Category: Business

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

The Hay Book Festival 2024: big money, mushrooms and make-or-break elections

It’s election time UK. (And in India. And in South Africa.) We’re waiting in a decision in the Trump trial. And… it’s the Hay Book Festival. A good place to get a wider perspective on events.

Two superb investigate journalists, Carole Cadwalladr and Tom Burgis, began my day. They were talking to Oliver Bullough. Burgis’s book, ‘Cuckooland’, is all about money buying access and influence, at the highest level. Burgis’s anti-hero is ‘communications entrepreneur, philanthropist and thought leader’ (as his Foundation describes him), and major Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi.

He brought a defamation case, which he lost, against former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie. She had investigated his background and he didn’t like the attention. Legal action was something he could take on without a moment’s thought, which wasn’t true for Leslie. Nor was it true of the legal action taken against Burgis himself in another case, which he won, brought by the Kazakhstan-based Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC).

Carole Cadwalladr is well-known for her role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But in a defamation case brought by Brexit funder Arron Banks she lost and had an award of £1 million costs against her. Crowdfunding came to her rescue.

Money will buy you the service of London lawyers at £600 an hour. SLAPPS, standing for ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’, is an acronym which neatly sums up the way lawsuits are being used by the super-rich.

A whole new breed of super-rich arose out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today it involves oil and mining executives, mega-industrialists and indeed corporate lawyers across the globe. And, as they seek, and gain, influence, in the UK they can draw on Quintessentially, the ‘concierge’ services on one Ben Elliot, which acts as a broker for their much-paraded philanthropic instincts. Johnson elevated Elliot to the position of Tory party co-chair.

Just last month I was in Malaga, and admiring, if that’s the word, three super-yachts moored in the harbour. Status unknown, maybe for sale. The one-time owner of one was the co-founder of WhatsApp. Another, even grander, had been the plaything of a now-deceased Kazakh mining magnate.

My next event was amazingly and wonderfully different. The book: ‘Entangled Life’, by Merlin Sheldrake. Compare our brief lives and absurd ambitions with the rather longer life of plants, ‘which only made it out water 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi…’ If we didn’t have fungi today we’d be under piles of waste miles high. (Or piles of shit if you prefer.) The myriad species of fungi are our disposal agents. Sheldrake’s book is an award-winning bestseller and he is himself a mesmerising and fluent speaker. Seek him out. Read his book!

Thomas Halliday’s wonderful book, ‘Otherlands’, a ‘reverse’ history of the last 500 million years, had the same effect on me. Both books inculcate a sense of wonder at the longevity and complexity of life of our planet. But they also demand our humility. And remind us that, if we want to hang around for a while, we’d do better supporting our planet rather than taking it apart.

I was back in the crisis world of now for my final session, with Matthew D’Ancona talking to Sarah Churchwell, Matt Frei and Carole Calwalladr. Subject: the UK and US elections. From the Wood Wild Web (the maybe-not-always benign subterranean network by which the myriad strands of fungi link up our above-ground world of plants and trees) to the World Wide Web. To the internet. To social media. Cadwalladr highlighted the role of ‘influencers’, who are everywhere.

Frei preferred to focus on Fox News and their role in breaking down that broad consensus which has held the USA together for more than two hundred years – based around an acceptance of the constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, open to multiple interpretations but always operating through a trusted electoral system, and a Congress where both sides could talk, and on occasion work together.

Churchwell focused on a second-term Trump and how he would casually subvert this system, without remotely understanding himself what the consequences could be. Half of America believes that a Biden victory would be the end of democracy, half believes a Trump victory would be. Trump and indeed his acolytes such as Tim Scott refuse to say whether they will accept the result of the next election.

The UK election hardly got a look in. The Tories have shaken down to a rump where Grant Shapps is our defence minister. They’re easy about donations from the rich and powerful, and mercenary activities such as selling games of tennis with Boris, and dinner round at Michael Gove’s, for big sums. They’d like us to think this is the new normal.

I love the passion of Hay. We were a bunch, a mega-bunch, of serious and animated book lovers. It rained all day, but no one complained.

Heading home to Manchester

I was up in the Pennines last week, visiting Hebden Bridge, and overnighting in Heptonstall…

I am high above the valley and the streets are cobbled and steep. The sun is shining through a gentle drizzle, and a mother, holding a child in one hand and pushing a buggy with the other, stops for a moment on the slow uphill to the school. They are the only people in sight.

Round the corner is the octagonal Wesleyan chapel (no corners for the devil), a place of worship for 260 years, but not beyond the end of May after which there will be no more regular services. The grave of my great-great-grandfather rests alongside one wall.

All a far cry from street demos in France and Israel, the immigration bill in parliament, a new leader for the SNP. A far cry you would think from anywhere. But not with the help of public transport, of a train line which opened in 1840, from Manchester.

Down the hill and in half an hour I’m on my way, arriving just 45 minutes later, in a spectacular downpour. Manchester is associated with drizzle. Not today. I’m close to the site of the IRA bomb of 1996. New build everywhere. Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and the vast and overwhelming acres of indulgence of the new Arndale Centre. Along Deansgate and King Street, and many back streets, Victorian Manchester is still looking good, but not so Chancery Place, where my father as a solicitor ran his practice for fifty years. They’ve demolished the soot-blackened stone and the gargoyles I remember and in their stead they’ve squeezed a sixteen-storey all-glass abomination.

Manchester today has a confidence all its own. Morrissey, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Joy Division, Oasis, and more… they’ve all helped. United and City (in that order) likewise. Also good local governance, and a mayor, Andy Burnham, who leads from the front. It’s reclaimed its old sense of purpose, which it had all but lost when I was a child. Having the BBC over in Salford has helped.

Born and bred in Bramhall, just outside Manchester, it is my city, and it’s been my calling card, my way of establishing my credentials, in many conversations in many places around the world.

My great-grandfather had a tailoring business in Hebden Bridge, with branches in a number of Lancashire towns, and a base in Manchester itself. The train journey I took last week to and from Manchester was in every sense his lifeline, connecting to his suppliers and indirectly to the world.

I’ll let Manchester have the last word, the Manchester of my great-grandfather’s time. I’m quoting David Ayerst, biographer of the Manchester Guardian, as it was, writing fifty years ago:

‘Edwardian Manchester was still in an economic sense something like a city state. The ties [of its merchants] with New Orleans or Alexandria; with Constantinople, Hamburg, Calcutta and Shanghai were in many respects closer than with Birmingham or Newcastle… a still growing proportion of mankind were clothed from the stately warehouses that lined Portland Street.’

I’m inclined to think that given the disastrous failure of London to chart a course for the UK in our modern world we need to look again to Manchester.

The new buccaneers

A curious piece, tongue-in-cheek, but neat, in a recent edition of The Economist.

‘Mr Johnson understood intuitively that the financial crisis had ended the neoliberal consensus…No mere Trumpian wrecking ball he is trying to reshape globalisation in the mould of Britain’s buccaneering maritime past, rather than in the European Union’s bureaucratic pettifoggery.’

Buccaneering. How do you ‘buccaneer’ these days?

Container ships could be the new buccaneers. Where once we had tea clippers and cargo ships. We’ll need a bit of the old aggression, against Chinese and indeed the Americans if we’re to capture markets, and of course against our old friends, the Europeans. Piracy would help. Conquest shouldn’t be ruled out.

Or if that’s beyond us, overseas markets will least welcome a bit of the old imperial chutzpah. It will be as if we’d never been away.

The EU’s ‘bureaucratic pettifoggery’. But isn’t it what successful free trade requires, a bit of pettifoggery? Small print. A few regulations, so we’re all on the same page. In olden times, we wrote our own. It was easier then. (Yes, regulations need to be reined it: it was always thus.)

You need the high seas and a big reach if you’re to buccaneer. But ‘big reach’, also known as globalisation, isn’t really that fashionable at the moment, beyond our shores. Buy American is the watchword over the pond. China is focusing more on its internal market, and on its Belt and Road for which there’s no equivalent here in the West. China on its doorstep bludgeons with overwhelming economic power. We negotiate as best we can.

We had our own strong internal market, just twenty miles away over the Channel, twenty-eight countries strong, but we gave it up, and put stop-gaps and confusion in its place. And hide our confusion with hyperbole.

Liz Truss’s article on the Politico website back in March is a fine example. A few quotes:

‘We will work together to reshape the rules of global trade to reflect our core values…The U.K.’s values-driven policy has already delivered successes in trade negotiations….Just as free trade made the U.K. great in the 19th century, we can be even greater still in the 21st by becoming a global hub for services and digital trade.’

We’re back to being … buccaneers. And nowadays the world’s awash with buccaneers. We could find ourselves with brief spells of comparative advantage, where we outperform our rivals, or corner a niche in the market, only to find we’re overtaken as other countries seek to build advantage for themselves in the same areas, which could be digital, medical or services. As a mature economy we specialise at the high end. As other economies mature, so will they.

Free trade in the highly fluid modern world can’t remotely be compared with the 19th century as a driver of community prosperity. That was built on certainty, and the confidence born of certainty, and it was even then a long, rocky, risky and highly uncertain road. Politics in the wrong hands deals in simplicities. History hits you hard with a reminder of just how extraordinarily complex is the reality.

Strong communities and long supply lines can be a poor mix, with little connection between businesses tucked away in business parks and nearby towns and villages. Community in its widest sense requires shorter, more guaranteed lines of supply, with industries which can sell strongly into local markets, or into UK-wide markets, or indeed into EU-wide markets. We need a different and wiser mindset, which focuses in developing our UK and European markets, and which, while promoting trade with China, Japan, India and the ASEAN countries, avoids obsession.

We’ve also had Johnson’s 15th July ‘levelling up’ speech.

‘We are turning this country into a science superpower, doubling public investment in R and D to £22 billion and we want to use that lead to trigger more private sector investment and to level up across the country so that we have hubs or research and innovation like the one we are in today which is actually driving battery technology.’

All this is admirable. But is this government competent to deliver? Have we any reason save their bluster to believe them? Our best hope lies in the local mayors of cities lie Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, also Teesside. Labour and Tory – they do have the competence.

We simply have the wrong people in power to get close to addressing, let alone solving, the issues of our time. We’ve over the last twenty years seen the disappearance of men and women of calibre from our politics. Johnson has ensured that the old high-calibre politicians won’t touch his party. On the other side, Corbyn didn’t help. The way back isn’t proving easy.

A little bit of lobbying – revisited

(If you read my last post you might want to miss this. It is simply a shortened, and updated, version. Last time there was too much Adam Smith, however fascinating he might be.)

We have finally put austerity behind us. We’re no longer frightened of deficits, here or in the USA. $1.9 trillion is Biden’s rescue package, and then some. More than ever, in these times, we need financial probity. How government interacts with the private sector, in all its aspects, is a key issue for our time.

As a convenient reminder, we have the lobbying scandal involving Cameron and Greensill Capital. And in the last two days we learn that, in March last year, Boris Johnson was exchanging text messages with his friend and Tory supporter Sir James Dyson. We needed ventilators quickly, Sir James could provide, and Johnson promised (‘“I will fix it tomo!’) no negative tax implications for Dyson staff who came to the UK to help.

It was a time of crisis, Johnson argued in the House of Commons. That doesn’t excuse. It only exemplifies how government without proper supervision, of the kind exemplified by the government’s plans to reduce the scope of judicial review, can operate via back doors and personal contacts. Whether ‘cronyism’ is the appropriate word I’ll leave for the reader to judge.  

I’ll skip direct quotes from Adam Smith, but will include a pivotal quote from Jesse Norman’s book about Adam Smith: ‘Yet as technology spreads big data, insider knowledge, digital technologies, there are increasing dangers of a new tech-enabled crony capitalism: a self-reinforcing cycle in which greater insider power encourages the development of bent markets…’

What intrigues me is that Jesse Norman is a Tory MP and Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and like Cameron, an Old Etonian. He will, I trust, have been making his views on crony capitalism widely known.  (There was, quite co-incidentally, a curious spat between Cameron and Norman over House of Lords reform back in 2012.)

‘What me, guv?’ I imagined Cameron as saying. The game is so entrenched. Market forces as experienced by ordinary consumers are one thing.  Financial engineering and derivatives are another story. Begetters of boom and bust, and multiple shenanigans.

Greensill Capital, advocacy for which got Cameron into trouble, was a clever financial idea (I wondered about the term ‘ruse’) where business bills are settled immediately for a fee, assisting thereby with the issue of late payments.

Cameron, a humble politician earning a relative pittance, stood to make a lot of money. Big share options were on offer. I sense he simply got out of his depth. That’s the kindest thing one can say.

And finally (as I mentioned in my last post) …I was intrigued to see how the Daily Mail is trying to turn the lobbying scandal into a plot by Labour anti-Brexit insiders within the Civil Service trying to blacken the government. It goes with Palace ‘insiders’ telling us what really went at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral between Harry and Kate and Will.

As always with the Mail, don’t believe a word of it.

A little bit of lobbying on the side

Remember Philip Hammond desperately trying to balance the books as Chancellor? Now all the talk is of how foolish Osborne was to batten down for so long. And it looks as if Hammond wasted his time. Expansion and big rescue packages and capital spending are the order of the day. In the USA, the same. Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package. And big plans for infrastructure. The debate in the USA is whether it will cause inflation to get out of hand. The Economist is putting out dire warnings on the one hand – but supporting a big spending approach for the EU on the other.

How government interacts with the private sector will be more than ever in the spotlight. The lobbying scandal involving David Cameron and Greensill Capital is just one example of how this relationship can go wrong.

Adam Smith provides context. He tends to be associated, by way of a selective reading of The Wealth of Nations, with a freewheeling free-market philosophy. By which bad behaviours might be somehow balanced out by good. Not so, as his ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ reveals. ‘It carries within it a crucial Smithean insight, that innumerable human interactions can yield vast but entirely unintended collective consequences – social benefits, yes, but also social evils…’ (Jesse Norman, ‘Adam Smith, What He Thought And Why It Matters’)

There is a good, and ‘Smithean’, argument to be made as follows. In a commercial society we are all merchants. The pursuit of wealth is of itself a good thing (depending on how ‘wealth’ is defined). The desire for human betterment drives that process. War and violence have, for all of history, brought about division. Commerce binds us together.

But over-accumulation, growth for its own sake, inequality, the pursuit of self-interest, the handing-on of wealth from one generation to the next – wealth for its own sake and not as the driver of a society’s welfare – they are among the great enemies. The fact that David Cameron’s activities were ‘legal’ exemplifies, all the more, how easily the pursuit of wealth as an ultimate social good can be corrupted.

Jesse Norman, who is incidentally an Old Etonian, and Tory MP (read into that what you may), has an intriguing paragraph in his biography of Adam Smith: ‘Yet as technology spreads big data, insider knowledge, digital technologies, there are increasing dangers of a new tech-enabled crony capitalism: a self-reinforcing cycle in which greater insider power encourages the development of bent markets; these in turn create popular demands for more government regulation, create more complexity and opportunity for lobbying, a further boost to the power of insiders, and so on.’

‘What me, guv?’ I can imagine Cameron as saying. The game is so entrenched. We’re, many of us, wary believers in market capitalism, where market forces ‘drive prices down and quality up, and consumers have a very wide choice’, in Norman’s words. We’re talking of food, clothes, everyday items.

Financial engineering and derivatives are another story. Begetters of boom and bust, and multiple shenanigans. (They were of course unknown to Adam Smith.) Greensill Capital, advocacy for which got Cameron into trouble, was a clever financial idea (I wondered about the term ‘ruse’) where business bills are settled immediately for a fee, assisting thereby with the issue of late payments.

Now, as much if not more than ever, with big money and big contracts in play, we have a whole new raft of opportunities for crony capitalism, re-working old business and school networks, rent-seeking, inside knowledge, and conflicts of interest. More than ever we need to be wary – to be aware.

Heading off at a slight tangent there’s a paragraph from an American author*, writing on the subject of meritocracy, I’d like to quote: ‘Someone who wants an elite income … must do one of a narrowly constricted category of jobs, heavily concentrated in finance, management, law and medicine.’ Teaching, public service, ‘even engineering’ don’t get a look in. (How medicine and money came to be quite so conflated is a uniquely American story.)

Cameron, a humble politician earning a relative pittance, wanted to be part of that big-earning brigade, with big stock options on offer.

Many had a high regard for Cameron. He will be wondering how he surrendered it so easily.  

And finally …I’m intrigued to see how the Daily Mail is trying to turn the lobbying scandal into a plot by Labour anti-Brexit insiders within the Civil Service trying to blacken the government. It goes with Palace ‘insiders’ telling us what really went at the funeral between Harry and Kate and Will.

Don’t believe a word of it.

*Daniel Markovits, ‘The Meritocracy Trap’, quoted by Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books)

Fog and politics

A single bird was in unusual and glorious voice in thick fog at the top of the Common this early morning.  It’s the first day of February. I slowed my run, and listened. As if to a nightingale in the silence. Also this morning a coup in Myanmar, and by lunchtime indications that the South African version of the virus has touched down in the UK. We’ve incipient vaccine wars with the EU, who I want to support, but who’ve made fools of themselves, turning on Astra-Zeneca, and threatening UK supplies.

Back home, after breakfast I take refuge from all that’s happening and about to happen by putting, with my partner, Hazel, a few more pieces into our 1000-piece jigsaw. Jigsaws like early-morning runs (pilates for Hazel) can be surprisingly therapeutic.

I needed a little therapy. It’s a morning when the news gets you down. Might the answer be to walk away from it all? Does politics, as a discussion in the current edition of Prospect, has it, really matter? Academic Freya Johnston is pitched against old-school politician, Malcolm Rifkind.

Politics for Johnston is inseparable from the public dislike of politicians. ‘One reason that polls demonstrate indifference to politics is the public contempt for politicians.’ Rifkind accepts, as I do, that ‘normal people are more interested in their own well-being than by what happens on the national stage’. But on the plus side he quotes the vision of the politicians behind the launch of the NHS. Johnston ripostes that ‘rather, it responded to increasing social and cultural pressures’. Politics is of course the interplay between the two, politicians and public. Aneurin Bevan, who championed the NHS in parliament, was a good guy, and a hero. (We do need more like him.)

The exchange was depressing, with both sides reduced to quoting Jane Austen. Johnston needs reminding we are in a world of stark dualities, good and evil, compassion and cruelty, and, yes, liberal democracy and various forms of often brutal autocracy (and Trumpian shades inbetween). We can take nothing for granted. Public opinion does need to engage, whether it likes it or not.

Both the Economist (23rd January) and TLS (8th January) have featured a new book, ‘Out of the Ordinary’, by Marc Stears, which doesn’t shy away from voters’ disdain for politics and politicians. On the one hand we’ve the ‘technocrats’ of the Blair/Cameron era, on the other the ‘ideologues’ and zealotry of the Labour left. In both cases it’s ‘direction by others’. (Brexit has landed us instead with the zealotry of the Tory right, and their market obsessions.)

Stears argues for another approach, ‘the politics of the ordinary’. He likes the JB Priestley of ‘English Journey’. Nothing sentimental. Ditto George Orwell. We’re reminded of the Orwell aphorism that ‘to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle’. Community engagement is fundamental to the picture, but I’d argue it’s not enough. Nor is the top-down, vote-buying capital investment the Tories talk about.

A genuine change of direction won’t come about by asserting that good sense and communitarian spirit will somehow win out in the end. But it would be helped by connecting ordinary folk, the you and me, and the next road, and the estate beyond the main road, with the economic and business as well as the social life of a community.

It would require a revival of a style of local government and local engagement that underpinned our politics until quite recent times. It would also involve short as well as long supply lines. Local suppliers employing local people to provide goods produced at a local level, alongside local services. Creating a landscape, a literal landscape, of SMEs – small and medium-sized enterprises, with government money supporting local business in a way people can connect to.  

It’s a direction of travel, not an easy answer. And it doesn’t discount the need for political and economic expertise, elites if you will. But it does require, and here I’m with Stears, that elites aren’t self-referential and self-serving, that they’re always connected, and don’t automatically renew.

I’m not arguing we turn our backs of the global world, or that we shouldn’t trade with Japan or South Korea or even China, but we do need a fundamental shift in the balance.

In this context I can’t let Freya Johnson get away with her ridiculous statement that ‘indifference [to the business of government] isn’t necessarily something to be lamented. It might even be strength’.

A few old-style ‘tribunes of the people’ might help. Marcus Rashford as he might be in a few years time. Trade unionists, remember Ernie Bevin and Jim Callaghan, brought hard experience from street and factory floor to government. It’s not so easy these days, but it’s that kind of connection from the street level via councils and other assemblies right up to parliament and the Cabinet that we need. I’m not against the occasional toff – we just need to mix them up with a few folk who’ve cut their teeth at a local level, and can bring a certain street-fighting capability to the business of government.

The obfuscations of 24-hour news, the miseries of Murdoch and Fox Media, the oddities of the Daily Mail – we have to do better. We thought the half-truths of social media were bad enough. Then came alternative truths, with conspiracy theories hot on their heels. We need an entirely different route, and disengagement Freya-Johnston-style from the process would be utterly foolish.

She’s an easy target, Freya Johnston, and I should dwell on her. Best to end by repeating that Orwell aphorism, ‘to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle’.

Mill country – from Hebden Bridge to Stroud

[The first paragraphs of this blog originally appeared as the blog, ‘One cheer for enterprise and two for poor’. I’d taken my cue from EM Forster’s short book from 1950, Two Cheers for Democracy. I’ve decided rather late that both title and allusion are too obscure – but there still is a story to tell.]

Back in 1907 there was a creditors’ meeting in Manchester. A low-key winding-up. Not such an unusual occurrence. In this case it was ‘Mr Joseph Spencer, carrying on business… as tailor and outfitter’. He was my great-grandfather.

You saw an opportunity, you seized it, ‘set up shop’, a mill maybe – or literally a shop. That’s what Joseph Spencer did, in Hebden Bridge in Upper Calderdale, that hybrid seriously-Yorkshire but edging-Lancashire area which, with the Rochdale Canal sneaking through the Pennines, linked to Manchester as much as Halifax, and manufactured cotton goods (especially fustian) which traded on the Manchester Exchange.

In the 1890s he looked west, across the border, and opened further shops in Burnley, Accrington and Oldham, and in 1901 transferred his main business to Deansgate Arcade in Manchester. His son, my grandfather, Thomas, aged 22, stayed behind to run the Hebden Bridge business.

I will need to research further whether Joseph simply over-traded and ran out of money, or whether there was a wider slump. Either way, it’s in the nature of enterprise. Our lives run on enterprise, our own, or that of others. Small traders live on the edge, big businesses ossify. Get taken over, or in extremis, they collapse. Shipbuilding and steel. Coal. BHS, Arcadia, Debenhams.

My house in Stroud, in Gloucestershire, is next to the old Severn-Thames canal. An abundance of Cotswold wool, fast-flowing rivers in the ‘five valleys’ and, later, coal brought up the Severn, drove a multitude of mills, many of which, re-purposed, still survive.  It seems I can’t escape from mills, though it was wool in Stroud, and cotton (and especially fustian) in Hebden Bridge.

Across the canal from my house a mill turned out military uniforms, and a few yards to the west two mills co-existed with the railway viaduct which sweeps over both the canal and the river Frome. To the north, up on the hill, was the workhouse, a substantial structure, an ever-present reminder of how the wheel of fortune goes up, and also comes down.

It’s a peaceful landscape now. As indeed is Hebden Bridge. Both places, as I’m finding, have remarkable stories to tell. Once upon a time they were all energy, and noise, the endless working out of success and failure. All has leaked away downriver. (In Hebden Bridge’s case with an occasional big flood. The Frome in Stroud runs a deeper channel.) Downriver – and overseas.

There are many remarkable personal stories to tell. My great-grandfather’s being one. He was fortunate. He wasn’t brought low by his bankruptcy. But it’s a useful reminder to me (if Covid wasn’t enough!) how fickle fortune can be.

Hard truths about a hard Brexit

I’m helping making marmalade at the moment. Messy but satisfying. An early New Year diversion from Covid-19 and the Brexit-induced mess of our politics.

We’ve left, and Zenpolitics needs to put a marker down. This blog has been going eleven years, and it can’t let the Brexit Agreement pass without comment.

As a first and most basic proposition, we will achieve far more if we have the widest perspective – as citizens of Britain, of Europe and of the world. The one naturally folding into the other. We are foolish to think otherwise. Recent events represent a closing-in not an opening-out of our society, whatever the absurd and grandiose claims of the Johnson government.

Our Brexit divisions have often been compared to fractured personal relationships, where the only hope of coming together lies in attempting some understanding of the other side’s position.

I go along with that. It is after all what Zenpolitics espouses. But it’s hard when you’re dealing with a series of false promises, a disregard as it suits for truth and precedent. Michael Gove has expressed the hope that the agreement will see politics move away from the bitterness surrounding the 2016 referendum. He and his like fed that bitterness to serve their own ends. We are a polarised society, and that is unlikely to change.

Looking across the pond, we see Republican senators still trying to undermine Biden’s election – with no chance of success but taking what they see as a longer-term perspective – hanging in with the hard-line Trump agenda, however divisive the consequences. Brexit has bred a similar though less extreme cynicism. But the direction of travel is the same.

Johnson talks of friends in Europe, when insulting and misrepresenting them has been his trademark over twenty years.  There will be no easy coming together. Insofar as it happens it will be the pro-Europeans, who will never give up on working closely with old allies, who will be responsible.

Pro-Europeans will never abandon their position or their loyalties. They – we – know where the future lies. There must, if we are to hold any position in the world, be a coming together again with Europe. We will need another, wiser government before this happens. Taking back control is an absurd slogan – Brexit is by definition a losing of control, a losing of influence, a diminution of status, a constriction of sovereignty.

Yes, we are off-shore Europeans. We haven’t been invaded, or lost wars. We’ve no sense of needing to escape from our past. Our links with Europe are born of sympathy, common culture, convenience – not of necessity. Many of us are, as de Gaulle reminded us, closer to USA and Commonwealth countries than other European countries. But that gave us the priceless benefit of being a bridge, which we can be no more. Brexit has exacerbated an ‘outsider’ instinct, which will serve us ill.

This isn’t to downplay the issues which pushed Brexit up the agenda. Immigration was perceived to be out of control. Between 2008 and 2019 the UK’s Polish population more than doubled. Cameron’s government consistently aspired to and failed to bring the numbers down, and that helped focus the issue further.

In previous decades the failings of Common Agricultural Policy dominated debate. It rewards scale, guarantees the supply of food, and holds down prices, but in market terms it’s highly inefficient. But food was abundant, and prices were low. So it wasn’t a key issue. It wouldn’t resonate with voters.

The Leave side looked elsewhere. Fishing, however small as a sector of our economy, became a totemic issue. ‘Metropolitan elites’ likewise. The EU ‘elite’ and the ‘metropolitan’ became merged in the public mind.

Leave attached itself to the innate social conservatism of the ordinary voter. The Tory party as the party of Leave has been the big beneficiary. Opposition to overtly ‘woke’ behaviour has become a rallying cry in the popular press. Likewise, four years on from the Brexit vote, opposition, not always covert, to Black Lives Matter.

The likes of Douglas Murray stir the waters with articles in The Spectator and elsewhere. AN Wilson sounds off in The Times against the Archbishop of Canterbury. Johnson would rather be above all this but, being one for whom popularity is the ultimate aim, he will bend before the party wind as much as he needs to.

There’s always that sense we’re governed for the benefit of party, to ensure the Tory Party retain its role as the natural party of government. That’s an old accusation, party before country, but it rings true.

Jeremy Corbin and Militant Labour lent a big helping hand. For the Tories to sustain their northern vote through to and, they hope, beyond the next election a big south-to-north transfer of funds will be required. We thought we were dealing with a party which believes in hands-off government. All the more so since free marketeers staged their internal coup (and radically reduced the Tory talent base at the same time). And yet – we now have free marketeers becoming big-state spenders. They’re the ones in cabinet. The true diehards remain on the fringes.

The government’s language is palpably foolish. They talk of Global Britain. The country has ‘changed beyond all recognition’.  It now has ‘global perspectives’. There’s a notion spread about that the EU is somehow inward-looking. Yes, in the sense that it is more stubborn and hard-nosed, as Brexit negotiations have demonstrated. It has to be, in a world where the real battleground is between the three great economic power blocks, the USA, China – and the EU.

Both sides of the Brexit debate trade statistics on the relative performance of the UK as opposed to the wider EU economy. The hard truth is, to quote The Economist, ‘Britain’s recent performance has been poor, and Brexit will be a further drag on growth.’  Taking the most recent statistics from the House of Commons Library, ‘compared with the same quarter a year before (that is, Q3 2019) [UK] GDP was -9.6%. In the Eurozone it was -4.3% and in the US it was -2.9%.’

The current edition of The Economist further underscores the hard realities: ‘Since 2005 British firms’ share of world market capitalisation has fallen from over 7% to 3%, a much greater slippage than any other large European economy. Over the same period the share of the stock of global cross-border investment attributable to British-headquartered multinationals has fallen from 10% to 6%, also a bigger drop than for any other major economy.’

It is indeed curious how a government so committed to ‘free trade’, so focused in their aspirations on our future economic performance,  should have allowed ‘sovereignty’ and the 0.1% of our economy that is the contribution of the fishing industry to be the make-or-break issues in the final months of the Brexit negotiations. The multitude of new restrictions we now face as a result of leaving the Customs Union and the Single Market were treated as secondary considerations. For a brief summary of (some of) what we face see below.*

Services, including the financial sector, along with foreign policy and defence, are not part of the agreement just concluded. In great part the Brexit deal is defined by what is leaves out.

We won’t get better deals than we got under the EU. Brexiteers thought to court China. But investment in China is now the subject of close scrutiny. The EU has, as of last week, confirmed a China trade deal after seven years of negotiation. The best we can hope to get is a mirror image. That said, China has a long memory of Britain’s arrogance in our 19th century China dealings. Hong Kong doesn’t help. And China is happily wreaking vengeance on Australia for being the first to demand an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus epidemic.

We also have a weakling foreign secretary.

That touches on another big issue. We have a weak government of Brexit conformists, with free market attitudes which do not connect to the realities of our times, and abilities which fall well short of the abilities their briefs require. Raab, Truss and Patel were key figures behind the 2012 book Britannia Unchained. ‘The British are among the worst idlers in the world,’ is one quote I remember. Their subservience to Cummings told its own story.

Along with ‘Global Britain’ we have a ‘brave new future’. There’s something pathetic in these rallying calls. We’ve seen them all through Covid. Big statements and then they row-back, change tack, always positioning themselves behind the curve. (This should be a case study for future students of politics.)

We’ve had a defence review where hard decisions are helped by a big expenditure splurge. We will shortly have a much-delayed foreign policy ‘integrated review’. We will have to see what it says. We do of course have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. We’re the second biggest contributors to NATO.  We have language on our side. But match that against a big reduction in the esteem in which we, and our democracy, a direct consequence of Brexit shenanigans, are held around the world. False pride is a biblical term that comes to mind.

Students of British politics in Europe, the USA and elsewhere will also be wondering about Scottish independence, and the likelihood of a united Ireland. The Johnson government is blind to what might well be realities, and further bitter divisions.

One lesson of history is that events never deliver on expectations. And the more radical the disturbance to the status quo the more disruptive the outcome. (Disruption was of course Cumming’s avowed aim). Brexit supporters back in 2016 thought we’d get a soft Brexit. A hard Brexit was for the extremists. And what do we have?

Another lesson is that you achieve by coming together, and not by splitting apart. A third would be that you don’t define your nation and your economy on the basis of its past achievements. We didn’t win 20th century wars on our own. We dispensed with Empire long ago, and we need to dispense with hangover imperial attitudes and sensitivities. We built our 19th century economy on cheap labour and captive markets. India had no choice but to buy our cotton manufactures. We don’t have those advantages now.

The sub-continent and Asian ‘tiger’ economies got their own back in the end. We have our expertise in specific sectors, defence, aviation, high tech, chemicals. But old Ricardian notions of comparative advantage mean very little these days. Tiger economies have shown how readily they can find investment funding, and how quickly they can overtake us in areas where we thought our advantage was well set.

Trade with our biggest partner is, by a vast margin, our best guarantee of future prosperity. At the same time we need to retain a healthy degree of cynicism. The idealism of the early years of the Common Market, when aspiration and market realities readily matched, is long gone. As a major driver of reform we have done the EU a disservice by leaving. That is, ironically, another reason for wanting to remain.

We won’t of course be rejoining in a hurry. But as and when, and if, we do, the EU in all probability is some shape or form will still be there. Many Brexiteers anticipated a wider fragmentation, precipitated by our departure. They have already been proved very wrong.

We have cast ourselves as outsiders, and it’s not a good place to be.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*Quoted from an article by Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform:

‘Most British people have no idea how hard Brexit will be…

Manufacturers and farmers will face irksome checks at borders for things like customs, VAT, safety and security, plant and animal health, and much else. Services companies will lose access to the single market unless they set up subsidiaries within it. British airlines and freight firms will no longer be able to operate freely within the EU. Citizens will lose the right to travel for as long as they wish, work, study or reside in the EU. Industries and institutions that have become accustomed to employing EU citizens – including farming, food processing, hospitality, care homes, construction and universities – will face difficulties. Britain is leaving a plethora of EU agencies, such as those that deal with medicines, chemicals, air safety and food safety. The British police will lose direct access to many EU criminal databases.’

Not all news is political…

Writing a blog can be a little like penning an article for a newspaper. Only it isn’t. You don’t have editors, querying content, or facts, or insisting on cuts, or rubbishing it altogether – denying your piece its ‘nihil obstat’ (as the Catholic Church would have it), ‘there is no objection.’

I’ve been my own editor in this case. I’ve objected and made changes. My original blog, ‘The very great and the very small’, is no more. If you did read that blog you’ll see I’ve re-worked the material, and put it into a different context.

I often put aside articles or news items that in some way or another hit home. It could be snippet or a long article in a periodical. They’re discussion points. I sometimes imagine myself in a college senior common room, chatting to specialists from a wide range of disciplines, non-specialist engaging with specialist. It could be Eng Lit meets astrophysics, microbiologist meets political scientist, or …

They get on to today’s news.

Politics… version one of this blog referred to the government’s £275m Culture Recovery Fund, and the £784,000 that’s been awarded to Cheltenham Festivals, which include science, jazz, classical music, and of course books.  As a regular visitor to Cheltenham’s remarkable festivals this is good news. I also mentioned, as a stark contrast, a Liverpool publican and his worries about his business’s future if Liverpool suffers a level three, almost total, lockdown for any length of time.

But that didn’t begin to do the subject justice, encompassing as it does local or national lockdowns, ‘circuit breakers’ – or avoiding lockdowns altogether, with at-risk groups self-isolating on a voluntary basis. Over in France Macron is bringing in curfews.

At which point a voice might say – no politics. Likewise no religion, and certainly no sex or scandal…

So my grumble (anger?) about the way the term ‘creative destruction’ has been used during the pandemic – it will be under-performing and less successful businesses which will go to wall, so we shouldn’t worry too much – would be not be allowed.

We move on to another subject.

Astrophysics… we have the Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to three scientists for their work on black holes. There’s a black hole, Sagittarius A, is the very heart of our galaxy. It’s a mere four million times the mass of our sun, and it is of course invisible, because light can’t escape from it.

The first-ever image a black hole (outlined against the visible gases swirling around it) was released in April 2019. It’s at the centre of galaxy M87, which is a mere 53 million light years from earth. 53 million years for the light to reach us … roughly when the first primitive primates evolved, according to a New Scientist timeline of human evolution.

Chemistry … the Nobel Prize this year has been awarded to two scientists for their work on gene editing (editing ‘parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence’). Out of it could come new therapies for cancer, disease-resistant crops, ‘and which may, perhaps, end hereditary disease in human beings’.

Before we exult too much, we should remember that Covid-19 is not a hereditary disease. But human ingenuity, we hope and trust, will find a way.

History … another item I’ve recently put aside is a review by Christopher Clark of a new book on the Austrian stateman Metternich, which contains a quote from Napoleon, the simple brutality of which brought me up short. ‘You are no soldier,’ Napoleon said to Metternich, ‘and you do not know what goes on in the soul of a soldier. I was brought up in military camps, I know only the camps, and a man such as I does not give a fuck about the lives of a million men.’ (‘Fuck’ it seems is a fair translation.)

Contrast, lest we forget, what’s happening in Yemen, or on a smaller scale in Nagorna Karabakh. The simple, brute indifference to life. Or the 5.6 million Syrians are refugees, the 6.2 million displaced within Syria.

Are we getting political? Just where lies the divide? Migration and refugees are contentious subjects. And we’re back as if we hadn’t left them to refugees in the English Channel, to Brexit… to the American election, and the Mexican border fence.

If this is all part of a post-prandial conversation, then time, I think, for a coffee break.