Against Corporate greed we need to be in a big batallion

‘Banks are pretty good at getting round rules,’ a senior financier recently told the Guardian, ‘if there are restrictions on us paying bonuses, we will be looking at paying some other kind of allowances.’

Meanwhile, among all the noise about Google, Amazon and Starbuck’s miserly contribution to the national exchequer in Britain, we hear from Senator John McCain that even the saintly Apple corporation is ‘among America's largest tax avoiders.’ 

You want to take these guys on?
You're going to need the clout that only size can give.

There seems to be a mood developing in a number of countries to try to rein in corporate greed. That’s the greed of the corporations themselves, uninterested in paying more than a minimal amount in tax to the jurisdictions in which they operate, and the greed of the people who lead them, passionately interested in maximising the amount they can take out of the companies they lead.

The US has the economic might that would allow it to make a move in this direction, but it’s probably best not to hold our breaths: those same corporations are also the biggest donors to political campaign funds. While they control the ability of politicians to get elected in the first place, there’s not a lot of chance of getting the politicians to control their behaviour. I’ve argued it before, and I’ll argue it again: ban political advertising on TV and suddenly you’ve cut the cost of political campaigns and, at a stroke, massively reduced the power of lobbies to dictate policy to elected officials through their wallets.

The US has the muscle to take on the corporations. Now it needs to find the will. 

Curiously, another body that probably has the muscle, simply because it represents such a huge market, is the European Union. It has recently shown signs of having the will as well, as it starts to look at bankers’ bonuses and at tax regimes. Could be interesting to see what happens in the next three or four years.

Because what’s at stake is fundamental: who shall run our societies, the citizens who inhabit them and make up their electorates, or just that tiny privileged handful who control the big corporations? Right now, the power of the latter leaves very little say to the former.

What’s curious in this context is to see that it’s precisely now that there is such a groundswell in Britain to leave the EU. Bob Crow, General Secretary of National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, was recently arguing the case for departure, from the left, but the most strident voices are coming from the right.

Most people campaigning against the EU, and certainly Bob Crow, would argue that they are forcefully opposed to excessive corporate power. But if Britain were to leave, it would on its own be far too small to exert much authority, it would lose the ability to influence the EU’s decisions, and it would weaken the EU’s own stance by depriving it of one of the main economies currently in its fold.

Big corporations run the world. To take them on, we need the power that a big bloc gives us. Far from giving up our rights by being in the EU, we join 350 million citizens in giving ourselves the clout to stand a chance of defending them.

The Europhobes demand a referendum on the subject of Britain’s membership, proclaiming that simple democratic principle dictates that there should be one. What they ignore is that if a referendum were held and it led to Britain’s exit, it would further erode any democratic control of the forces that shape our lives.

Surely not exactly what they intend, is it?

A modest proposal: solving the problem of corporate greed

Now here’s an idea I think has mileage, but not the slightest chance of being adopted.

There’s a lot of talk, especially in Britain at the moment, of tax evasion, in particular by large corporations. Amazon made £4.3 billion in this country last year and managed to pay just £2.4m in corporation tax, less than the £2.5m it collected in government grants. Meanwhile, Margaret Hodge, Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons the other day called Google ‘evil’ for taking £3.2b from UK customers, and paying £6m in tax.

Margaret Hodge
Do you get the impression she wasn't entirely pleased
with what she was hearing?

At the same time, we all get a bit sick of those characters who precipitated the present economic misery continuing to reward themselves handsomely, as often as not for failure, as often as not for failure for which the rest of us, as taxpayers, have to carry the can. Bankers, in particular, continue to take salaries that dwarf those of people who actually do some good (like teachers or nurses), sometimes by multiples of 10, 20 or more. They help themselves to bonuses, though their banks continue to lose value and several of them can only pay out because they’re being kept afloat by the compulsory generosity of the taxpayer. 

It’s not just banks, of course. Board room salaries across industry continue to climb, however bad the economy and however much others suffer. Cuts fall on those same teachers or nurses, and even more severely still on the ill or the unemployed, who are seeing already low living standards slashed still further.

So here’s a solution to the twin problems, of tax evasion and excessive bonuses, simultaneously.

Bonuses to highly-paid staff should be strictly proportional to the corporation tax paid by their companies.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious sight? These are the individuals who take the decisions that keep corporation tax liabilities down. Just imagine how it would be if their bonuses fell with them.

If they wanted to boost their personal pay, they’d have to boost the tax paid by the company by a proportionate amount. That would give a whole new sense to the idea of ‘win-win’.

The big question is, which way would things crack? Would they go on trying to keep tax payments down or would they sacrifice the corporation’s gains for their own?

Having seen how altruistically these characters behave, can anyone have any possible doubt which way they’d go? We might see a long-repeated claim being realised at last: their success would truly be shared by everyone.

Europe, land of ironies

Ah, the nostalgia. The British Conservative Party is going through one of its periodic phases of tearing itself apart over the European Union. 

The European Union, Achilles heel of the Tory Party

It’s a great spectator sport and normally I’d sit back and enjoy it, but this time the stakes are a bit too high. This time Britain could end up outside the EU.

Europhobia is running quite strong in Britain. Various undead from the Thatcher years – Nigel Lawson, Michael Portillo – have been crawling out of their satin-lined coffins to pronounce. Lawson even talked about how much better things were when we traded with the whole world, as a great imperial power, and didn’t have to get too tied up with all those dull people on the continent. 

It’s a point of view. All it leaves out of account is that all that great trade we were doing was with colonies which had to give preference to British goods. And we were a lot poorer then than now in any case.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, David Cameron is giving us a fascinating display of political leadership skills. Frightened by the emergence of an unambiguously Europobe party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, the Tories are splitting between those who want to keep a clear space between themselves and the far right, and those who feel the best approach is to steal UKIP’s agenda by offering a referendum on getting out of the EU.

Now Cameron’s problem is that he governs in coalition with the Lib Dems who, insofar as they have any principles they’re not prepared to abandon to hang on to office, are pretty firmly committed to staying inside the European Union. They certainly don’t want a referendum which they might lose. So officially the government can’t back the demand for a referendum. But the Tory Party, and its leader David Cameron, can go along with the demand.

Follow this carefully. As Prime Minister of a coalition government, he can’t. But as leader of the major party of that coalition, a party desperate to grab back Europhobic territory, he can. In fact, he thinks he must.

Which means he hasn’t learned the fundamental lesson of intra-Tory fights about Europe: throw the phobes some raw meat and all they do is come back for more.

Even more fun, while Cameron is backing the people who want an in-out referendum on the European Union, he’s off in the US promoting a trade deal. With the same European Union.

In the meantime, his Chancellor of the Exchequer and best mate George Osborne, was in Brussels trying to persuade the rest of the much-maligned European Union to help him track down tax dodgers. Having been there ten days earlier in efforts to block the Union putting a cap on bankers’ bonuses (he failed). Because protecting bankers’s income is right up there at the top of the to-do list of a Tory Chancellor.

The sad thing? The people who’ve been voting UKIP include above all people who’ve been plunged into the worst kind of mess as a result of the antics of those very same bankers. Many such voters back UKIP and denounce the EU which is trying to tackle the source of their problems.

The latest? It came out yesterday. The British Office of Fair Trading recently dropped an investigation into price-fixing by oil companies. Who’s reopened it? Investigators from the EU. Those same UKIP supporters are also victims of profiteering by the energy companies. And want to take us out of the European Union that's trying do something about it.

Irony’s great, isn’t it? But a bit sad sometimes.

When the ice saints go marching by

It’s always a good moment when we say goodbye to the Ice Saints.

My wife, whose roots are in the German-speaking world where the ‘Eisheiligen’ are much better known, introduced me to these characters. They mark the definitive end of the winter and, at long last, the start of Spring. Up here in the north of the northern hemisphere, at least.

They start on 11 May, with St Mamertus, followed by St Pancras on the 12th, St Servatius on the 13th and St Boniface on the 14th. With Boniface it’s all over: the last late frosts give way to the start of summer on the 15th, St Sophia’s day (is it a coincidence that we get four ice men followed by a summer woman? Perhaps I won’t go there.)

‘Vor Bonifaz kein Sommer,’ say the Germans: before Boniface there’s no summer, and ‘nach der Sophie kein Frost’: after Sophia no frost.

No wonder, then, that’s it’s for the best when those guys have gone by. Though I should mention in passing that there’s one I have a bit of a soft spot for: I rather like St Pancras. 

St Pancras
Don't know much about the saint,
but I really like the station

I think it’s great to have a saint named after my favourite station. Now that I don’t work in London any more, I don’t go there often, but I get a real kick when I see it from time to time: the pianos are still there with anonymous members of the public just sitting down and hammering out a tune to pass the time and entertain the passers by; so’s the statue of John Betjeman, who penned an ode to the station; and now there’s even a hanging sculpture over one end of the concourse. Lots of fun.

St Pancras, where passengers get entertained by occasional pianists

Don’t get me wrong. I like Grand Central station with its huge concourse, I love the Gare de l’Est with its extraordinary destinations that I find it hard to believe you can reach by train: Budapest. Warsaw. Moscow. Moscow for Pete’s sake! But even so, you can’t imagine a St Grand Central, can you, or a Saint Gare de l’Est for that matter?

But there’s a St Pancras and when you see his station, it’s no wonder he’s a bit special.

In any case, all that ice saint stuff doesn’t really work any more. When Europe switched to the Gregorian calendar, that cost ten days. So the actual weather that goes with the old ice saints belongs a bit later in the month.

Probably safest to go with the old English saying, ‘ne’er cast a clout till may be out.’ Not that I think that’s the month of May. Much more likely to be mayflower, called after that famous boat that got the United States going. Hawthorn blossom. Don’t take off a stitch of clothing till it’s in full bloom.

The Mayflower.
Puritains to America, summer to Britain
I know who did better out of that deal

No sign of that yet in England. So I’ll wave goodbye to St Boniface tomorrow, hello to St Sophie the day after. But I’m keeping the coat on until those white flowers have really taken over in the hedgerows.

Mayflower
More reliable than the Ice Saints

Magic of a second chance after a first-time screw up

Charles Venables, the government minister in J M Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows, tells us that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

Barrie strikes me as a deeply suspect individual (what is Peter Pan really about?) and this play is a vehicle for some pretty troubling social attitudes. Despite my reservations, however, I can’t help enjoying it and I particularly like the sentiment about second thoughts.

Of course, I work in business where it’s a fundamental principle that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Where the mantra is getting things right first time. Doesn’t stop companies getting things wrong again and again, or not getting them done at all, very often, but the mantra’s there.

So it was wonderful to have a second chance to get something right this morning. I’ve already recounted how two weeks ago I screwed up by taking us to the wrong place for an early morning bird-watching walk, in the breathtaking splendour of Ashridge Forest. That meant that we were up at 5:00 a.m. for nothing, and I’d spoiled my wife’s birthday: she'd set a lot of store by the charms of early morning bird watching in a delightful setting.

Even at stupid o'clock, Ashridge is a magical place
for a walkin the sunshine

Fortunately, the Ashridge National Trust people had organised another walk for this morning and though it meant a 5:00 start all over again, it was a tremendous relief to have an opportunity to correct things so soon. This time, I made a point of checking the details the night before, even looking at the map to be sure I knew where we had to go (like instruction manuals, I feel a real wimp if I have to consult a map). We were at the right place and a few minutes before time. A major success compared to the last occasion.

We’ve had nearly two weeks of nearly summer weather here in England, which is pretty long for any kind of summer compared to the last few years. It was no surprise therefore that we left this morning facing a grim weather forecast, with the skies turning grey and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees down on the last few days (and that’s real degrees, not the trivial little Fahrenheit ones). Why, it was even beginning to spit a little rain as we set out on the walk.

But still, England’s weather hadn’t fully plunged us back into November yet (that didn’t happen until this afternoon), and we had moments of glorious sunshine when, if we got out of the wind, it felt positively warm. As the guides warned us, we didn’t do so much actual bird watching as bird listening: the leaves are out and birds are mostly concealed, but on the other hand they’re pouring out their hearts in song. The first two species we were introduced to were jackdaws and yellow hammers, and I was just enchanted: town dweller that I am, I’m much more used to the sound of the jackhammer.

Two hours walking through fabulous scenery in sunshine that kept constant quite a lot of the time more than made up for the stupid o’clock start. And finishing it all of with a full breakfast in the National Trust café really put the icing on the cake (not that we had cake: it wouldn’t have gone with the bacon or egg).

Second thoughts had more than made up for my total lack of thinking first time round. And my wife got her wish at last.

Happy birthday, again, Danielle. Just a couple of weeks late.

No bird pictures, I'm afraid.
But here's a Whitebeam catching the sun,
with all of Bucks and Beds laid out behind it

What did immigrants ever do for us?

As everybody knows, that magnificent imperial power, Rome, was founded by Romulus and Remus, two twins who as babies had been suckled by a she-wolf.

Founders. Started well, ended badly. But later came glory

Later on, things turned a bit sour between the twins, and Romulus killed Remus, which is presumably why, in The Life of Brian, John Cleese never asks  ‘what have the Remans ever done for us?’ 

In other versions of the Roman story, it wasn’t Romulus who struck the fatal blow but one of his mates. There was no doubt some squeamishness about a founding myth involving fratricide, though given the way brothers sometimes behave towards each other, I should have thought a desire to inflict fratricide is frequently a pretty strong desire in a lot of siblings, closely followed by an equal inclination in their parents to commit infanticide.

Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect two twins to launch a whole city – and anyone who has followed the story so far will no doubt have been struck by its gritty realism – so they had to enlist the help of others. That they did by inviting anyone who wished to come and join them, with no questions asked. So a great many unsavoury individuals, the kind of people with often pressing needs to be elsewhere fast, congregated to the site of the new city, which was built by as undesirable a collection of criminals and outlaws as you could hope to see anywhere.

They were all men, which rather limited the city’s hopes of longevity. They needed to find some expedient to attract a few women to join them. But these were men who were perhaps short of the capacity to attract, or didn’t think that attraction was a sufficiently reliable method, and didn’t find more energetic means unduly reprehensible. So they invited a nearby tribe, the Sabines, to a slap-up meal. As soon as festivities were over, they seized all the females in an act which set the bar pretty low when it comes to the treatment of guests, and which has come to be known as the rape of the Sabine women.

Nicolas Poussin:
a case of extreme bad manners towards guests?

When the far from gruntled Sabine men came back to wreak horrible revenge on the Romans, the women intervened between the two sides, calling on the ones not to kill their fathers and brothers, on the others not to kill their husbands and sons. Clearly, the refusal to take rape seriously and the inclination to be lenient in handling it, has long antecedents. 

But what interests me more was what the myth reveals of Roman attitudes towards assimilation: the Sabine women had been completely absorbed into the people of the city, as had all the wastrels who’d drifted to it in the period of its foundation. That Romans really believed in that kind of assimilation is revealed by their later history: huge numbers, down the centuries, gravitated to the city as slaves; in time, many were freed and as soon as they obtained their freedom, they were granted citizenship as well. The same happened throughout the empire, with Roman citizens in every province, many of them locally born.

In other words, the Roman Empire, one of the most successful the world has seen, which despite almost constant war around its periphery, kept the peace and stimulated prosperity in huge areas of Western Europe for four or five centuries, was built on the shoulders of immigrants. Romans spoke a huge number of languages and believed in a huge number of gods; the Empire testifies to the vibrancy and power that multi-culturalism, through the assimilation of the foreign born, can give a society.

Now fast forward to just a couple of hundred years ago and the words of Emma Lazarus, some of which are inscribed on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Beacon to the world:
calling for the wretched refuse of other nations

It’s true that these words weren’t always honoured in practice, with successive waves of immigrants to the United States often having a torrid time of it when they first arrived, not infrequently at the hands of the immediately preceding wave. Somehow down the centuries, however, the US has been able to absorb Englishmen and Scotsmen, Irishmen, Scandinavians and Germans, Italians and other Southern Europeans, turning them all into US citizens. 

They took Anglicans and Baptists, Quakers and Catholics, Jews and more recently Muslims, Hindus and representatives of pretty well any faith on Earth or those with none at all. And, with a constitution keeping the state and faith firmly apart, guaranteeing that the former would be secular, assimilation into a huge, multi-cultural melting point has generally worked well.

Give the US another generation or two, and the Hispanic immigrants now forming the main inward flows, from the US's near neighbours in the Americas, will have been as well integrated as Minnesota Swedes or Chicago Irishmen. And they may even have taken further steps towards absorbing that great minority, the black descendants of the slaves who made the wealth of the south back in the eighteenth century.

‘The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ Isn’t that so like the Roman founding myth? Come to us, whoever you are, and whatever you may have been in your past, to help us build a country. It worked for Rome, and it’s worked pretty spectacularly for the United States too. Just like the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana has guaranteed peace for its friends for sixty years, though at the price of more or less uninterrupted war with those threatening the edges of its sphere. And it has driven unprecedented levels of prosperity for large parts of the world.

Immigrants. The restless, striving masses, driven to achieve, injecting new blood into societies to take them to unimaginable heights.

So why do we get so upset about them?

Celebrate the gifted amateur, but spare a thought for the other variety

Don’t we all admire the gifted amateur? So inspiring. So selfless. So courageous.

Do you remember the film Chariots of Fire? Look at Lord Andrew Lindsay. He joined Harold Abrahams, the driven, striving Jew, running not just for the joy of athletics but to mark a victory over anti-Semitism, in attempting the ‘Caius dash’ round the courtyard of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. Lindsay helps push Abrahams along to success, while not quite making it himself.

At the 1924 Olympics, Lindsay takes a silver medal, the ideal result: so good as to suggest that he might have taken gold had he pushed himself harder like all those nasty semi-professionals, including Abrahams or the Yanks, but just off the top step of the podium, so as to maintain a becoming modesty.

Then of course Lindsay steps aside from his other event, the 200 metres, to give Eric Liddle the chance to compete in his place. Liddle wouldn’t run in the 100 metres because his Christian principles wouldn't allow him to take part in heats held on a Sunday; Lindsay’s sacrifice made it possible for him to win his gold medal at the longer distance.

Wonderful stuff, eh? Self-effacing. Noble in the truest sense of the word. All for the spirit of the thing. He even tells Liddell that he’s doing it ‘just to see you run.’ I can’t remember if he adds ‘old chap’, but you can feel the words are there. Such a decent fellow, so civilised. It would almost make me want to doff my cap, if I was into that kind of thing and owned a cap.

But Lindsay is the quintessence of the gifted amateur. What about the other kind?

I have to admit that for a long time I saw myself as one of them. The flattering idea was born in an interview when my soon-to-be boss declared me to be ‘ideally unqualified’ for the job, and appointed me anyway.

Sadly, however, more recently I’ve had to accept that I naturally belong to the ungifted category. And nowhere more so than when it comes displaying any kind of skill in manual work.

For instance, some months ago I proudly constructed two woodsheds at the bottom of our garden. I had help, I confess, but not that much. I did most of the work myself.

Honest.

True I was working from kits. So the construction didn’t really require great skill. All I had to do was assemble the parts in the right order. Which makes it slightly galling that I didn’t quite manage that simple task.

Most flagrantly, I came unstuck with the roofs, These were made from overlapping planks of wood. Put them one way round, and rainwater would run delicately off one plank onto the next one, which is below it. Trouble is, put it the other way round and the rain will, equally delicately, run down to the next plank, which is above it, form a pool and then leak through.

Onto the logs underneath.

Work of the ungifted amateur:
the roof traps the water and leaks it gently onto the wood beneath

It does seem terribly unfair that, given that the roofs could only be put on in one of two positions, I got it wrong in both cases.

The result is that having gone to considerable trouble and expense to make sure we had good, seasoned, dry wood to burn in our stove this winter, my wife has struggled throughout the season to kindle a flame from damp fuel.

Fortunately a wonderful builder is putting in a path in our garden for us.

‘I can sort that for you,’ he assured us, ‘in about five minutes.’

It was welcome news as I hadn’t been able to unscrew either roof in thirty minutes of trying. And he was good as his word, correcting the problem in a way that made me understand what ‘in a jiffy’ really meant.

Fixed by the  professional
The water flows away and the shed does its job of protecting the wood

It’s comforting to know that our two sheds, intended to protect our wood from rain, will now be doing just that instead of exactly the opposite.

I suppose I can console myself with the thought that at least I equalled Lord Andrew Lindsay’s performance. I took the silver medal. Though, sadly, there were no other competitors to finish behind me. And what I came second to was a lump of wood.