Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Chances are that you have learned rather a lot about Huawei. That the Chinese giant is one of the world’s most controversial companies. That security experts, those people we pay to be paranoid on our behalf, warn its telecoms kit could be used by Beijing to spy on us. That Theresa May was begged by cabinet colleagues to keep the firm well away from our 5G network – yet ignored them. And that one or more senior ministers were so eager to prove their concern for national security that they leaked details of their meeting, thus breaching national security.
So you can already guess what will happen when Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, meets May and her foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, on Wednesday. Once the pleasantries about Harry and Meghan’s baby are over, top of America’s agenda will be to warn No 10 of the threat Huawei poses to British privacy – and to restate that Washington may retaliate by freezing London out of its intelligence network.
Maybe you recall whistleblower Edward Snowden and his revelations, published in this paper, about how US surveillance services are themselves harvesting millions of people’s phone calls and internet usage. Or possibly you are too busy gasping at the haplessness with which a Conservative-run government has allowed itself to be dragged into an escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing. Many are the questions raised by this affair, but among the largest is one I have not seen asked. Namely, where is Britain’s Huawei? How does one of the world’s most advanced economies end up without any major telecoms equipment maker of its own, and having to buy the vital stuff from a company that enjoys, according to the FBI, strong links with both the Chinese Communist party and the People’s Liberation Army?
Well, the answer is that the UK did have one. It was one of the largest and most famous industrial companies in the world. And it was finally killed off within the lifetime of every person reading this article, just over a decade ago. It was called the General Electric Company, or GEC, and the story of how it came to die explains and illuminates much of the mess the country is in today.
At its height, in the early 80s, GEC was not a company at all. It was an empire comprising around 180 different firms and employing about 250,000 people. It built everything from x-ray machines to ships, and it was huge in telecoms and defence electronics. At the helm was Arnold Weinstock, who took the reins in 1963 and spent the next three decades building it into a colossus, securing his place as postwar Britain’s most renowned industrialist.
The son of Jewish Polish immigrants, Weinstock never quite slotted into his role in the British establishment. He was known to be fanatical about cost-cutting, terrible at managing people, and only really lit up by breeding racehorses and visiting Milan’s La Scala opera house. Journalists visiting his Mayfair headquarters found the carpet threadbare and the paint peeling off the walls. A correspondent for the Economist more used to convivial three-bottle lunches with captains of industry came away complaining that GEC’s guests “have never been known to receive so much as a glass of water”.
That Economist profile was headlined Lord of Dullest Virtue, which sums up how both boss and business were seen: steadily profitable yet cautious and utterly unfashionable in the Britain of the 80s, which fancied a turbocharge. Weinstock went unloved by Margaret Thatcher, who preferred the corporate-raiding asset-stripper James Hanson (or Lord Moneybags, as he was dubbed). The post-Big Bang City bankers glanced at GEC’s vast spread of unglamorous businesses, out of step in an era of specialisation, and its shy boss better suited to a Rhineland boardroom – and buried both in plump-vowelled disdain.
Perhaps the pinstriped jeering got to Weinstock. Even as he protested “we’re not a company to render excitement”, he too began indulging in the 1980s business culture of “if it moves, buy it”. Between 1988 and 1998, academics found that GEC did no fewer than 79 “major restructuring events”: buying or selling units, or setting up joint ventures. But it was after Weinstock stepped down in 1996 that all hell broke loose. His replacement was an accountant, George Simpson, who had made his name, as the Guardian sniffed, “selling Rover to the Germans”. The new finance director, John Mayo, came from the merchant-banking world detested by Weinstock. Together the two men looked at the giant cash pile salted away by their predecessor – and set about spending it, and then some.
They sold the old businesses and bought shiny new ones; they flogged off dowdy and snapped up exciting. In just one financial year, 1999-2000, they bought no fewer than 15 companies, from America to Australia. Suddenly, GEC – or Marconi, as the rump was rebranded – was beloved by the bankers, who marvelled at the commissions coming their way, and the reporters, who had headlines to write.
Then came the dotcom bust, and the new purchases went south. A company that had been trading at £12.50 a share was now worth only four pence a pop. In the mid-2000s, Marconi’s most vital client, BT, passed it over for a contract that went instead to … Huawei. Weinstock didn’t live to see the death of his beloved firm but among his last reported remarks was: “I’d like to string [Simpson and Mayo] up from a high tree and let them swing there for a long time.”
This is not a story about genius versus idiocy, let alone good against evil. Weinstock was not quite as dull as made out, nor did he avoid all errors. But it is one of the most important episodes in recent British history – because it highlights the clash between two business cultures. On the one hand is Weinstock, building an institution over decades; on the other is the frenetic wheeler-dealing of Simpson and Mayo, mesmerised by quarterly figures and handing shareholders a fast buck. The road GEC took is the one also taken by ICI and other household names. It is also the one opted for by Britain as a whole, whose political class decided it cared neither who owned our industrial giants or venerable banks or Fleet Street newspapers, nor what they did with them. That is why our capitalism is today dominated by unsavoury, get-rich-quick merchants in the Philip Green mould.
Firms such as GEC and ICI used to invest heavily in research and development, notes Sheffield University’s pro-vice-chancellor for innovation, Richard Jones. Now the UK has been overtaken in R&D by all major western competitors. Even China, a vastly poorer economy in terms of GDP per capita, is more research-intensive than the UK.
Now Britons laud businessmen such as James Dyson who make most of their stuff in Asia. As a result, we rely on the rest of the world to come here and buy our assets. And even on something as relatively simple as telecoms equipment, we can’t help but be pulled into other countries’ strategic battles.
Showing posts with label Dyson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dyson. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 May 2019
Thursday, 24 January 2019
The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything
Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power. by Anand Giridharadas in The Guardian
A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their services as repairmen.
When the fruits of change have fallen on the US in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three-and-a-half decades’ worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Globally, over the same period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people – saw 12% of it.
That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives. For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992. The country has had a “culinary renaissance”, as one publication puts it, one farmers’ market and Whole Foods store at a time – but it has failed to improve the nutrition of most people, with the incidence of obesity and related conditions rising over time.
The tools for becoming an entrepreneur appear to be more accessible than ever, for the student who learns coding online or the Uber driver – but the share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s. America has birthed both a wildly successful online book superstore, Amazon, and another company, Google, that has scanned more than 25m books for public use – but illiteracy has remained stubbornly in place, and the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades. The government has more data at its disposal and more ways of talking and listening to citizens – but only a quarter as many people find it trustworthy as did in the tempestuous 1960s.
Meanwhile, the opportunity to get ahead has been transformed from a shared reality to a perquisite of already being ahead. Among Americans born in 1940, those raised at the top of the upper middle class and the bottom of the lower middle class shared a roughly 90% chance of realising the so-called American dream of ending up better off than their parents. Among Americans born in 1984 and maturing into adulthood today, the new reality is split-screen. Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70% chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in need of elevation, have a 35% chance of climbing above their parents’ station. And it is not only progress and money that the fortunate monopolise: rich American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other country, now live 15 years longer than poor American men, who endure only as long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.
Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. Perhaps this is why we hear constant condemnation of “the system”, for it is the system that people expect to turn fortuitous developments into societal progress. Instead, the system – in America and across much of the world – has been organised to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10% of humanity have come to hold 85% of the planet’s wealth. New data published this week by Oxfam showed that the world’s 2,200 billionaires grew 12% wealthier in 2018, while the bottom half of humanity got 11% poorer. It is no wonder, given these facts, that the voting public in the US (and elsewhere) seems to have turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the centre of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news. There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken, that the system has to change.
Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. (We see you, Koch brothers!) But in recent years a great many fortunate Americans have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: they have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.
For the most part, these initiatives are not democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favour the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo – and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win – are the secret to redressing the injustices. Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviours from an age of inequality. Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through “win-win” initiatives such as “green bonds” and “impact investing”. Tech companies such as Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions.
Conferences and ideas festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business – such as the World Economic Forum, which is under way in Davos, Switzerland, this week – host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders” who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back” – regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Elite networking forums such as the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest – rather than, say, public regulation – is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them.
A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their services as repairmen.
When the fruits of change have fallen on the US in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three-and-a-half decades’ worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Globally, over the same period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people – saw 12% of it.
That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives. For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992. The country has had a “culinary renaissance”, as one publication puts it, one farmers’ market and Whole Foods store at a time – but it has failed to improve the nutrition of most people, with the incidence of obesity and related conditions rising over time.
The tools for becoming an entrepreneur appear to be more accessible than ever, for the student who learns coding online or the Uber driver – but the share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s. America has birthed both a wildly successful online book superstore, Amazon, and another company, Google, that has scanned more than 25m books for public use – but illiteracy has remained stubbornly in place, and the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades. The government has more data at its disposal and more ways of talking and listening to citizens – but only a quarter as many people find it trustworthy as did in the tempestuous 1960s.
Meanwhile, the opportunity to get ahead has been transformed from a shared reality to a perquisite of already being ahead. Among Americans born in 1940, those raised at the top of the upper middle class and the bottom of the lower middle class shared a roughly 90% chance of realising the so-called American dream of ending up better off than their parents. Among Americans born in 1984 and maturing into adulthood today, the new reality is split-screen. Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70% chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in need of elevation, have a 35% chance of climbing above their parents’ station. And it is not only progress and money that the fortunate monopolise: rich American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other country, now live 15 years longer than poor American men, who endure only as long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.
Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. Perhaps this is why we hear constant condemnation of “the system”, for it is the system that people expect to turn fortuitous developments into societal progress. Instead, the system – in America and across much of the world – has been organised to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10% of humanity have come to hold 85% of the planet’s wealth. New data published this week by Oxfam showed that the world’s 2,200 billionaires grew 12% wealthier in 2018, while the bottom half of humanity got 11% poorer. It is no wonder, given these facts, that the voting public in the US (and elsewhere) seems to have turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the centre of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news. There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken, that the system has to change.
Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. (We see you, Koch brothers!) But in recent years a great many fortunate Americans have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: they have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.
For the most part, these initiatives are not democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favour the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo – and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win – are the secret to redressing the injustices. Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviours from an age of inequality. Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through “win-win” initiatives such as “green bonds” and “impact investing”. Tech companies such as Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions.
Conferences and ideas festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business – such as the World Economic Forum, which is under way in Davos, Switzerland, this week – host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders” who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back” – regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Elite networking forums such as the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest – rather than, say, public regulation – is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them.
Bill Clinton and Richard Branson at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York in 2006. Photograph: Tina Fineberg/AP
This genre of elites believes and promotes the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.
This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and thinktanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls “thought leaders”, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.
The elites of MarketWorld often speak in a language of “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” – language more typically associated with protest barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left with the inescapable fact that even as these elites have done much to help, they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average American’s life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the US’s institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public’s trust.
One of the towering figures in this new approach to changing the world is the former US president Bill Clinton. After leaving office in 2001, he came to champion, through his foundation and his annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York, a mode of public-private world improvement that brought together actors like Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation and McDonald’s, sometimes with a governmental partner, to solve big problems in ways plutocrats could get on board with.
After the populist eruption that resulted in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US election, I asked the former president what he thought lay behind the surge of public anger. “The pain and road rage we see reflected in the election has been building a long time,” he said. He thought the anger “is being fed in part by the feeling that the most powerful people in the government, economy and society no longer care about them or look down on them. They want to become part of our progress toward shared opportunities, shared stability and shared prosperity.” But when it came to his proposed solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector and nongovernment organisations to make it better.”
In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not. The public’s anger, of course, has been directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene, on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed, uncared for and scorned.
What people have been rejecting in the US – as well as in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere – was, in their view, rule by global elites who put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbours and fellow citizens. These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people 10 miles to the east or west. Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained over them – whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their children’s school. What they did not appreciate was the world being changed without them.
Which raises a question for all of us: are we ready to hand over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?
There is no denying that today’s American elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolise progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken – many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if society were working right. It is vital that we try to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking – and perhaps abetting – of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also important to understand how the elites see the world, so that we might better assess the merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.
There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation. One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is what it is, the system is what it is, the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist, and the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that elite helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but reassures itself that at least it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this sort of change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes – it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform.
But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that doing so not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are. After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public’s anger at being excluded from progress. It improves the image of the winners. By using private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing. There is no question that the outpouring of elite-led social change in our era does great good and soothes pain and saves lives. But we should also recall Oscar Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an aggravation of the difficulty”. More than a century ago, in an age of churn like our own, he wrote: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
This genre of elites believes and promotes the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.
This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and thinktanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls “thought leaders”, its own language, and even its own territory – including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.
The elites of MarketWorld often speak in a language of “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” – language more typically associated with protest barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left with the inescapable fact that even as these elites have done much to help, they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average American’s life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the US’s institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public’s trust.
One of the towering figures in this new approach to changing the world is the former US president Bill Clinton. After leaving office in 2001, he came to champion, through his foundation and his annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York, a mode of public-private world improvement that brought together actors like Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation and McDonald’s, sometimes with a governmental partner, to solve big problems in ways plutocrats could get on board with.
After the populist eruption that resulted in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US election, I asked the former president what he thought lay behind the surge of public anger. “The pain and road rage we see reflected in the election has been building a long time,” he said. He thought the anger “is being fed in part by the feeling that the most powerful people in the government, economy and society no longer care about them or look down on them. They want to become part of our progress toward shared opportunities, shared stability and shared prosperity.” But when it came to his proposed solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector and nongovernment organisations to make it better.”
In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not. The public’s anger, of course, has been directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene, on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed, uncared for and scorned.
What people have been rejecting in the US – as well as in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere – was, in their view, rule by global elites who put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbours and fellow citizens. These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people 10 miles to the east or west. Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained over them – whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their children’s school. What they did not appreciate was the world being changed without them.
Which raises a question for all of us: are we ready to hand over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?
There is no denying that today’s American elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolise progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken – many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if society were working right. It is vital that we try to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking – and perhaps abetting – of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also important to understand how the elites see the world, so that we might better assess the merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.
There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation. One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is what it is, the system is what it is, the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist, and the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that elite helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but reassures itself that at least it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this sort of change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes – it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform.
But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that doing so not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are. After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public’s anger at being excluded from progress. It improves the image of the winners. By using private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing. There is no question that the outpouring of elite-led social change in our era does great good and soothes pain and saves lives. But we should also recall Oscar Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an aggravation of the difficulty”. More than a century ago, in an age of churn like our own, he wrote: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images
Wilde’s formulation may sound extreme to modern ears. How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm. In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. Society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.
The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we observe all around: powerful people fighting to “change the world” in ways that essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an indefensible distribution of influence, resources and tools. Is there a better way?
The secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a research and policy organisation that works on behalf of the world’s richest countries, has compared the prevailing elite posture to that of the fictional 19th-century Italian aristocrat Tancredi Falconeri, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who declares: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If this view is correct, then much of today’s charity and social innovation and buy-one-give-one marketing may not be measures of reform so much as forms of conservative self-defence – measures that protect elites from more menacing change. Among the kinds of issues being sidelined, the OECD leader wrote, are “rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the education and of the values we transmit to future generations.” Elites, he wrote, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all”. The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change – often with the passive assent of those most in need of it.
It is fitting that an era marked by these tendencies should culminate in the election of Donald Trump. He is at once an exposer, an exploiter and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change. He tapped, as few before him successfully had, into a widespread intuition that elites were phonily claiming to be doing what was best for most Americans. He exploited that intuition by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing most of that anger not at elites, but at the most marginalised and vulnerable Americans. And he came to incarnate the very fraud that had fuelled his rise, and that he had exploited. He became, like the elites he assailed, the establishment figure who falsely casts himself as a renegade. He became the rich, educated man who styles himself as the ablest protector of the poor and uneducated – and who insists, against all evidence, that his interests have nothing to do with the change he seeks. He became the chief salesman for the theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful him is best for the powerless too. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust.
One thing that unites those who voted for Trump and those who despaired at his being elected – and the same might be said of those for and against Brexit – is a sense that the country requires transformational reform. The question we confront is whether moneyed elites, who already rule the roost in the economy and exert enormous influence in the corridors of political power, should be allowed to continue their conquest of social change and of the pursuit of greater equality. The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.
What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves. Yes, the American government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled. We must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labour, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security and dignity in old age.
Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis. When we see through the myths that foster this misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. It will once again be possible to improve the world without permission slips from the powerful.
Wilde’s formulation may sound extreme to modern ears. How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm. In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. Society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.
The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we observe all around: powerful people fighting to “change the world” in ways that essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an indefensible distribution of influence, resources and tools. Is there a better way?
The secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a research and policy organisation that works on behalf of the world’s richest countries, has compared the prevailing elite posture to that of the fictional 19th-century Italian aristocrat Tancredi Falconeri, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who declares: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If this view is correct, then much of today’s charity and social innovation and buy-one-give-one marketing may not be measures of reform so much as forms of conservative self-defence – measures that protect elites from more menacing change. Among the kinds of issues being sidelined, the OECD leader wrote, are “rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the education and of the values we transmit to future generations.” Elites, he wrote, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all”. The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change – often with the passive assent of those most in need of it.
It is fitting that an era marked by these tendencies should culminate in the election of Donald Trump. He is at once an exposer, an exploiter and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change. He tapped, as few before him successfully had, into a widespread intuition that elites were phonily claiming to be doing what was best for most Americans. He exploited that intuition by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing most of that anger not at elites, but at the most marginalised and vulnerable Americans. And he came to incarnate the very fraud that had fuelled his rise, and that he had exploited. He became, like the elites he assailed, the establishment figure who falsely casts himself as a renegade. He became the rich, educated man who styles himself as the ablest protector of the poor and uneducated – and who insists, against all evidence, that his interests have nothing to do with the change he seeks. He became the chief salesman for the theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful him is best for the powerless too. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust.
One thing that unites those who voted for Trump and those who despaired at his being elected – and the same might be said of those for and against Brexit – is a sense that the country requires transformational reform. The question we confront is whether moneyed elites, who already rule the roost in the economy and exert enormous influence in the corridors of political power, should be allowed to continue their conquest of social change and of the pursuit of greater equality. The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.
What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves. Yes, the American government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled. We must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labour, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security and dignity in old age.
Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis. When we see through the myths that foster this misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. It will once again be possible to improve the world without permission slips from the powerful.
Sunday, 14 October 2018
What price the wisdom of Luke Johnson, when his own company Patisserie Valerie tanks?
Catherine Bennett in The Guardian
The Patisserie Valerie chief should look to himself before lecturing others again
The Patisserie Valerie chief should look to himself before lecturing others again
Self-styled ‘risk-taker’ Luke Johnson at a branch of Patisserie Valerie in London.
‘Unfortunately,” Luke Johnson wrote recently, “financial illiteracy permeates society from top to bottom. Too many ordinary people do not understand mortgages, pensions, insurance, loans or investing.”
Johnson, the entrepreneur whose biggest asset, Patisserie Valerie, now needs bailing out, was being generous. Even after the 2008 financial crisis confirmed that corporate incompetence warranted unwavering public scrutiny, too many ordinary people remain equally ignorant about the operations and capabilities of business leaders, even those, like Mr Johnson, whose influence extends far beyond his imperilled patisserie company.
Some of us, inexcusably, even struggle with the basic jargon of “black hole”. As in: “The owner of Patisserie Valerie has been plunged into financial crisis after it revealed a multimillion pound accounting black hole.” Is it the same sort of black hole that astonished managers at Carillion, following a “deterioration in cashflows”? Or an industry synonym for the “material shortfall” disclosed by the Patisserie Valerie board, “between the reported financial status and the current financial status of the business”.
Either way, does the black hole’s existence mean that Mr Johnson must also be financially illiterate? Or is that question better addressed to Patisserie Valerie’s finance chief, Chris Marsh, with whom Johnson has worked since 2006? Marsh was arrested by the police, then released on bail.
Regrettably, at the very moment when an ordinary person struggles to comprehend how £28m in May became minus £10m by October, and why one creditor, the HMRC, should be pursuing an unpaid tax bill of £1.4m – and what that tells us about the company’s leadership – it appears that Mr Johnson is taking a break from his weekly newspaper column. Its absence is the more acute, now that its author, expert on subjects such as red tape, Brexit and other people’s incompetence, has also fallen silent on Twitter; and his popular personal website seems, at the time of writing, to have vanished. With luck, it won’t be too long before he is sharing details of his mercy dash on Evan Davis’s The Bottom Line: “Providing insight into business from the people at the top.”
‘Unfortunately,” Luke Johnson wrote recently, “financial illiteracy permeates society from top to bottom. Too many ordinary people do not understand mortgages, pensions, insurance, loans or investing.”
Johnson, the entrepreneur whose biggest asset, Patisserie Valerie, now needs bailing out, was being generous. Even after the 2008 financial crisis confirmed that corporate incompetence warranted unwavering public scrutiny, too many ordinary people remain equally ignorant about the operations and capabilities of business leaders, even those, like Mr Johnson, whose influence extends far beyond his imperilled patisserie company.
Some of us, inexcusably, even struggle with the basic jargon of “black hole”. As in: “The owner of Patisserie Valerie has been plunged into financial crisis after it revealed a multimillion pound accounting black hole.” Is it the same sort of black hole that astonished managers at Carillion, following a “deterioration in cashflows”? Or an industry synonym for the “material shortfall” disclosed by the Patisserie Valerie board, “between the reported financial status and the current financial status of the business”.
Either way, does the black hole’s existence mean that Mr Johnson must also be financially illiterate? Or is that question better addressed to Patisserie Valerie’s finance chief, Chris Marsh, with whom Johnson has worked since 2006? Marsh was arrested by the police, then released on bail.
Regrettably, at the very moment when an ordinary person struggles to comprehend how £28m in May became minus £10m by October, and why one creditor, the HMRC, should be pursuing an unpaid tax bill of £1.4m – and what that tells us about the company’s leadership – it appears that Mr Johnson is taking a break from his weekly newspaper column. Its absence is the more acute, now that its author, expert on subjects such as red tape, Brexit and other people’s incompetence, has also fallen silent on Twitter; and his popular personal website seems, at the time of writing, to have vanished. With luck, it won’t be too long before he is sharing details of his mercy dash on Evan Davis’s The Bottom Line: “Providing insight into business from the people at the top.”
Happily, as others have noted, some of Mr Johnson’s earlier columns have addressed related issues such as, recently, “a business beginner’s guide to tried and tested swindles”. Watch out, he warns, for non-payment of creditors, dodgy advisers and attempts to overcomplicate things, so as to baffle the many people – unlike himself – who “do not understand the technicalities of investing or accounting”.
Inevitably, that widespread ignorance makes it hard to judge how much of Johnson’s wide-ranging, pre-existing advice, which has recently focused on Brexit, we can safely discard as, if not consistently hilarious, worthless. His chairmanship of Patisserie Valerie has, after all, repeatedly been cited, in the same way as Dyson’s profits and Tim Martin’s pubs, as the main reason to listen to him deprecate the EU, with his own achievements (pre-black hole), proving that “this is a great country in which to do business and prosper”.
Although Johnson is no different from other business celebrities, such as Dyson, Branson and Trump, in having parlayed business success into guru status, he has, more unusually, further set himself up as a kind of entrepreneur-moralist, with a biblical line in rebukes. Here he is, against – I think – overpaid government regulators: “Political leaders who want to foster world-beating companies must act decisively and, as with any transformation, slash off the gangrenous limbs without mercy.” Critics of rich people are warned: “Envy is a ruinous trait – as well as one of the deadly sins – and a sordid national characteristic.”
Inevitably, that widespread ignorance makes it hard to judge how much of Johnson’s wide-ranging, pre-existing advice, which has recently focused on Brexit, we can safely discard as, if not consistently hilarious, worthless. His chairmanship of Patisserie Valerie has, after all, repeatedly been cited, in the same way as Dyson’s profits and Tim Martin’s pubs, as the main reason to listen to him deprecate the EU, with his own achievements (pre-black hole), proving that “this is a great country in which to do business and prosper”.
Although Johnson is no different from other business celebrities, such as Dyson, Branson and Trump, in having parlayed business success into guru status, he has, more unusually, further set himself up as a kind of entrepreneur-moralist, with a biblical line in rebukes. Here he is, against – I think – overpaid government regulators: “Political leaders who want to foster world-beating companies must act decisively and, as with any transformation, slash off the gangrenous limbs without mercy.” Critics of rich people are warned: “Envy is a ruinous trait – as well as one of the deadly sins – and a sordid national characteristic.”
Like any half-decent moralist, he alternates rants with hints for personal salvation, through thrift, reliability and, again, financial literacy: “I am surprised how many senior managers I meet cannot read a cashflow statement.”
By way of authority, even Johnson’s less scorching capitalist homilies are littered with references to the usual suspects – Napoleon, Samuel Smiles and Marcus Aurelius – less usually, the scriptures and “the 19th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer”, not forgetting, shamelessly, Ayn Rand. “Those who possess willpower,” Johnson echoes, “seize the day and actively control their destiny.” Less gifted individuals are dismissed as lazy idiots, fools, inferiors who will never get the chance to close down a chain of well-regarded bookshops or, as now, bail out their own patisseries.
That Johnson should, on the back of this stuff, and the cake shops, have risen to yet greater prominence as a notable Vote Leave backer, his blessing sought by Theresa May, is perhaps no more absurd than, earlier, was David Cameron’s promotion of the Topshop brute, Philip Green, or elevation of JCB’s Anthony Bamford (previously fined by the EU). The myth of the disinterested entrepreneur-consultant seems ineradicable.
In Brexit, Johnson and his like-minded entrepreneurs have, however, discovered a yet more rewarding platform on which to portray their regulation-averse interests as a purely patriotic project.
Entrepreneurs, Johnson has written, on this favourite subject, are “the anarchists of the business world. Their mission is to overthrow the existing order.” Every entrepreneur is “a disruptor and a libertarian”, or would be “if the state sets a sensible framework and gets out of the way”. He explains that the word “chancer” properly describes risk-takers like him, who are willing to make mistakes, probably through excessive impetuosity, or as others might think of it, recklessness. “Probably the most common and devastating mistake I’ve made,” he wrote, “is to choose the wrong business partners.” As for abiding by the rules of the game: “It is the nature of risk-takers to be in a ferocious hurry to become successful, which frequently means cutting corners.”
Thus, even before last week’s disclosures about Patisserie Valerie, Johnson’s own columns amounted to the best possible case for ignoring the entrepreneur lobby on Brexit – indeed, on every subject other than their own, risk-taking genius.
By way of authority, even Johnson’s less scorching capitalist homilies are littered with references to the usual suspects – Napoleon, Samuel Smiles and Marcus Aurelius – less usually, the scriptures and “the 19th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer”, not forgetting, shamelessly, Ayn Rand. “Those who possess willpower,” Johnson echoes, “seize the day and actively control their destiny.” Less gifted individuals are dismissed as lazy idiots, fools, inferiors who will never get the chance to close down a chain of well-regarded bookshops or, as now, bail out their own patisseries.
That Johnson should, on the back of this stuff, and the cake shops, have risen to yet greater prominence as a notable Vote Leave backer, his blessing sought by Theresa May, is perhaps no more absurd than, earlier, was David Cameron’s promotion of the Topshop brute, Philip Green, or elevation of JCB’s Anthony Bamford (previously fined by the EU). The myth of the disinterested entrepreneur-consultant seems ineradicable.
In Brexit, Johnson and his like-minded entrepreneurs have, however, discovered a yet more rewarding platform on which to portray their regulation-averse interests as a purely patriotic project.
Entrepreneurs, Johnson has written, on this favourite subject, are “the anarchists of the business world. Their mission is to overthrow the existing order.” Every entrepreneur is “a disruptor and a libertarian”, or would be “if the state sets a sensible framework and gets out of the way”. He explains that the word “chancer” properly describes risk-takers like him, who are willing to make mistakes, probably through excessive impetuosity, or as others might think of it, recklessness. “Probably the most common and devastating mistake I’ve made,” he wrote, “is to choose the wrong business partners.” As for abiding by the rules of the game: “It is the nature of risk-takers to be in a ferocious hurry to become successful, which frequently means cutting corners.”
Thus, even before last week’s disclosures about Patisserie Valerie, Johnson’s own columns amounted to the best possible case for ignoring the entrepreneur lobby on Brexit – indeed, on every subject other than their own, risk-taking genius.
Friday, 2 November 2012
Met police corporate sponsorship: how about Samsung Yard?
'With the break-up of the UK imminent, Scotland Yard is clearly an inappropriate name. Why not Samsung Yard?' Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
The Metropolitan police, one of the most sclerotic institutions in Britain, is at last making strides to join the modern world where money is short and everyone has to shape up or ship out. As well as considering the sale of New Scotland Yard in central London, which will make a very nice luxury hotel or HQ for a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund, and moving to a refurbished terraced house in Peckham, it is also now seeking to attract sponsors, with donors supplying an increasing amount of its equipment.
There are the usual leftwing critics (Boris Johnson would have a ruder word for them) who carp that this will undermine the independence of the police. But they need to get real. Policing is expensive and our police will know where the red lines have to be drawn to ensure that their view of McDonald's is not influenced by the fact that it is paying for police mountain bikes, or that the policing of matches involving Chelsea or Queens Park Rangers is not affected by the fact those clubs have kindly given the police much-needed football shirts.
Scotland Yard robustly defends the donations, saying it has a "long history" of working with commercial partners to tackle crime. It's time to move that history along. There is no reason why many aspects of police work shouldn't be paid for by commercial organisations, following the example of UK Payments Administration Ltd, which has donated £11.9m to fund the police's dedicated cheque and plastic crime investigation unit.
Let's start thinking creatively about this and get more companies involved. WH Smith could sponsor police notepads and pencils; Dyson could pay for anti-litter units; Yale locks would be an obvious sponsor for police units dealing with burglaries; Virgin could underwrite the Flying Squad; Ann Summers could produce branded handcuffs and truncheons; the Antiques Roadshow could sponsor the art theft unit; Visa and Mastercard will want to compete for the plastic card crime contract; there must be mattress companies that would want to sponsor padded cells (with extra pocket springs); and do Black Marias really have to be black – why not orange (EasyJail)?
New New Scotland Yard, down in Peckham, could itself be sponsored. With the break-up of the UK imminent, Scotland Yard is clearly an inappropriate name. Why not Samsung Yard? And why not brand individual police stations? Instead of Paddington Green, why not Paddington Bear?
Police personnel wear drab uniforms and for some bizarre reason walk around with their fingers tucked into their tunics. Why not redesign the uniforms and cover them in stylish logos like Formula One drivers? They will look and feel better about themselves, and their forces will be making some desperately needed dosh.
This isn't rocket science. It's simple commercial thinking that will transform the face of the police in this country. As a nation we have become fearful of change and commercialisation, losing out to more innovative countries in Asia and South America which don't have hang-ups about keeping public service and tawdry commerce separate. There are no Chinese walls in China! Unless we wake up, we will be eaten by the Asian tiger and the South American (subs – please fill in appropriate animal). The police, in embracing the need to find sponsors and reduce their dependence on the state, are showing what is possible. Now for the fire service … or rather the EDF fire service.
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