinces me that the unselfconsciously loose and informal body language of men is much easier for women to acquire than is the unselfconscious poise and subtlety of women, especially the glamorous women that men always seem to want to become.
Karen, Lewis, Max and Drew
Of the seven, the most “successful” transitioner appeared to be Donna: that is to say, the most confident and outgoing and – more important for transgender people even than for lesbian, gay and bisexual people (and, come to that, for straight people too) – the most comfortable in her own sexuality. Donna admits to having self-harmed in her teens but now, at 25, has been on hormones for two years and presents a persuasively female shape. Her breasts have developed but she knows how to present them too.
Still, she has no plans to seek surgery. For the females-to-males, chest surgery was/is part of the process and Lewis longs for a penis of his own, even if erecting it requires mechanical assistance. For her part, Donna gaily frequents bars where men go to meet transitional women who have not had surgery. She perhaps will settle for a hermaphroditic state. As a personality and a presence, the while, she appears – successfully and in many ways to her advantage – to carry off the trick of enjoying many of the advantages of both women and men.
Donna’s strongest suit is that she is not prepared to defer to anyone. She is sure of her place in the world and will fight to keep it. All the other transitioners recognised that and drew on it. We should too.
Through a mist of tears, I caught up with the conclusion of My Transsexual Summer, Channel 4’s four-part fly-on-the-wall series. Seven strangers, ranging in age from 22 to 52, were brought together for four weekend “retreats”. The only common factor between them was transitioning – three from female to male, the rest the reverse route. Their progress along these transitions varied greatly: from a few weeks to four years of “living as” the gender opposite to the given, from hormone treatment but with no plans for surgery to undergoing genital “correction” during the first programme.
That the seven individuals were necessarily self-absorbed was no hindrance to an immediate atmosphere of mutual support. Hugging and weeping soon became the lingua franca but that was no bar to laughter and the odd interesting undercurrent. Those of them – the youngest – who could not utter a subordinate clause without prefacing it with the syntactically redundant “like” or adding to it the rhetorical “d’you know what I mean?” may, having seen themselves on the box, attempt to eradicate this dreary verbal tic. For the viewer, it was a modest price to pay for their candour and courage.
Putting hitherto obscure people under the media spotlight is as old as broadcasting. What has changed radically over the years is the way that obscurity is mediated. Half a century ago, producers took a disciplined, even puritanical approach to pointing microphones and cameras at people in the sanctity of their lives. Charles Parker’s wonderful and imperishably influential Radio Ballads tapped into a rich oral tradition and linked it to ordinary people’s experiences as expressed through their music – literally, folk music. Parker’s approach was pursued in television in various ways by Philip Donnellan, Denis Mitchell, Charlie Squires, Harold Williamson, Edward Mirzoeff, Paul Watson, Roger Graef and others.
These film-makers were also tapping into the traditions of documentary-making for the cinema in the Soviet Union and, in the west, by Robert Flaherty and the Grierson school. Although their methods could sometimes be suspect – staging, scripting and even faking scenes – the intention was to create the sense that the people momentarily in the spotlight were there on their own terms.
Though there has been a surprising revival in documentary for the big screen – especially in the States where serious non-fiction seems still to be greatly encouraged by PBS and independent cinema companies – swathes of routine documentary-making for British television have descended to a bankrupt aesthetic. Commissioning editors seem to believe that the audience will accept nothing unless it is said or shown by a supposed celebrity, however self-evidently unqualified to pontificate on the subject (or indeed on anything else). The audience cannot be trusted to watch and appreciate a stranger; an introduction must be effected by someone both viewer and stranger have (theoretically) heard of, even though the viewer and the stranger usually have rather more basis for a rapport than either has with the intermediary.
Frequently, also, members of the public only earn their place on the screen alongside the “stars” by dint of their utter singularity. This is “freak show television”, epidemic across the channels. The more grotesque and humiliating the disability, the more unusual and distorting the condition, the better the commissioning editors like it.
And then there is the most unspeakable genre of all, the crassly misnamed “reality television”, whereat people both unknown and known (though not mixed) submit themselves to situations that are very far from real. Indeed, the programmes depend for their (apparent) appeal on the increasing inordinacy of both the situations and the behaviour of the participants: a diminishing prospect, they will surely discover,
The premise of My Transsexual Summer might have cast it into the “freak show” category or the fringes of “reality television”, but thankfully in practice it did not. Producer Helen Richards had contrived a mechanism that permitted sufficient freedom for the participants to learn a little about and from each other and to get comfortable with each other and with the camera. The retreat venue obviously allowed for ease of filming but did not impose its own characteristics. More importantly, the forward planning allowed for judicious moving of the production away from the communal set-up and into the individuals’ environments.
This expansion added greatly to the reach of the series’ engagement with the participants. In the matter of any kind of search for identity among the young, the role of the parents is central and Richards was lucky or shrewd (or both) with her casting, which opened up a range of parental reactions and methods of dealing with their offspring’s dramatic developments. If the estranged father of Lewis suddenly found a warmth and sensitivity towards his son because the camera was on him, so much the better for the camera and for Lewis.
Those parents – and an adorable grandma – who gamely took part did themselves great credit. Others were eloquent in their absence, including the 20 year-old daughter of the 52 year-old former policeman-cum-lorry driver. Is changing sex more difficult, more testing, more traumatising – both for the transsexual and for those close to her or him – when the changer is middle-aged? Clearly the subject does not lend itself to too many generalities. It depends on the case.
Even so, during the course of the series, I could not help wondering whether the transition from female to male is easier, more satisfactory, more … do I mean “natural”? … than from male to female. Among the seven we met, at least, the women became very convincing (if camp) boys, whereas the men tended to face the problem of seeming like, in the words of Sarah in Programme One, “bad drag”. Vocally, becoming female is especially taxing, whereas hormone treatment appears to lower the transitioning women’s voices considerably. And of course facial hair helps a lot.
A couple of the group spoke shrewdly about the crucial matter of moving convincingly, especially walking, and (by implication) the larger picture of demeanour, of presentation. Genital surgery clearly assists here, obliging the transgender person to walk accordingly. But both the programme and my own observations of drag entertainers and transvestite civilians convinces me that the unselfconsciously loose and informal body language of men is much easier for women to acquire than is the unselfconscious poise and subtlety of women, especially the glamorous women that men always seem to want to become.
Of the seven, the most “successful” transitioner appeared to be Donna: that is to say, the most confident and outgoing and – more important for transgender people even than for lesbian, gay and bisexual people (and, come to that, for straight people too) – the most comfortable in her own sexuality. Donna admits to having self-harmed in her teens but now, at 25, has been on hormones for two years and presents a persuasively female shape. Her breasts have developed but she knows how to present them too.
Still, she has no plans to seek surgery. For the females-to-males, chest surgery was/is part of the process and Lewis longs for a penis of his own, even if erecting it requires mechanical assistance. For her part, Donna gaily frequents bars where men go to meet transitional women who have not had surgery. She perhaps will settle for a hermaphroditic state. As a personality and a presence, the while, she appears – successfully and in many ways to her advantage – to carry off the trick of enjoying many of the advantages of both women and men.
Donna’s strongest suit is that she is not prepared to defer to anyone. She is sure of her place in the world and will fight to keep it. All the other transitioners recognised that and drew on it. We should too.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
NEVER a SOFT or QUIET RUSSELL
For lively-minded people, the mid-teens are a dazzling voyage of discovery, a time when one starts seriously to explore identity, personality, friendship, sexuality, romance, psychology, politics, intellect, culture, self-expression and all the richness of existence and the world. Something that impacted forcibly on that period of my own life was the early work of Ken Russell.
Embraced and nurtured by the BBC at a time when the Corporation was fearlessly expanding and could train and encourage individual talent, Russell made a string of short documentaries of all kinds, including one on the young Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney (whose death preceded his own by only a few days), that was shown again on BBC4 just last year.
The young master considers his editing options
Then he was invited to join the Monitor team. This arts strand was the fiefdom of Huw Wheldon, a dynamic and deceptively avuncular Welshman with the public service ethic gushing through his veins. Wheldon was a fine editor, gathering about him programme-makers of exceptional ability and panache – John Boorman, John Berger, John Schlesinger, Humphrey Burton, Melvyn Bragg, David Jones – and he went on to be a canny managing director of television when the BBC led the world in innovative programming.
For Wheldon, Russell made a variety of programmes on a variety of arts and artists – Marie Rambert, Peter Blake, Le Douanier Rousseau – but it was his series of films about composers that marked him out and caught my own rapt attention. After more conventional portraits of Kurt Weill and Gordon Jacob, Russell persuaded the deeply dubious Wheldon to let him make a partly dramatised study of Edward Elgar. Wheldon would only agree to enactments without dialogue or identified actors. He, Wheldon, would speak the narration, which the two men wrote together.
Like all real artists, Russell rose gamely to the constraints. His film was elegiac but troubled, finding memorable images both to complement the music and to evoke the events of Elgar’s life and the struggles of his personality. The result was a triumph, kick-starting renewed interest in the music that has obtained ever since.
Sir (as he then wasn't) Huw Wheldon
And Wheldon, knowing a good thing when he saw it, accepted one composer portrait after another, each less constrained either in form or in content than the last. Prokofiev, Bartok and Debussy saw out Monitor’s run. By now, Russell had bankability for BBC managers and his ambitious and visually sumptuous portrait of the larger-than-life dancer Isadora Duncan was given a free-standing slot. It exercised the press for days and made a temporary star of the eccentric actress Vivian Pickles who took the lead. Karel Reisz later made a feature film of the same story starring Vanessa Redgrave but, though it offered Eastmancolor instead of the BBC’s black and white, the Russell is superior in every way, including cinematography (I’ll take Dick Bush and Brian Tufano in monochrome over Larry Pizer in colour any day).
Russell's image of the boy Elgar
After Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World, the offers of features came flooding in. Russell, who appreciated the autonomy granted by the BBC and knew well enough that cinema was much less flexible, played the studios off against the Corporation shrewdly over a few years. For the new BBC1 arts strand, Omnibus, he made five films. The penultimate was the finest thing he ever did. Song of Summer was a rapturous portrait of the blind and ailing composer Frederick Delius and his increasing dependence on the young composer Eric Fenby, for whom the word amanuensis seems practically to have been coined. Fenby was alive then – in 1968 – and he co-wrote the film with Russell.
Nowhere before or since did Russell so tenderly and instinctively tap into the mystery and agony of creation. The relationship delineated by Max Adrian as Delius and the former dancer Christopher Gable as Fenby is enthralling from beginning to end and much of the underpinning is provided by the radiant performance of Maureen Pryor as the devoted Jelka Delius. Just when you begin to get a sense that the filming may have fallen in love with its own rarefied atmosphere, Russell introduces a glorious passage of irreverent energy when David Collings as Percy Grainger invades the scene, racing up and down to throw and catch a cricket ball from either side of Delius’ house. Like everything in the piece, it is perfectly judged.
Oliver Reed in The Debussy Film
But Russell’s judgment was fitful. His next film was his most notorious: Dance of the Seven Veils, a riotous skit on the life of Richard Strauss and his supposed sympathy for the Nazi Party. It was so scattergun in its method and so inordinate in its traducing of Strauss’s reputation that there were questions in the House and the Strauss estate injuncted against it. I watched its transmission while coming down from an acid trip, in retrospect the ideal conditions. It seems unlikely that I will ever have the chance to see it straight.
By this time, Russell was an Oscar-nominated features director – for Women in Love – and, though his instincts about the lowering effect of the movie industry were on the button, he perhaps thought he could parlay a protected career. For a few years he did indeed get to make much of what he wanted, having started with a mix of idiosyncratic gossamer (French Dressing and a charming Lamorisse-inspired short called Amelia and the Angel) and hack work (Billion Dollar Brain).
Vivian Pickles (centre) as Isadora Duncan
Women in Love, a very confident and rather persuasive dramatisation (written by Larry The Normal Heart Kramer) of the Lawrence novel, gave Russell the clout to negotiate a continuation of his fantasy biographies of composers. He got to celebrate (and simultaneously mock) Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers), Mahler and Liszt (Lisztomania) but clearly the audience for classical musicians was limited, especially as the movie-going demographic was growing ever younger. Nevertheless, for most of the 1970s, he managed to come across as a genuine auteur whose work could only be his – indeed, for a year or two, he, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock were the only British directors whose names appeared above the title on posters.
It couldn’t last. The British movie industry was too fitful. Hollywood had firmly cast British directors as easily bullied but good with scripts and actors, and Russell fitted no part of that cliché. History was against him. With the exceptions of Boorman and Ken Loach, none of the directors who learned their trade in British television in the 1950s and ‘60s – Schlesinger, Philip Saville, Alan Bridges, Michael Apted, Alan Clarke, Claude Whatham, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Alan Cooke, Roy Battersby, Mike Newell, Roland Joffé – got to make movies that were a patch on their television work.
Gable as Fenby, Adrian as Delius
Moreover, Russell was too wilful and irascible to look for ways to accommodate himself to front office and box office considerations. He couldn’t fashion a consistent and reliable methodology. Nor did he have the nous to show the executives a reassuring script. Russell’s screenplays were proverbially around forty pages long, a mere jumping-off point for what was in his head.
And he had no feel for the dynamics of performance. He veered between pliable people with whom he was familiar and stars handed to him. Though he worked with some fine players – Glenda Jackson often, Kathleen Turner, Alan Bates, William Hurt, Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha and Joely Richardson – he was more likely to cast limited or one-note actors – Oliver Reed often, Judith Paris often, Robert Powell, Richard Chamberlain, Ann-Margret, Vladek Sheybal, Theresa Russell (no relation), Andrew Faulds, Lindsay Kemp, Georgina Hale, Michael Gothard, Murray Melvin and – in the lead in Savage Messiah – Scott Antony who, to the evident disappointment of some, thereafter sank without trace. Another ineffectual regular was the away-with-the-fairies Hetty Baynes, at least during her period as Mrs Russell in the 1990s. I always imagined that her real name was Betty Haynes.
One of many striking compositions from Song of Summer
Russell also employed rather more than his share of non-actors to busk their way through: Roger Daltrey, Rudolf Nureyev, Twiggy, young Gable (to whose puppyish charms none could object), Christopher Logue, Michelle Phillips, Eleanor Fazan, Clive Goodwin, Caroline Coon, Ringo Starr, himself …
Russell clearly had a wonderful and instinctive rapport with music-makers, (though Sandy Wilson, who wept over the wild inflation of his modest pastiche of a musical, The Boy Friend, would not agree). He would have certainly subscribed to Walter Pater’s famous dictum that “all art aspires to the condition of music”. His own gift was for visualising. Much of his work is ravishing or at least eye-popping to look at. The source of this was his own immersion from an early age in cinema. Russell’s visual style harks back three generations, to that of Griffith, Eisenstein, DeMille and Von Stroheim. No director’s work resounds through his more than that of Fritz Lang, from whom Russell must have gained his penchant for symmetrical framing and expressionist camera angles.
Unlike the run of British directors, Russell was a born creator of film images. Most of those British reliables upon whom Hollywood leans are superb at reading scripts – other people’s scripts – and coaxing actors into bringing those scripts to life. But they are largely interchangeable, their work is not distinctive. Russell’s cinema is, for the most part, as unmistakeable as that of Michael Powell or Nicolas Roeg or Peter Greenaway or Mike Leigh or Danny Boyle or Christopher Nolan. And like most of them he often teetered on the tightrope. After Altered States, his hallucinogenic misfire of 1980, it became harder and harder for Russell to get his projects off the ground and although that has been true of every maverick movie-maker, including many greater than Russell – Powell, Orson Welles, von Stroheim, Stanley Kubrick. Roeg, Terry Gilliam – it is no less frustrating for someone full of notions.
The old monstre sacré
Mavericks tend to alienate critics and Russell was far from an exception. Indeed, so many commentators found his work vulgar, overblown, reckless with sources and shameless that a reputation as a monstre sacré became impossible to shake. Yet many serious and properly gifted people were happy to work with him, especially behind the scenes: Melvyn Bragg (who commissioned many of his last pieces for The South Bank Show), Peter Maxwell Davies, Derek Jarman, John Corigliano, Ferde Grofé, Douglas Slocombe, André Previn, Georges Delerue, David Watkin, Tony Walton …
Like many monomaniacs – and just about any movie director worth his salt is undoubtedly a monomaniac – Ken Russell was often his own worst enemy. He was certainly not the first, and he won’t be the last, whose pre-big-screen work is superior (often simply because less compromised) than his movies. And that applies to actors, writers and composers as well as to jobbing directors and auteurs like Russell. His BBC work certainly will pass the test of time, provided it remains available to see (some of it presently is not). And he added greatly to the excitement and stimulation of the age, not just for this highly receptive teenager.
For lively-minded people, the mid-teens are a dazzling voyage of discovery, a time when one starts seriously to explore identity, personality, friendship, sexuality, romance, psychology, politics, intellect, culture, self-expression and all the richness of existence and the world. Something that impacted forcibly on that period of my own life was the early work of Ken Russell.
Embraced and nurtured by the BBC at a time when the Corporation was fearlessly expanding and could train and encourage individual talent, Russell made a string of short documentaries of all kinds, including one on the young Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney (whose death preceded his own by only a few days), that was shown again on BBC4 just last year.
Then he was invited to join the Monitor team. This arts strand was the fiefdom of Huw Wheldon, a dynamic and deceptively avuncular Welshman with the public service ethic gushing through his veins. Wheldon was a fine editor, gathering about him programme-makers of exceptional ability and panache – John Boorman, John Berger, John Schlesinger, Humphrey Burton, Melvyn Bragg, David Jones – and he went on to be a canny managing director of television when the BBC led the world in innovative programming.
For Wheldon, Russell made a variety of programmes on a variety of arts and artists – Marie Rambert, Peter Blake, Le Douanier Rousseau – but it was his series of films about composers that marked him out and caught my own rapt attention. After more conventional portraits of Kurt Weill and Gordon Jacob, Russell persuaded the deeply dubious Wheldon to let him make a partly dramatised study of Edward Elgar. Wheldon would only agree to enactments without dialogue or identified actors. He, Wheldon, would speak the narration, which the two men wrote together.
Like all real artists, Russell rose gamely to the constraints. His film was elegiac but troubled, finding memorable images both to complement the music and to evoke the events of Elgar’s life and the struggles of his personality. The result was a triumph, kick-starting renewed interest in the music that has obtained ever since.
And Wheldon, knowing a good thing when he saw it, accepted one composer portrait after another, each less constrained either in form or in content than the last. Prokofiev, Bartok and Debussy saw out Monitor’s run. By now, Russell had bankability for BBC managers and his ambitious and visually sumptuous portrait of the larger-than-life dancer Isadora Duncan was given a free-standing slot. It exercised the press for days and made a temporary star of the eccentric actress Vivian Pickles who took the lead. Karel Reisz later made a feature film of the same story starring Vanessa Redgrave but, though it offered Eastmancolor instead of the BBC’s black and white, the Russell is superior in every way, including cinematography (I’ll take Dick Bush and Brian Tufano in monochrome over Larry Pizer in colour any day).
After Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World, the offers of features came flooding in. Russell, who appreciated the autonomy granted by the BBC and knew well enough that cinema was much less flexible, played the studios off against the Corporation shrewdly over a few years. For the new BBC1 arts strand, Omnibus, he made five films. The penultimate was the finest thing he ever did. Song of Summer was a rapturous portrait of the blind and ailing composer Frederick Delius and his increasing dependence on the young composer Eric Fenby, for whom the word amanuensis seems practically to have been coined. Fenby was alive then – in 1968 – and he co-wrote the film with Russell.
Nowhere before or since did Russell so tenderly and instinctively tap into the mystery and agony of creation. The relationship delineated by Max Adrian as Delius and the former dancer Christopher Gable as Fenby is enthralling from beginning to end and much of the underpinning is provided by the radiant performance of Maureen Pryor as the devoted Jelka Delius. Just when you begin to get a sense that the filming may have fallen in love with its own rarefied atmosphere, Russell introduces a glorious passage of irreverent energy when David Collings as Percy Grainger invades the scene, racing up and down to throw and catch a cricket ball from either side of Delius’ house. Like everything in the piece, it is perfectly judged.
But Russell’s judgment was fitful. His next film was his most notorious: Dance of the Seven Veils, a riotous skit on the life of Richard Strauss and his supposed sympathy for the Nazi Party. It was so scattergun in its method and so inordinate in its traducing of Strauss’s reputation that there were questions in the House and the Strauss estate injuncted against it. I watched its transmission while coming down from an acid trip, in retrospect the ideal conditions. It seems unlikely that I will ever have the chance to see it straight.
By this time, Russell was an Oscar-nominated features director – for Women in Love – and, though his instincts about the lowering effect of the movie industry were on the button, he perhaps thought he could parlay a protected career. For a few years he did indeed get to make much of what he wanted, having started with a mix of idiosyncratic gossamer (French Dressing and a charming Lamorisse-inspired short called Amelia and the Angel) and hack work (Billion Dollar Brain).
Women in Love, a very confident and rather persuasive dramatisation (written by Larry The Normal Heart Kramer) of the Lawrence novel, gave Russell the clout to negotiate a continuation of his fantasy biographies of composers. He got to celebrate (and simultaneously mock) Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers), Mahler and Liszt (Lisztomania) but clearly the audience for classical musicians was limited, especially as the movie-going demographic was growing ever younger. Nevertheless, for most of the 1970s, he managed to come across as a genuine auteur whose work could only be his – indeed, for a year or two, he, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock were the only British directors whose names appeared above the title on posters.
It couldn’t last. The British movie industry was too fitful. Hollywood had firmly cast British directors as easily bullied but good with scripts and actors, and Russell fitted no part of that cliché. History was against him. With the exceptions of Boorman and Ken Loach, none of the directors who learned their trade in British television in the 1950s and ‘60s – Schlesinger, Philip Saville, Alan Bridges, Michael Apted, Alan Clarke, Claude Whatham, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Alan Cooke, Roy Battersby, Mike Newell, Roland Joffé – got to make movies that were a patch on their television work.
Moreover, Russell was too wilful and irascible to look for ways to accommodate himself to front office and box office considerations. He couldn’t fashion a consistent and reliable methodology. Nor did he have the nous to show the executives a reassuring script. Russell’s screenplays were proverbially around forty pages long, a mere jumping-off point for what was in his head.
And he had no feel for the dynamics of performance. He veered between pliable people with whom he was familiar and stars handed to him. Though he worked with some fine players – Glenda Jackson often, Kathleen Turner, Alan Bates, William Hurt, Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha and Joely Richardson – he was more likely to cast limited or one-note actors – Oliver Reed often, Judith Paris often, Robert Powell, Richard Chamberlain, Ann-Margret, Vladek Sheybal, Theresa Russell (no relation), Andrew Faulds, Lindsay Kemp, Georgina Hale, Michael Gothard, Murray Melvin and – in the lead in Savage Messiah – Scott Antony who, to the evident disappointment of some, thereafter sank without trace. Another ineffectual regular was the away-with-the-fairies Hetty Baynes, at least during her period as Mrs Russell in the 1990s. I always imagined that her real name was Betty Haynes.
Russell also employed rather more than his share of non-actors to busk their way through: Roger Daltrey, Rudolf Nureyev, Twiggy, young Gable (to whose puppyish charms none could object), Christopher Logue, Michelle Phillips, Eleanor Fazan, Clive Goodwin, Caroline Coon, Ringo Starr, himself …
Russell clearly had a wonderful and instinctive rapport with music-makers, (though Sandy Wilson, who wept over the wild inflation of his modest pastiche of a musical, The Boy Friend, would not agree). He would have certainly subscribed to Walter Pater’s famous dictum that “all art aspires to the condition of music”. His own gift was for visualising. Much of his work is ravishing or at least eye-popping to look at. The source of this was his own immersion from an early age in cinema. Russell’s visual style harks back three generations, to that of Griffith, Eisenstein, DeMille and Von Stroheim. No director’s work resounds through his more than that of Fritz Lang, from whom Russell must have gained his penchant for symmetrical framing and expressionist camera angles.
Unlike the run of British directors, Russell was a born creator of film images. Most of those British reliables upon whom Hollywood leans are superb at reading scripts – other people’s scripts – and coaxing actors into bringing those scripts to life. But they are largely interchangeable, their work is not distinctive. Russell’s cinema is, for the most part, as unmistakeable as that of Michael Powell or Nicolas Roeg or Peter Greenaway or Mike Leigh or Danny Boyle or Christopher Nolan. And like most of them he often teetered on the tightrope. After Altered States, his hallucinogenic misfire of 1980, it became harder and harder for Russell to get his projects off the ground and although that has been true of every maverick movie-maker, including many greater than Russell – Powell, Orson Welles, von Stroheim, Stanley Kubrick. Roeg, Terry Gilliam – it is no less frustrating for someone full of notions.
Mavericks tend to alienate critics and Russell was far from an exception. Indeed, so many commentators found his work vulgar, overblown, reckless with sources and shameless that a reputation as a monstre sacré became impossible to shake. Yet many serious and properly gifted people were happy to work with him, especially behind the scenes: Melvyn Bragg (who commissioned many of his last pieces for The South Bank Show), Peter Maxwell Davies, Derek Jarman, John Corigliano, Ferde Grofé, Douglas Slocombe, André Previn, Georges Delerue, David Watkin, Tony Walton …
Like many monomaniacs – and just about any movie director worth his salt is undoubtedly a monomaniac – Ken Russell was often his own worst enemy. He was certainly not the first, and he won’t be the last, whose pre-big-screen work is superior (often simply because less compromised) than his movies. And that applies to actors, writers and composers as well as to jobbing directors and auteurs like Russell. His BBC work certainly will pass the test of time, provided it remains available to see (some of it presently is not). And he added greatly to the excitement and stimulation of the age, not just for this highly receptive teenager.
Monday, November 28, 2011
BOOM at the TOP
The report of the High Pay Commission, delivered the other day, has put nourishing flesh on the bones of what many of us had perceived long ago: that Gordon Gekko’s 1980’s mantra “greed is good” has been superseded throughout the upper echelons of the money-manipulating industries by the conviction that greed is the sole motivation for any deal, move, argument, or even thought.
Two years ago, the Financial Services Authority was reporting that nearly 3,000 UK-based bankers were receiving seven-figure salaries, let alone the top-ups contrived through share options and bonuses. But since the Con-Dem coalition came to power, the highest-paid ten percent have enjoyed further pay rises of an average two percent – a handy £100,000 if your “basic” salary is £5m. By contrast, low-paid workers have seen their incomes fall because inflation is running at five percent and average pay rises are at 0.4 percent, the lowest in recorded British history. As we know, the low-paid take a greater hit proportionately from inflation because most of their outgoings are on essential goods and services where inflation is highest.
These pay figures were released by the Office for National Statistics, a body that succeeds in irritating the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles on pretty much a daily basis. Expect the ONS to go the way of the Audit Commission and any other public body whose findings tend to embarrass the government.
Bob Diamond, the cat who got the cream
Using his now routine argument that two wrongs do indeed make a right, David Cameron refuses to take any stick for the recent growth of wage differentials on his watch because the wages gap did not noticeably narrow under Labour. But for most of the thirteen years of Labour government, everyone’s income rose. Since Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, the average wage has risen by 300 percent. Over the same period, though, high-earners have done rather better. The salary – the basic salary, mind – of Diamond Bob, the boss of Barclays, is 3,000 percent higher (yes, ten times as much as the average) than that of his predecessor thirty years ago. No wonder his default facial expression is a self-satisfied smirk.
The HPC says that CEO’s are generally paid up to a hundred times the average salary of their workforce. Its chair Deborah Hargreaves wrote in The Guardian: “Our year-long enquiry has led us to believe that excessive top pay levels are not only corroding trust in business but also damaging society and the economy as a whole”.
Whatever George Osborne’s Autumn Statement brings on Tuesday, it will certainly not unleash any moves against the remunerations gobbled up by business executives, bankers, financial speculators and all the other unproductive detritus of triumphalist capitalism. The coalition (largely through the neutered mouthpiece of Vince Cable, the Business Secretary) periodically make vague tut-tutting noises about the confetti falling on the money-laundering sector, but they do nothing about it because their friends and bankrollers live there. Cameron remarked once again the other day that he wants to “tackle the welfare dependency culture” but you won’t catch him threatening “the bonus dependency culture”.
There are three canards that are routinely trotted out in supposed justification for the grossly inflated “packages” negotiated by managerial types in the money markets. The first is that you can only get the best people by paying them top dollar. The second is that you have to reward “success”. The third is that if you don’t pay these shysters what they reckon they are worth, they will flounce off somewhere where they are appreciated. Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association (and – would you credit it? – a former Tory minister) trots out these lines several times a day, but nobody outside the City of London and the Tory party has credited a word she’s said since she joined the BBA three years ago,
None of these propositions survives a few seconds of what I can only call common sense. Take the claim that there is an organic link between the “best” people and the highest salaries. This only persuades if you equate greed with ability. Curiously, no one – and certainly no government minister – links these two factors in any sphere but finance and business. Other professionals are assured that their work is vocational and this is its own reward. The BBC, for instance, is told not to offer so-called “competitive” rates to famous presenters and performers because the “privilege” of working for the Corporation makes up the loss.
No doubt Barclays will reckon that they would have been unable to entice Bob Diamond across the Atlantic for any less pay per meeting than the average teacher makes in a whole lifetime. On the other hand, Diamond was on the Barclays payroll for fifteen years before becoming CEO. And I know dozens of Americans who have spent pretty much all their adult lives in Britain for a fraction of Diamond’s chips. So living in London must have its attractions too and might be considered a bonus-sized “perk”.
Deborah Hargreaves, gunning for the overpaid
But why do banks and other employers in the financial services imagine that expecting an astronomical salary is an indication of ability, let alone desirability? Surely these companies favour managers and other senior staff who evince more faithfulness to the company and appreciation of working conditions than that shown by the average premier league footballer to his club. If the city is packed with chancers looking for a higher-paying berth, it must be a stiflingly self-interested environment. And while you’re advancing the argument that these speculators are making money for their employers, you’d better be sure that they’re not siphoning away rather more than you think they are, which is what those motivated primarily by money are rather apt to do.
At his party’s conference, Ed Miliband made the telling point that only Cameron could believe that you persuade the rich to work harder by paying them more and the poor to work harder by cutting their benefits. Except of course that it isn’t only Cameron who believes it. Large swathes of the electorate have let themselves be taught to say that “benefit cheats” are a scourge on society while tax cheats are being smart and thwarting officials who are as repellent as traffic wardens. This perception is very much further developed in the US where Tea Party-supporters have swallowed the carefully crafted case that the mega-rich – like the Koch brothers who actually fund the Tea Party – are unjustly taxed by a wickedly spendthrift administration, even as unemployment rates break records and hundreds of thousands default on their mortgages.
Then there is the notion that rewards recognise success. I put the word in quotes before because it doesn’t like to be interrogated. Deborah Hargreaves confirms what we all knew: “Our research has shown little connection between pay and performance”. Well, of course it hasn’t. Barclays knew that they were gambling on Diamond Bob when they appointed him. But they also knew that they would be out of pocket if the gamble didn’t pay off. If Barclays fall short of their projected profit margins this year, what are they going to do? Dock Bob’s pay? I don’t think so.
That useless article “Sir” Fred Goodwin trousered a phenomenal golden farewell and pension deal when he left the Royal Bank of Scotland, even though he was about as big an asset as Typhoid Mary to the bank itself – which, you recall, had to go cap in hand for a government bail-out. I could never understand why Gordon Brown’s financial support to RBS was not reduced precisely by the amount of Fred the Shred’s pay-off (a “notional fund” of £16m releasing upwards of £70,000 per year to a man stepping down at 50), so that the space-fillers at the bank took the hit rather than you and me.
Angela Knight-of-the-Living-Dead
The plain fact of it is that there is absolutely no connection between executive pay, bonuses or share options and the vagaries of the market or the share price or the annual accounts. None whatever. There is every connection between the size of the cojones displayed by the executive and the gullibility of the remuneration committees that determine who gets what. Hargreaves of the HPC says that “pay is too often set by a closed shop of individuals on remuneration committees with little regard to the conditions among the rest of the workforce, and the packages have become so complex that even shareholders struggle to understand how much they are worth”.
The phrase “closed shop” is resonant. Those inside the magic salary circle jealously guard the secrets of how they manage it. Not only does this bestow a useful mystique that encourages aspiring arbitrageurs to earn their spurs and perpetuate the elaborate scams practised therein, it also helps to baffle the taxman.
The government is rather keen on closing “failing” schools and hospitals and on public servants who can be characterised as “not delivering” or as otherwise surplus to requirements being “let go”. It would be instructive to know how far these stances have been expressed to those banks that received support from the Exchequer.
And finally, there is the untested claim that banks and other financial services will haemorrhage staff if they are denied their accustomed level of goodies; indeed that those companies themselves will have to consider quitting the City of London and relocating if ministers dare to propose any limits on their corporate greed. To which the proper answer is an immediate “goodbye”. By all means, seek more hospitable circumstances in Bogotá or Damascus or Pyongyang. And if you have no scruples about operating well inside the black of a really massive wage gap, go and speculate in Mogadishu or Dhaka or Tarawa.
But just think about it for a moment: the present economic instability is global. What’s more, the disenchantment with overpaid speculators is also global, spearheaded by the Occupy movement that is now active in approaching 3,000 cities from San Francisco to Seoul. How could traders be sure of landing a secure position in a foreign land? How could companies be sure that they won’t relocate into an environment that would grow rapidly uncomfortable?
"You talkin' to me?" Fred the Shred practises mean
The threat to leave is a myth, of course. It’s just a bargaining counter, both for individuals parlaying a raise and for companies who want the coalition to have a ready argument against further regulation. Because don’t run away with the idea that there is any sort of desire in the Tory part of the coalition to ameliorate the socially divisive effects of the recession. Many backbenchers and some ministers favour the scrapping of the minimum wage, the cutting of taxes for high earners “to stimulate the economy” (ha-ha) and decoupling from European human rights legislation.
Just because it’s been keeping its cards close since the election, the ideological wing of the Tories hasn’t gone away. Indeed, the evidence is that it grew at the last election. “Back to the Middle Ages” is its unexpressed cry. These fundamentalists dream of a time when the great majority of the population return to serfdom or homelessness while the favoured few live in fortified communities and move around in reinforced privacy, believing themselves inured against the climate change in which they anyway don’t believe, against contact with strangers, against the natural world, against the reach of government or the law and – most important but perhaps least dependable from their own point of view – against the sound of the tumbrils.
Oh, and anyway … is the financial sector such a towering asset that we need to hug it to our bosom and throw sweeties at it? After all, the public sector earns the British economy half a billion a day – that, at any rate, is the amount that Francis Maude claims will be lost by Wednesday’s mass walkout. Does anybody know whether the City pulls in as much as half a billion a day?
The report of the High Pay Commission, delivered the other day, has put nourishing flesh on the bones of what many of us had perceived long ago: that Gordon Gekko’s 1980’s mantra “greed is good” has been superseded throughout the upper echelons of the money-manipulating industries by the conviction that greed is the sole motivation for any deal, move, argument, or even thought.
Two years ago, the Financial Services Authority was reporting that nearly 3,000 UK-based bankers were receiving seven-figure salaries, let alone the top-ups contrived through share options and bonuses. But since the Con-Dem coalition came to power, the highest-paid ten percent have enjoyed further pay rises of an average two percent – a handy £100,000 if your “basic” salary is £5m. By contrast, low-paid workers have seen their incomes fall because inflation is running at five percent and average pay rises are at 0.4 percent, the lowest in recorded British history. As we know, the low-paid take a greater hit proportionately from inflation because most of their outgoings are on essential goods and services where inflation is highest.
These pay figures were released by the Office for National Statistics, a body that succeeds in irritating the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles on pretty much a daily basis. Expect the ONS to go the way of the Audit Commission and any other public body whose findings tend to embarrass the government.
Using his now routine argument that two wrongs do indeed make a right, David Cameron refuses to take any stick for the recent growth of wage differentials on his watch because the wages gap did not noticeably narrow under Labour. But for most of the thirteen years of Labour government, everyone’s income rose. Since Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, the average wage has risen by 300 percent. Over the same period, though, high-earners have done rather better. The salary – the basic salary, mind – of Diamond Bob, the boss of Barclays, is 3,000 percent higher (yes, ten times as much as the average) than that of his predecessor thirty years ago. No wonder his default facial expression is a self-satisfied smirk.
The HPC says that CEO’s are generally paid up to a hundred times the average salary of their workforce. Its chair Deborah Hargreaves wrote in The Guardian: “Our year-long enquiry has led us to believe that excessive top pay levels are not only corroding trust in business but also damaging society and the economy as a whole”.
Whatever George Osborne’s Autumn Statement brings on Tuesday, it will certainly not unleash any moves against the remunerations gobbled up by business executives, bankers, financial speculators and all the other unproductive detritus of triumphalist capitalism. The coalition (largely through the neutered mouthpiece of Vince Cable, the Business Secretary) periodically make vague tut-tutting noises about the confetti falling on the money-laundering sector, but they do nothing about it because their friends and bankrollers live there. Cameron remarked once again the other day that he wants to “tackle the welfare dependency culture” but you won’t catch him threatening “the bonus dependency culture”.
There are three canards that are routinely trotted out in supposed justification for the grossly inflated “packages” negotiated by managerial types in the money markets. The first is that you can only get the best people by paying them top dollar. The second is that you have to reward “success”. The third is that if you don’t pay these shysters what they reckon they are worth, they will flounce off somewhere where they are appreciated. Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association (and – would you credit it? – a former Tory minister) trots out these lines several times a day, but nobody outside the City of London and the Tory party has credited a word she’s said since she joined the BBA three years ago,
None of these propositions survives a few seconds of what I can only call common sense. Take the claim that there is an organic link between the “best” people and the highest salaries. This only persuades if you equate greed with ability. Curiously, no one – and certainly no government minister – links these two factors in any sphere but finance and business. Other professionals are assured that their work is vocational and this is its own reward. The BBC, for instance, is told not to offer so-called “competitive” rates to famous presenters and performers because the “privilege” of working for the Corporation makes up the loss.
No doubt Barclays will reckon that they would have been unable to entice Bob Diamond across the Atlantic for any less pay per meeting than the average teacher makes in a whole lifetime. On the other hand, Diamond was on the Barclays payroll for fifteen years before becoming CEO. And I know dozens of Americans who have spent pretty much all their adult lives in Britain for a fraction of Diamond’s chips. So living in London must have its attractions too and might be considered a bonus-sized “perk”.
But why do banks and other employers in the financial services imagine that expecting an astronomical salary is an indication of ability, let alone desirability? Surely these companies favour managers and other senior staff who evince more faithfulness to the company and appreciation of working conditions than that shown by the average premier league footballer to his club. If the city is packed with chancers looking for a higher-paying berth, it must be a stiflingly self-interested environment. And while you’re advancing the argument that these speculators are making money for their employers, you’d better be sure that they’re not siphoning away rather more than you think they are, which is what those motivated primarily by money are rather apt to do.
At his party’s conference, Ed Miliband made the telling point that only Cameron could believe that you persuade the rich to work harder by paying them more and the poor to work harder by cutting their benefits. Except of course that it isn’t only Cameron who believes it. Large swathes of the electorate have let themselves be taught to say that “benefit cheats” are a scourge on society while tax cheats are being smart and thwarting officials who are as repellent as traffic wardens. This perception is very much further developed in the US where Tea Party-supporters have swallowed the carefully crafted case that the mega-rich – like the Koch brothers who actually fund the Tea Party – are unjustly taxed by a wickedly spendthrift administration, even as unemployment rates break records and hundreds of thousands default on their mortgages.
Then there is the notion that rewards recognise success. I put the word in quotes before because it doesn’t like to be interrogated. Deborah Hargreaves confirms what we all knew: “Our research has shown little connection between pay and performance”. Well, of course it hasn’t. Barclays knew that they were gambling on Diamond Bob when they appointed him. But they also knew that they would be out of pocket if the gamble didn’t pay off. If Barclays fall short of their projected profit margins this year, what are they going to do? Dock Bob’s pay? I don’t think so.
That useless article “Sir” Fred Goodwin trousered a phenomenal golden farewell and pension deal when he left the Royal Bank of Scotland, even though he was about as big an asset as Typhoid Mary to the bank itself – which, you recall, had to go cap in hand for a government bail-out. I could never understand why Gordon Brown’s financial support to RBS was not reduced precisely by the amount of Fred the Shred’s pay-off (a “notional fund” of £16m releasing upwards of £70,000 per year to a man stepping down at 50), so that the space-fillers at the bank took the hit rather than you and me.
The plain fact of it is that there is absolutely no connection between executive pay, bonuses or share options and the vagaries of the market or the share price or the annual accounts. None whatever. There is every connection between the size of the cojones displayed by the executive and the gullibility of the remuneration committees that determine who gets what. Hargreaves of the HPC says that “pay is too often set by a closed shop of individuals on remuneration committees with little regard to the conditions among the rest of the workforce, and the packages have become so complex that even shareholders struggle to understand how much they are worth”.
The phrase “closed shop” is resonant. Those inside the magic salary circle jealously guard the secrets of how they manage it. Not only does this bestow a useful mystique that encourages aspiring arbitrageurs to earn their spurs and perpetuate the elaborate scams practised therein, it also helps to baffle the taxman.
The government is rather keen on closing “failing” schools and hospitals and on public servants who can be characterised as “not delivering” or as otherwise surplus to requirements being “let go”. It would be instructive to know how far these stances have been expressed to those banks that received support from the Exchequer.
And finally, there is the untested claim that banks and other financial services will haemorrhage staff if they are denied their accustomed level of goodies; indeed that those companies themselves will have to consider quitting the City of London and relocating if ministers dare to propose any limits on their corporate greed. To which the proper answer is an immediate “goodbye”. By all means, seek more hospitable circumstances in Bogotá or Damascus or Pyongyang. And if you have no scruples about operating well inside the black of a really massive wage gap, go and speculate in Mogadishu or Dhaka or Tarawa.
But just think about it for a moment: the present economic instability is global. What’s more, the disenchantment with overpaid speculators is also global, spearheaded by the Occupy movement that is now active in approaching 3,000 cities from San Francisco to Seoul. How could traders be sure of landing a secure position in a foreign land? How could companies be sure that they won’t relocate into an environment that would grow rapidly uncomfortable?
The threat to leave is a myth, of course. It’s just a bargaining counter, both for individuals parlaying a raise and for companies who want the coalition to have a ready argument against further regulation. Because don’t run away with the idea that there is any sort of desire in the Tory part of the coalition to ameliorate the socially divisive effects of the recession. Many backbenchers and some ministers favour the scrapping of the minimum wage, the cutting of taxes for high earners “to stimulate the economy” (ha-ha) and decoupling from European human rights legislation.
Just because it’s been keeping its cards close since the election, the ideological wing of the Tories hasn’t gone away. Indeed, the evidence is that it grew at the last election. “Back to the Middle Ages” is its unexpressed cry. These fundamentalists dream of a time when the great majority of the population return to serfdom or homelessness while the favoured few live in fortified communities and move around in reinforced privacy, believing themselves inured against the climate change in which they anyway don’t believe, against contact with strangers, against the natural world, against the reach of government or the law and – most important but perhaps least dependable from their own point of view – against the sound of the tumbrils.
Oh, and anyway … is the financial sector such a towering asset that we need to hug it to our bosom and throw sweeties at it? After all, the public sector earns the British economy half a billion a day – that, at any rate, is the amount that Francis Maude claims will be lost by Wednesday’s mass walkout. Does anybody know whether the City pulls in as much as half a billion a day?
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
The INCONTINENT of EUROPE
“England has saved herself by her exertions,” William Pitt the Younger once declared, “and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example”. As William Hague is something of an expert on Pitt, it surprises me that the Foreign Secretary has evidently yet to point out this superior remark to his leader. That David Cameron sees himself as saviour of Britain by exertion and Europe by example is surely the least part of his self-image.
As a political issue, the management of Europe is never as straightforward as it is deemed to be by those, each as passionate as the other, who espouse or decry the Union. The calamitous G20 summit in Cannes – planned as a great pre-election showcase for Nicolas Sarkozy who is far from assured of winning a second term – left the French president impatient, frustrated and (perhaps worst of all, given his electorate) graceless.
Sarkozy: harrumph
Much (but not all) of the source of Sarkozy’s malheur was the so-called Greek tragedy, wherein the charming and urbane prime minister, George Papandreou, eventually decided (wisely, you might think) to hand on the reins of a bolting crisis for that part of the euro that was once called the drachma.
Ever-genial Papandreou
Meanwhile, the basso buffo of contemporary Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, has said he will go, but (at the time of writing) clings to the wreckage of the Italian economy, having spent the past few years fiddling (evidently with under-age prostitutes) while the Via XX Settembre HQ of the Ministry of Economy and Finance burned.
Berlusconi: the latest official photograph
A week or two earlier, Cameron suffered the humiliation – I don’t think the term is too strong – of a rebuff from very nearly 80 of his own backbenchers over the offer of a referendum on Europe to the British electorate. Cameron, his coalition allies and the Labour opposition are against such a referendum precisely because they all fear that the electorate would vote to opt out of the European Union. It sticks in many a craw, not just those of little Englanders, that Cameron was passionately advocating a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty just two years ago when leader of the opposition.
The Ministry of Economy and Finance in Rome
Referendums on European Union issues have proved treacherous. The new European Constitution, signed into being in Rome in 2004, had to be abandoned once it had been repudiated by Dutch and French voters. The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty was delayed for a year because of an initial rejection of it at a referendum in the Republic of Ireland. And it was Papandreou’s unexpected proposal of a referendum on Europe’s package of measures to tackle the Greek deficit that threw his fellow Eurozone leaders into panic and brought his own premiership to an end. As Israel’s allies could not disguise when the Palestinians elected Hamas, democracy is fine (even in its Greek cradle) so long as it produces the result you want.
On Europe as on so many issues, Cameron is an opportunist rather than an ideologue – what Harold Wilson called a pragmatist. While this is seen by some as a usefully light-footed approach to the “art of the possible” nature of government, the PM does find himself surrounded by ministers and backbenchers who, when push comes to shove, have no intention of trimming on the matter of Europe.
Cameron: I see no Euro-rebellion
Just as the name of Calais would, she averred, be found inscribed upon the heart of Queen Mary, so the names of Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg might well be found slashed onto the pericardium of the Conservative Party … if, that is, the party actually ran to a heart. Most Tory Prime Ministers since the War – Churchill, Macmillan, Heath, Major, Cameron – have been rather more communitaire than large sections of their party and have found this dichotomy to be a running sore, never healed.
The only Tory PM close to anti-European Union backbench opinion was Margaret “no, no, no” Thatcher who summarised her view in the notorious Bruges speech of 1988: “To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve”. Her speechwriter (Sir Ronald Millar?) will have chosen the word “conglomerate” to allow his boss to express her scorn. A mere four years later, non-smoker Thatcher was hired at a reputed million dollars a year as “international political consultant” to tobacco giant Philip Morris which, with its beverage-to-processed cheeses portfolio, is nothing if not a conglomerate. But irony is the abiding humour under which European affairs are conducted.
This bizarre image is allegedly of a pre-Eurosceptic Thatcher
Anti-Union sentiment is widely encountered across the member nations. A primary engine of that sentiment is undoubtedly an admixture of xenophobia and racism. If nationalist parties throughout the world have one instinct in common, it is suspicion of and hence hatred for their nation’s equivalent of Johnny Foreigner. This is clearly true of English nationalist parties of varying degree of disreputability. Interestingly, it seems very much less true of Scotland where, although contempt for the English often runs white hot, attitudes to continental Europe are considerably more benign. This may well be a product of the “auld alliance” with France that has held sway in varying degrees for upwards of seven centuries.
Suspicion and hatred can readily be traced back to ignorance. As one who feels perfectly comfortable in the company of any race or nationality, I generally account myself a citizen of the world rather than of England, Britain, the UK or Europe. (Conduct, class and creed are altogether a different consideration). But an instinctive scepticism about Europe, if deplorable, is entirely comprehensible. Such multi-national comfort is perhaps relatively rare.
My own instincts favour continuing to be a part of the European Union. Those instincts suggest that withdrawal would prove a disaster for Britain’s trading position and for those hard-won rights and entitlements that are underwritten by European law. The menaces being made by the Tory half of the coalition against the European Court of Human Rights, for instance, make me even surer that I want us to stay in the Union.
The anti-Europeans have never, to my knowledge, made any coherent economic case for the UK’s departure from Europe, probably because there is no such case. Relying on horror stories about bureaucratic foibles reported in the Daily Mail is not a credible substitute. The most honourable living anti-European, Tony Benn, has (it seems to me) moderated his opposition in recent years or at least found other, more compelling campaigns.
But the anti-Europeans are not alone in failing to make a case that resonates intellectually. I have waited some fifty years to hear an argument that I can fillet and reproduce on behalf of the case for a European role for Britain. I have still to hear it. It is as though the pro-Europeans believe that, to coin a phrase, mere “common sense” makes the case for being in Europe.
The ever-pensive Roy Jenkins
Perhaps it is a prejudice about the supremely pro-European British politician of the modern era, Roy Jenkins, that leaves me feeling that communitaire means in its essence no more than the favouring of Dante and Schiller over Norman Mailer and Jacqueline Suzann, Velasquez and Van Gogh over Andrew Wyeth and Roy Lichtenstein, Dvorak and Sibelius over Edward MacDowell and Nico Muhly, Gewürztraminer and Pont-l’Évêque over Jack Daniels and Chicken McNuggets (you see how brutal are the terms of battle). The suspicion remains that the pull of the Old World commands a sentimental clout that “civilised” people cannot resist. Robert Hughes’ unbeatable description of the “cultural epiphany” that Europe represented for 19th-century Americans catches it exactly: “six weeks of vomiting at sea, and then – Chartres”.
Jenkins’ well-attested penchant for claret was, I assume, not the sole motor for his rise to the Presidency of the European Commission, a role he played from 1977 to 1981. During his tenure, the articles that led to the creation of the Eurozone were put in place. But also during his time in Brussels, Jenkins began to float an alternative to both the Labour Party (his ancestral home) and the Liberals, with whom he had not previously been known to flirt. His Dimbleby Lecture of 1979, entitled (disingenuously, one might think) ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, laid down the ground on which was built the new Social Democrat Party, subsequently set up with three other refugees from Labour: David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers. The most significant mission to unite the so-called Gang of Four was a commitment to the European ideal.
The Gang of Four: Rodgers, Owen, Jenkins, Williams
The SDP survived as a separate political entity only for seven years before merging with the Liberal Party (which is why that party is now known as the Liberal Democrats). It would be hard to argue that anything of the SDP’s much-vaunted “breaking the mould” still may be detected in Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems. Doubtless the Liberals would function as the Euroconscience of the present coalition government even if the SDP blip had never come about.
Meanwhile, those of us who sense – I cannot in conscience put it stronger – that Europe is where the UK ought to be still await Clegg, Cameron or some other European advocate making a case that we can understand and carry triumphantly against the xenophobes, Little Englanders and sceptics. It’s not a big ask.
“England has saved herself by her exertions,” William Pitt the Younger once declared, “and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example”. As William Hague is something of an expert on Pitt, it surprises me that the Foreign Secretary has evidently yet to point out this superior remark to his leader. That David Cameron sees himself as saviour of Britain by exertion and Europe by example is surely the least part of his self-image.
As a political issue, the management of Europe is never as straightforward as it is deemed to be by those, each as passionate as the other, who espouse or decry the Union. The calamitous G20 summit in Cannes – planned as a great pre-election showcase for Nicolas Sarkozy who is far from assured of winning a second term – left the French president impatient, frustrated and (perhaps worst of all, given his electorate) graceless.
Much (but not all) of the source of Sarkozy’s malheur was the so-called Greek tragedy, wherein the charming and urbane prime minister, George Papandreou, eventually decided (wisely, you might think) to hand on the reins of a bolting crisis for that part of the euro that was once called the drachma.
Meanwhile, the basso buffo of contemporary Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, has said he will go, but (at the time of writing) clings to the wreckage of the Italian economy, having spent the past few years fiddling (evidently with under-age prostitutes) while the Via XX Settembre HQ of the Ministry of Economy and Finance burned.
A week or two earlier, Cameron suffered the humiliation – I don’t think the term is too strong – of a rebuff from very nearly 80 of his own backbenchers over the offer of a referendum on Europe to the British electorate. Cameron, his coalition allies and the Labour opposition are against such a referendum precisely because they all fear that the electorate would vote to opt out of the European Union. It sticks in many a craw, not just those of little Englanders, that Cameron was passionately advocating a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty just two years ago when leader of the opposition.
Referendums on European Union issues have proved treacherous. The new European Constitution, signed into being in Rome in 2004, had to be abandoned once it had been repudiated by Dutch and French voters. The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty was delayed for a year because of an initial rejection of it at a referendum in the Republic of Ireland. And it was Papandreou’s unexpected proposal of a referendum on Europe’s package of measures to tackle the Greek deficit that threw his fellow Eurozone leaders into panic and brought his own premiership to an end. As Israel’s allies could not disguise when the Palestinians elected Hamas, democracy is fine (even in its Greek cradle) so long as it produces the result you want.
On Europe as on so many issues, Cameron is an opportunist rather than an ideologue – what Harold Wilson called a pragmatist. While this is seen by some as a usefully light-footed approach to the “art of the possible” nature of government, the PM does find himself surrounded by ministers and backbenchers who, when push comes to shove, have no intention of trimming on the matter of Europe.
Just as the name of Calais would, she averred, be found inscribed upon the heart of Queen Mary, so the names of Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg might well be found slashed onto the pericardium of the Conservative Party … if, that is, the party actually ran to a heart. Most Tory Prime Ministers since the War – Churchill, Macmillan, Heath, Major, Cameron – have been rather more communitaire than large sections of their party and have found this dichotomy to be a running sore, never healed.
The only Tory PM close to anti-European Union backbench opinion was Margaret “no, no, no” Thatcher who summarised her view in the notorious Bruges speech of 1988: “To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve”. Her speechwriter (Sir Ronald Millar?) will have chosen the word “conglomerate” to allow his boss to express her scorn. A mere four years later, non-smoker Thatcher was hired at a reputed million dollars a year as “international political consultant” to tobacco giant Philip Morris which, with its beverage-to-processed cheeses portfolio, is nothing if not a conglomerate. But irony is the abiding humour under which European affairs are conducted.
Anti-Union sentiment is widely encountered across the member nations. A primary engine of that sentiment is undoubtedly an admixture of xenophobia and racism. If nationalist parties throughout the world have one instinct in common, it is suspicion of and hence hatred for their nation’s equivalent of Johnny Foreigner. This is clearly true of English nationalist parties of varying degree of disreputability. Interestingly, it seems very much less true of Scotland where, although contempt for the English often runs white hot, attitudes to continental Europe are considerably more benign. This may well be a product of the “auld alliance” with France that has held sway in varying degrees for upwards of seven centuries.
Suspicion and hatred can readily be traced back to ignorance. As one who feels perfectly comfortable in the company of any race or nationality, I generally account myself a citizen of the world rather than of England, Britain, the UK or Europe. (Conduct, class and creed are altogether a different consideration). But an instinctive scepticism about Europe, if deplorable, is entirely comprehensible. Such multi-national comfort is perhaps relatively rare.
My own instincts favour continuing to be a part of the European Union. Those instincts suggest that withdrawal would prove a disaster for Britain’s trading position and for those hard-won rights and entitlements that are underwritten by European law. The menaces being made by the Tory half of the coalition against the European Court of Human Rights, for instance, make me even surer that I want us to stay in the Union.
The anti-Europeans have never, to my knowledge, made any coherent economic case for the UK’s departure from Europe, probably because there is no such case. Relying on horror stories about bureaucratic foibles reported in the Daily Mail is not a credible substitute. The most honourable living anti-European, Tony Benn, has (it seems to me) moderated his opposition in recent years or at least found other, more compelling campaigns.
But the anti-Europeans are not alone in failing to make a case that resonates intellectually. I have waited some fifty years to hear an argument that I can fillet and reproduce on behalf of the case for a European role for Britain. I have still to hear it. It is as though the pro-Europeans believe that, to coin a phrase, mere “common sense” makes the case for being in Europe.
Perhaps it is a prejudice about the supremely pro-European British politician of the modern era, Roy Jenkins, that leaves me feeling that communitaire means in its essence no more than the favouring of Dante and Schiller over Norman Mailer and Jacqueline Suzann, Velasquez and Van Gogh over Andrew Wyeth and Roy Lichtenstein, Dvorak and Sibelius over Edward MacDowell and Nico Muhly, Gewürztraminer and Pont-l’Évêque over Jack Daniels and Chicken McNuggets (you see how brutal are the terms of battle). The suspicion remains that the pull of the Old World commands a sentimental clout that “civilised” people cannot resist. Robert Hughes’ unbeatable description of the “cultural epiphany” that Europe represented for 19th-century Americans catches it exactly: “six weeks of vomiting at sea, and then – Chartres”.
Jenkins’ well-attested penchant for claret was, I assume, not the sole motor for his rise to the Presidency of the European Commission, a role he played from 1977 to 1981. During his tenure, the articles that led to the creation of the Eurozone were put in place. But also during his time in Brussels, Jenkins began to float an alternative to both the Labour Party (his ancestral home) and the Liberals, with whom he had not previously been known to flirt. His Dimbleby Lecture of 1979, entitled (disingenuously, one might think) ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, laid down the ground on which was built the new Social Democrat Party, subsequently set up with three other refugees from Labour: David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers. The most significant mission to unite the so-called Gang of Four was a commitment to the European ideal.
The SDP survived as a separate political entity only for seven years before merging with the Liberal Party (which is why that party is now known as the Liberal Democrats). It would be hard to argue that anything of the SDP’s much-vaunted “breaking the mould” still may be detected in Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems. Doubtless the Liberals would function as the Euroconscience of the present coalition government even if the SDP blip had never come about.
Meanwhile, those of us who sense – I cannot in conscience put it stronger – that Europe is where the UK ought to be still await Clegg, Cameron or some other European advocate making a case that we can understand and carry triumphantly against the xenophobes, Little Englanders and sceptics. It’s not a big ask.
Monday, October 31, 2011
FEAR and LOATHING in the 21st CENTURY
The moment I heard the bare headlines about the murder of a 28 year-old barman in Ayrshire last weekend, my gaydar detected a homophobic element. At the time of writing, this instinct has yet to be wholly justified by what has been publicly disclosed, but if the evident fact of Stuart Walker’s relaxed and unconcealed sexuality proves to be a total red herring, I’ll be very surprised.
An 18 year-old has been detained by the police. Only very sketchy details of the killing have been released. Initially, Strathclyde Police declared that, while it was not “a random attack”, there was “nothing to indicate that this is a homophobic crime”. However, it was “an extremely violent attack” and Walker’s body was found to be “charred”. Reports have conflicted as to whether he had been tied to a lamppost and whether torture and/or a weapon were involved.
There has been a moving response from the public, both in Cumnock itself and in the wider on-line world. Evidently, Walker was well-liked. The nature of his death – outdoors at night but in an urban area where the events leading up to the attack and the attack itself might easily have been witnessed – has clearly shaken locals, but so has the possibility that someone might have been bludgeoned merely because of his sexuality.
Stuart Walker
Stonewall Scotland says that its researches indicate that two out of three Scots are relaxed about the question of gay marriage. The campaigning organisation also reckons that there has been a five-fold increase in “hate crimes” against LGBT people in Scotland in the last five years. But of course this calculation may be tempered by a greater readiness to report such crimes and a greater diligence on the police’s part in recording and following up reports.
For the police and for other public services, sexuality has become a subject to be treated as if walking on eggshells. This is not to say that institutional homophobia has significantly lessened in those services, only that it is much less often openly expressed. We can only count this “improvement” a mixed blessing.
Elsewhere, there is clearly a long way to go. In recent weeks, there has been much comment about alleged racist remarks made on the pitches of the premier football league in England. The sport’s authorities, the clubs and the media have scrupulously maintained a fierce disapproval of such behaviour, while simultaneously reserving the fallback position that some such allegations might be erroneous, unjustified or even malicious. One suspects, though, that disobliging remarks made in heat about sexuality would provoke rather less soul-searching, let alone official investigation.
The notorious lewd pantomime performed in 1999 by the then Liverpool player Robbie Fowler in order to rile the Chelsea player Graeme Le Saux was penalised by the Football Association and the club. Le Saux was sometimes “accused” by fellow players of being gay on the basis of his distaste for the raucous and drunken celebratory culture widely indulged in top-flight football and – bizarrely – because he read The Guardian rather than The Daily Star. However, it is difficult to determine the degree to which either the FA or Liverpool disapproved Fowler’s behaviour because his offence was processed simultaneously with a further example of juvenilia at a different match when Fowler pantomimed snorting the touchline. The player was fined for both incidents by both club and regulatory body. The FA did, though, impose a four-match suspension for the “cocaine” business and only a further two-match suspension for the “bum-waving”. I wonder what penalty would be imposed today and whether calling another player a “poof” would be deemed an offence.
Dog-Walker
In the media and of course on-line, anti-gay sentiment is much more rife. Some of it is intended, some of it merely thoughtless, born of an instinctive but unexamined response. Though the coverage of Walker’s death has generally been treated with as much persuasive horror and concern as, say, the murder of Jo Yeates, you don’t need to look far to find the attitudes that still lurk beneath the professional surface.
On the Daily Mail’s on-line site, for instance, there is a piece headlined: “Man held over inquiry into death of gay barman who was facing child sex probe”. The “child sex probe” is not, the report goes on to explain, some kind of medical device or sex toy but a legal procedure. “However,” says the report (and it is not wholly clear why that particular word is used), “it has come to light that the 28 year-old had only recently been questioned over an alleged incident involving a 12 year-old boy in August and a report was sent to the Procurator Fiscal”. In fact, as the report goes on to make clear, the Procurator Fiscal had closed the case. Hence there is no earthly reason why the “alleged incident” should have been mentioned, especially as the report quotes the Strathclyde Police thus: “There’s no suggestion that this incident is in any way connected to the murder”. The website is either flying a kite, hinting at something the reporter has heard but cannot publish, making mischief or appealing to the perceived homophobia of its readers (this is the Daily Mail, after all, a rag known to many as the Daily Hate-Mail). The on-line report, by the by, is credited to a certain “Oliver Pickup” and if, as seems likely, that is a pseudonym, it was singularly insensitively chosen.
Daily Mail writers and other right-wingers implicitly subscribe to a view, whether expressed outright or not, that attraction to members of the same sex is “unnatural”. If these objectors also embrace supernatural delusions of one stripe or another, they then frequently deem homosexuality “sinful” and “corrupt”. As one who spurns supernatural delusion as itself unnatural, I cannot spend precious time on the notions of sinfulness and corruption. As for the “unnatural” argument, I offer that it is natural for me. Humans do many things that are not found in nature: cooking food, driving cars, firing missiles, taking part in “reality television” programmes, claiming to be divinely inspired. When homophobes argue that god did not intend humans to indulge in sodomy, for instance, I want to ask why in his infinite wisdom he went and made the anus an erogenous zone. Did he know his business?
For aeons, greybeards have attempted to “explain” homosexuality, as if it needs to be swaddled and safely buried in theory. Every so often, it is thought that some breakthrough is about to demonstrate conclusively that attraction to the same sex is a product of nature rather than nurture or, just as often, the other way around. As a gay man myself, I would much prefer the issue were left alone, because I know in my bones that whichever comes to be pronounced “the definitive answer” will be used against us. If it’s nature, prospective parents will require the sexuality of the foetus to be revealed and, in some cases, will demand that this is sufficient justification for a termination. If it’s nurture, the behavioural experts will be put to work to determine those gay responses that are indeed “learned” so that they may be eradicated with extreme prejudice.
Life and Soul
Rather than burning brain cells on futile attempts to account for what makes individuals gay, I propose that the homophobia mystery be the one that is solved. That would benefit society a great deal more. Actually, of course, it is not such a mystery, especially to anyone who has encountered it. Many people’s homophobia is merely an outward manifestation of their supernatural delusion – or, to give the dog its name, their religious bigotry. It is in the nature of being a subscriber to a religion that intolerance of those who differ follows. A righteous person by definition measures herself against the “wrongeousness” of others. Nowhere is this expressed more forcibly than in Islam, according to which anyone who does not embrace the Muslim faith is an infidel and hence not fit to live. I don’t know any lesbian or gay people who consider that heterosexuals should be put to death, only that they are missing out. Mostly, though, we just hope that straights will let us alone.
There is another view of homophobia – more a theory than a study – which is that those whose hatred and fear is not taught and motivated by scripture may be driven by an insecurity about their own sexuality. This is a perception akin to that of the Jew-hating Jew, save of course that Jewishness is rather more clearly a fact about a person, whereas sexuality is a lot to do with movable positions on a spectrum of behaviour and instinct. At any rate, my own anecdotal evidence does suggest that those heterosexuals who are most relaxed at being around gays are themselves the most comfortable in their own sexual identities. I remember back in the 1970s, during the week of one of the first of what were then called Gay Pride marches in London, I was working at Time Out magazine. The editor of the theatre section was a lovely man called John Ashford and, for the duration, he sported a lapel badge that read “Sad to be Straight”. It might not be thought exactly correct now, but back then I was grateful for such fraternal solidarity, particularly as so much of the left was extremely tardy in understanding and responding to sexual politics.
The spot where Walker's body was found
LGBT people do not ask for special consideration. We only want a shake equivalent to that enjoyed by everybody. In particular, we want to be able to go about our business without being persecuted, abused or despised. Or indeed murdered.
The moment I heard the bare headlines about the murder of a 28 year-old barman in Ayrshire last weekend, my gaydar detected a homophobic element. At the time of writing, this instinct has yet to be wholly justified by what has been publicly disclosed, but if the evident fact of Stuart Walker’s relaxed and unconcealed sexuality proves to be a total red herring, I’ll be very surprised.
An 18 year-old has been detained by the police. Only very sketchy details of the killing have been released. Initially, Strathclyde Police declared that, while it was not “a random attack”, there was “nothing to indicate that this is a homophobic crime”. However, it was “an extremely violent attack” and Walker’s body was found to be “charred”. Reports have conflicted as to whether he had been tied to a lamppost and whether torture and/or a weapon were involved.
There has been a moving response from the public, both in Cumnock itself and in the wider on-line world. Evidently, Walker was well-liked. The nature of his death – outdoors at night but in an urban area where the events leading up to the attack and the attack itself might easily have been witnessed – has clearly shaken locals, but so has the possibility that someone might have been bludgeoned merely because of his sexuality.
Stonewall Scotland says that its researches indicate that two out of three Scots are relaxed about the question of gay marriage. The campaigning organisation also reckons that there has been a five-fold increase in “hate crimes” against LGBT people in Scotland in the last five years. But of course this calculation may be tempered by a greater readiness to report such crimes and a greater diligence on the police’s part in recording and following up reports.
For the police and for other public services, sexuality has become a subject to be treated as if walking on eggshells. This is not to say that institutional homophobia has significantly lessened in those services, only that it is much less often openly expressed. We can only count this “improvement” a mixed blessing.
Elsewhere, there is clearly a long way to go. In recent weeks, there has been much comment about alleged racist remarks made on the pitches of the premier football league in England. The sport’s authorities, the clubs and the media have scrupulously maintained a fierce disapproval of such behaviour, while simultaneously reserving the fallback position that some such allegations might be erroneous, unjustified or even malicious. One suspects, though, that disobliging remarks made in heat about sexuality would provoke rather less soul-searching, let alone official investigation.
The notorious lewd pantomime performed in 1999 by the then Liverpool player Robbie Fowler in order to rile the Chelsea player Graeme Le Saux was penalised by the Football Association and the club. Le Saux was sometimes “accused” by fellow players of being gay on the basis of his distaste for the raucous and drunken celebratory culture widely indulged in top-flight football and – bizarrely – because he read The Guardian rather than The Daily Star. However, it is difficult to determine the degree to which either the FA or Liverpool disapproved Fowler’s behaviour because his offence was processed simultaneously with a further example of juvenilia at a different match when Fowler pantomimed snorting the touchline. The player was fined for both incidents by both club and regulatory body. The FA did, though, impose a four-match suspension for the “cocaine” business and only a further two-match suspension for the “bum-waving”. I wonder what penalty would be imposed today and whether calling another player a “poof” would be deemed an offence.
In the media and of course on-line, anti-gay sentiment is much more rife. Some of it is intended, some of it merely thoughtless, born of an instinctive but unexamined response. Though the coverage of Walker’s death has generally been treated with as much persuasive horror and concern as, say, the murder of Jo Yeates, you don’t need to look far to find the attitudes that still lurk beneath the professional surface.
On the Daily Mail’s on-line site, for instance, there is a piece headlined: “Man held over inquiry into death of gay barman who was facing child sex probe”. The “child sex probe” is not, the report goes on to explain, some kind of medical device or sex toy but a legal procedure. “However,” says the report (and it is not wholly clear why that particular word is used), “it has come to light that the 28 year-old had only recently been questioned over an alleged incident involving a 12 year-old boy in August and a report was sent to the Procurator Fiscal”. In fact, as the report goes on to make clear, the Procurator Fiscal had closed the case. Hence there is no earthly reason why the “alleged incident” should have been mentioned, especially as the report quotes the Strathclyde Police thus: “There’s no suggestion that this incident is in any way connected to the murder”. The website is either flying a kite, hinting at something the reporter has heard but cannot publish, making mischief or appealing to the perceived homophobia of its readers (this is the Daily Mail, after all, a rag known to many as the Daily Hate-Mail). The on-line report, by the by, is credited to a certain “Oliver Pickup” and if, as seems likely, that is a pseudonym, it was singularly insensitively chosen.
Daily Mail writers and other right-wingers implicitly subscribe to a view, whether expressed outright or not, that attraction to members of the same sex is “unnatural”. If these objectors also embrace supernatural delusions of one stripe or another, they then frequently deem homosexuality “sinful” and “corrupt”. As one who spurns supernatural delusion as itself unnatural, I cannot spend precious time on the notions of sinfulness and corruption. As for the “unnatural” argument, I offer that it is natural for me. Humans do many things that are not found in nature: cooking food, driving cars, firing missiles, taking part in “reality television” programmes, claiming to be divinely inspired. When homophobes argue that god did not intend humans to indulge in sodomy, for instance, I want to ask why in his infinite wisdom he went and made the anus an erogenous zone. Did he know his business?
For aeons, greybeards have attempted to “explain” homosexuality, as if it needs to be swaddled and safely buried in theory. Every so often, it is thought that some breakthrough is about to demonstrate conclusively that attraction to the same sex is a product of nature rather than nurture or, just as often, the other way around. As a gay man myself, I would much prefer the issue were left alone, because I know in my bones that whichever comes to be pronounced “the definitive answer” will be used against us. If it’s nature, prospective parents will require the sexuality of the foetus to be revealed and, in some cases, will demand that this is sufficient justification for a termination. If it’s nurture, the behavioural experts will be put to work to determine those gay responses that are indeed “learned” so that they may be eradicated with extreme prejudice.
Rather than burning brain cells on futile attempts to account for what makes individuals gay, I propose that the homophobia mystery be the one that is solved. That would benefit society a great deal more. Actually, of course, it is not such a mystery, especially to anyone who has encountered it. Many people’s homophobia is merely an outward manifestation of their supernatural delusion – or, to give the dog its name, their religious bigotry. It is in the nature of being a subscriber to a religion that intolerance of those who differ follows. A righteous person by definition measures herself against the “wrongeousness” of others. Nowhere is this expressed more forcibly than in Islam, according to which anyone who does not embrace the Muslim faith is an infidel and hence not fit to live. I don’t know any lesbian or gay people who consider that heterosexuals should be put to death, only that they are missing out. Mostly, though, we just hope that straights will let us alone.
There is another view of homophobia – more a theory than a study – which is that those whose hatred and fear is not taught and motivated by scripture may be driven by an insecurity about their own sexuality. This is a perception akin to that of the Jew-hating Jew, save of course that Jewishness is rather more clearly a fact about a person, whereas sexuality is a lot to do with movable positions on a spectrum of behaviour and instinct. At any rate, my own anecdotal evidence does suggest that those heterosexuals who are most relaxed at being around gays are themselves the most comfortable in their own sexual identities. I remember back in the 1970s, during the week of one of the first of what were then called Gay Pride marches in London, I was working at Time Out magazine. The editor of the theatre section was a lovely man called John Ashford and, for the duration, he sported a lapel badge that read “Sad to be Straight”. It might not be thought exactly correct now, but back then I was grateful for such fraternal solidarity, particularly as so much of the left was extremely tardy in understanding and responding to sexual politics.
LGBT people do not ask for special consideration. We only want a shake equivalent to that enjoyed by everybody. In particular, we want to be able to go about our business without being persecuted, abused or despised. Or indeed murdered.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
FRANKLY, DEBT (TORY) is RIDING HIGH
“The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit card and store card bills”. Common sense or what? The words are from a speech by the Prime Minister but they were never delivered. Somebody among his many advisors explained gently to him that if every household paid off its debts instead of spending the money on other things, the economy would collapse. Mr Cameron, certainly no economist he, hadn’t realised that. Unfortunately for him, the text of his keynote address to the Tory party conference the other week had already been released. Consequently, the two sentences he didn’t read out became the most remarked upon in the speech.
The government is all at sea over the question of debt and hence all at sea over the whole of the national economy. Today (Tuesday) the September rate of inflation as measured by the government’s favoured method, known as the Consumer Prices Index, was announced. At 5.2 percent, it is the highest it has ever been since the method was adopted 14 years ago.
Public Sector Net Debt
Effectively, then, what we have now is what is called stagflation: a high and rising rate of inflation, a high and rising rate of unemployment and zilch growth. It’s a combination that reduces the value of money. And the usual counter to it is to increase interest rates. But to do that (which of course makes borrowing more expensive) will further reduce growth. The government has been relying on private sector growth to obviate the need for a level of public service and welfare cuts that will redound on ministers both on the street and in the ballot box. And it has made such a fetish of cutting government borrowing that to resort to Plan B or even Plan A-minus would be the most humiliating economic climb-down since Norman Lamont’s Black Wednesday. Cameron and George Osborne have steered us into a perfect storm and it’s hard to see that they are in any way equipped to ride it.
I got into a punishing level of personal debt in the 1990s. It’s bad enough when everything you purchase is expensive but when you have to purchase the money you need to make those purchases it soon becomes a vicious spiral. Running a debt on a credit card creates an illusion of painlessly burying debt. In reality, the proportion of the debt on the card that is the interest payment grows each month until it is the greater part of what you owe the bank. Banks were a lot happier to let their customers run debts then than they are now. And of course one’s chances of being allowed to slide into debt are greatly reduced if one’s prospects of securing future income are slight.
That is the main difference between the dangerously illusory debt of individuals and households – a road that can lead to repossession of one’s home if one’s home is no longer an asset that one holds – and the indebtedness that is the engine of capitalism. In business and finance, debt is called investment. Enterprises attract credit by looking as if such investment will help to grow the business and hence produce a healthy return. It’s a gamble, of course, and capitalism’s equivalent of homelessness is bankruptcy.
The present economic climate discourages investment. Hence existing indebtedness cannot be fed into something encouraging. Interest rates may be historically low but so is investment. Without growth, there is more homelessness and bankruptcy and the increasing incidence of these fell fates further discourages lending: another vicious spiral.
Osborne, Cameron and especially Business Secretary Vince Cable regularly exhort the banks to lend more money. But the banks pay no heed. The banks are afraid that they will be caught holding the bad debts when the music stops, an understandable fear. They also insist on paying their management teams grotesquely inflated salaries, bonuses, “golden handshakes” and “golden hellos”, even though many of these banks are owned at least in part by the government.
Cable itches to regulate the banks and cap the in-house rewards but Osborne and Cameron won’t let him. When Labour urges him to give Cable his head, Cameron chants his usual mantra, that Labour didn’t regulate the banks so they can’t talk. The PM subscribes to an unusual philosophy: two wrongs do make a right.
Debt as Percentage of GDP
Like business and the financial sector, government also speculates and invests. So the indebtedness that fuels capitalism also is utilised by government. It is normal for government to operate a deficit. But there is a distinction, not always kept clear, between the deficit and the National Debt. Cameron wants to reduce both and there is some controversy over whether such reduction is truly necessary.
The National Debt is the net accumulation of government borrowing. 80 or 90 years ago, that debt was greater than the whole of Gross Domestic Product, which is the global market value of the national output. That was the age of the Great Depression, when poverty and unemployment were rife in Europe and the United States, and hyperinflation sent prices out of ordinary people’s reach. While the Great War had fanned global interest in revolution and Socialism, the Depression sowed the seeds of dictatorship and fascism. After World War II, Britain’s National Debt was 250 percent of GDP – hence the austerity programme instigated by the Attlee government. It didn’t prevent that government implementing Rab Butler’s Education Act, Nye Bevan’s National Health Service and Lord Beveridge’s welfare state.
At the beginning of 2011, the National Debt was 60 percent of GDP and Cameron made – and still makes – great play of Labour’s “failure” to control this figure. But under Margaret Thatcher, the National Debt was well above 50 percent of GDP and, because inflation was so much higher than the negligible rate that it fell to successively under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the cost of servicing that debt was much more punishing. Some twelve percent of tax revenue was swallowed in paying down the interest on Thatcher’s debt. As Chancellor, Brown made the reduction of the debt his top priority and, as a result of his much-vaunted “prudence”, the percentage of tax revenue required to service the debt by the time the coalition came to power was nearer three percent. Cameron infrequently gives Labour credit for that.
Here’s a further measure, found in the most recent figures courtesy of the Office of National Statistics. The current national budget deficit “excluding the temporary effects of financial interventions” was £13.8 billion as of August. The net borrowing with the same exclusions was £15.9 billion and the net debt £944.5 billion, equivalent to 61.4 percent of GDP. Two years previously, under Labour and after nearly a year of global economic turmoil, the equivalent figures were £12.8 billion, £16.1 billion and £804.8 billion, 57.5 percent of GDP.
A different measure of the economy is the balance of trade. Again taking ONS stats, one finds that the seasonally adjusted deficit on trade in goods and services in August this year was £1.9 billion. This raw figure masks a vast difference between the two halves of the economy. Trade in goods was in deficit by £7.8 billion whereas trade in services was in surplus by £5.9 billion. That disparity starkly demonstrates how Britain’s manufacturing base has shrunk and why the government is running scared when bankers and other city slickers threaten to take their business elsewhere if their bonuses are culled and if the government doesn’t abolish the 50 percent tax rate.
Government Debt per Person
The figures from exactly a decade earlier make an interesting contrast. Then the trade deficit was £2.4 billion and no one was screaming about an economic crisis. But the two halves of the economy were rather closer together. The deficit in goods was £3.3 billion, the surplus on services £904 million.
On the basis of these figures, it is not unreasonable to surmise that, far from reducing the National Debt, the coalition is in fact increasing it. A flat-lining economy means that government revenue is stalled. Rising inflation this month causes increases in welfare payments to kick in next year. The debacle of tuition fees has led to the great majority of institutions of further education electing to charge the maximum for their courses, thereby requiring higher and higher lending by the government to students who are plunged further and further into the personal debt that Cameron affects to scorn.
Many of the government’s policies for cutting expenditure have proved to be so ill-conceived that they result in increased expense for smaller return. The savings that Osborne – like all in-coming Chancellors before him – was determined to make by cutting “waste” have proved to be a fantasy, as Osborne’s predecessors also found. And of course Cameron decided to add the excursion into Libya to the continuing unwinnable war in Afghanistan, at far greater cost than the government is prepared to divulge. The pain that has so far been inflicted on the electorate through cuts in public services and welfare has not been matched by any visible reduction in government borrowing. Ed Miliband ought to start using a mantra of his own, that “as usual Labour will have to come in after the Tories to clear up the mess”.
The pity of it is that Labour has not sought to put clearer ground between itself and the coalition. Miliband and Ed Balls have done little to discourage the belief that, had they been in government, they would have pursued similar policies of slash and burn, only slower. But is the reduction of the deficit and the National Debt so desirable or indeed at all necessary?
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who praised Gordon Brown’s leadership of Europe’s handling of the 2008-09 recession and who remains a trenchant critic of present policies pursued in both Washington and London, wrote that the Republican Party in the US “never cared about the deficit – not a bit. It has always been nothing but a club with which to beat down opposition to an ideological goal, namely the dissolution of the welfare state. They’re not interested, at all, in a genuine deficit-reduction deal if it does not serve that goal” [New York Times, June 24th 2011]. Looking at Andrew Lansley’s ham-fisted assault on the NHS and the coalition’s handling of education, the police, the BBC, local government and other public services, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the recently posited links between the Tories and the Tea Party go a lot further than agreement about fiscal policy.
Cameron and Osborne would do well to mark Keynes’ phrase “the paradox of thrift”. Keynes anticipated the error that Cameron excised from his conference speech at the last minute, that if people eschew spending in a recession (as Cameron almost advocated) the fall in demand leads to a fall in activity and so a recession becomes a depression. If the government doesn’t spend on promoting growth, it will have to spend more on saving the unemployed and their dependents from penury. This is the fundamental error that the Irish government committed last year and that the Greek government is sliding into now. And the people don’t thank their governments for making such poor judgments.
“The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit card and store card bills”. Common sense or what? The words are from a speech by the Prime Minister but they were never delivered. Somebody among his many advisors explained gently to him that if every household paid off its debts instead of spending the money on other things, the economy would collapse. Mr Cameron, certainly no economist he, hadn’t realised that. Unfortunately for him, the text of his keynote address to the Tory party conference the other week had already been released. Consequently, the two sentences he didn’t read out became the most remarked upon in the speech.
The government is all at sea over the question of debt and hence all at sea over the whole of the national economy. Today (Tuesday) the September rate of inflation as measured by the government’s favoured method, known as the Consumer Prices Index, was announced. At 5.2 percent, it is the highest it has ever been since the method was adopted 14 years ago.
Effectively, then, what we have now is what is called stagflation: a high and rising rate of inflation, a high and rising rate of unemployment and zilch growth. It’s a combination that reduces the value of money. And the usual counter to it is to increase interest rates. But to do that (which of course makes borrowing more expensive) will further reduce growth. The government has been relying on private sector growth to obviate the need for a level of public service and welfare cuts that will redound on ministers both on the street and in the ballot box. And it has made such a fetish of cutting government borrowing that to resort to Plan B or even Plan A-minus would be the most humiliating economic climb-down since Norman Lamont’s Black Wednesday. Cameron and George Osborne have steered us into a perfect storm and it’s hard to see that they are in any way equipped to ride it.
I got into a punishing level of personal debt in the 1990s. It’s bad enough when everything you purchase is expensive but when you have to purchase the money you need to make those purchases it soon becomes a vicious spiral. Running a debt on a credit card creates an illusion of painlessly burying debt. In reality, the proportion of the debt on the card that is the interest payment grows each month until it is the greater part of what you owe the bank. Banks were a lot happier to let their customers run debts then than they are now. And of course one’s chances of being allowed to slide into debt are greatly reduced if one’s prospects of securing future income are slight.
That is the main difference between the dangerously illusory debt of individuals and households – a road that can lead to repossession of one’s home if one’s home is no longer an asset that one holds – and the indebtedness that is the engine of capitalism. In business and finance, debt is called investment. Enterprises attract credit by looking as if such investment will help to grow the business and hence produce a healthy return. It’s a gamble, of course, and capitalism’s equivalent of homelessness is bankruptcy.
The present economic climate discourages investment. Hence existing indebtedness cannot be fed into something encouraging. Interest rates may be historically low but so is investment. Without growth, there is more homelessness and bankruptcy and the increasing incidence of these fell fates further discourages lending: another vicious spiral.
Osborne, Cameron and especially Business Secretary Vince Cable regularly exhort the banks to lend more money. But the banks pay no heed. The banks are afraid that they will be caught holding the bad debts when the music stops, an understandable fear. They also insist on paying their management teams grotesquely inflated salaries, bonuses, “golden handshakes” and “golden hellos”, even though many of these banks are owned at least in part by the government.
Cable itches to regulate the banks and cap the in-house rewards but Osborne and Cameron won’t let him. When Labour urges him to give Cable his head, Cameron chants his usual mantra, that Labour didn’t regulate the banks so they can’t talk. The PM subscribes to an unusual philosophy: two wrongs do make a right.
Like business and the financial sector, government also speculates and invests. So the indebtedness that fuels capitalism also is utilised by government. It is normal for government to operate a deficit. But there is a distinction, not always kept clear, between the deficit and the National Debt. Cameron wants to reduce both and there is some controversy over whether such reduction is truly necessary.
The National Debt is the net accumulation of government borrowing. 80 or 90 years ago, that debt was greater than the whole of Gross Domestic Product, which is the global market value of the national output. That was the age of the Great Depression, when poverty and unemployment were rife in Europe and the United States, and hyperinflation sent prices out of ordinary people’s reach. While the Great War had fanned global interest in revolution and Socialism, the Depression sowed the seeds of dictatorship and fascism. After World War II, Britain’s National Debt was 250 percent of GDP – hence the austerity programme instigated by the Attlee government. It didn’t prevent that government implementing Rab Butler’s Education Act, Nye Bevan’s National Health Service and Lord Beveridge’s welfare state.
At the beginning of 2011, the National Debt was 60 percent of GDP and Cameron made – and still makes – great play of Labour’s “failure” to control this figure. But under Margaret Thatcher, the National Debt was well above 50 percent of GDP and, because inflation was so much higher than the negligible rate that it fell to successively under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the cost of servicing that debt was much more punishing. Some twelve percent of tax revenue was swallowed in paying down the interest on Thatcher’s debt. As Chancellor, Brown made the reduction of the debt his top priority and, as a result of his much-vaunted “prudence”, the percentage of tax revenue required to service the debt by the time the coalition came to power was nearer three percent. Cameron infrequently gives Labour credit for that.
Here’s a further measure, found in the most recent figures courtesy of the Office of National Statistics. The current national budget deficit “excluding the temporary effects of financial interventions” was £13.8 billion as of August. The net borrowing with the same exclusions was £15.9 billion and the net debt £944.5 billion, equivalent to 61.4 percent of GDP. Two years previously, under Labour and after nearly a year of global economic turmoil, the equivalent figures were £12.8 billion, £16.1 billion and £804.8 billion, 57.5 percent of GDP.
A different measure of the economy is the balance of trade. Again taking ONS stats, one finds that the seasonally adjusted deficit on trade in goods and services in August this year was £1.9 billion. This raw figure masks a vast difference between the two halves of the economy. Trade in goods was in deficit by £7.8 billion whereas trade in services was in surplus by £5.9 billion. That disparity starkly demonstrates how Britain’s manufacturing base has shrunk and why the government is running scared when bankers and other city slickers threaten to take their business elsewhere if their bonuses are culled and if the government doesn’t abolish the 50 percent tax rate.
The figures from exactly a decade earlier make an interesting contrast. Then the trade deficit was £2.4 billion and no one was screaming about an economic crisis. But the two halves of the economy were rather closer together. The deficit in goods was £3.3 billion, the surplus on services £904 million.
On the basis of these figures, it is not unreasonable to surmise that, far from reducing the National Debt, the coalition is in fact increasing it. A flat-lining economy means that government revenue is stalled. Rising inflation this month causes increases in welfare payments to kick in next year. The debacle of tuition fees has led to the great majority of institutions of further education electing to charge the maximum for their courses, thereby requiring higher and higher lending by the government to students who are plunged further and further into the personal debt that Cameron affects to scorn.
Many of the government’s policies for cutting expenditure have proved to be so ill-conceived that they result in increased expense for smaller return. The savings that Osborne – like all in-coming Chancellors before him – was determined to make by cutting “waste” have proved to be a fantasy, as Osborne’s predecessors also found. And of course Cameron decided to add the excursion into Libya to the continuing unwinnable war in Afghanistan, at far greater cost than the government is prepared to divulge. The pain that has so far been inflicted on the electorate through cuts in public services and welfare has not been matched by any visible reduction in government borrowing. Ed Miliband ought to start using a mantra of his own, that “as usual Labour will have to come in after the Tories to clear up the mess”.
The pity of it is that Labour has not sought to put clearer ground between itself and the coalition. Miliband and Ed Balls have done little to discourage the belief that, had they been in government, they would have pursued similar policies of slash and burn, only slower. But is the reduction of the deficit and the National Debt so desirable or indeed at all necessary?
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who praised Gordon Brown’s leadership of Europe’s handling of the 2008-09 recession and who remains a trenchant critic of present policies pursued in both Washington and London, wrote that the Republican Party in the US “never cared about the deficit – not a bit. It has always been nothing but a club with which to beat down opposition to an ideological goal, namely the dissolution of the welfare state. They’re not interested, at all, in a genuine deficit-reduction deal if it does not serve that goal” [New York Times, June 24th 2011]. Looking at Andrew Lansley’s ham-fisted assault on the NHS and the coalition’s handling of education, the police, the BBC, local government and other public services, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the recently posited links between the Tories and the Tea Party go a lot further than agreement about fiscal policy.
Cameron and Osborne would do well to mark Keynes’ phrase “the paradox of thrift”. Keynes anticipated the error that Cameron excised from his conference speech at the last minute, that if people eschew spending in a recession (as Cameron almost advocated) the fall in demand leads to a fall in activity and so a recession becomes a depression. If the government doesn’t spend on promoting growth, it will have to spend more on saving the unemployed and their dependents from penury. This is the fundamental error that the Irish government committed last year and that the Greek government is sliding into now. And the people don’t thank their governments for making such poor judgments.
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