Life in the Slow Lane

An interesting time in the beautiful city of Ely, where Lucy and I are helping lead an Engaged Encounter Weekend.

The spring is sprung, the gardens are lovely, and it’s great to be alive, especially around one of the most glorious Cathedrals in the world. Who am I, to be alive in such a place on a spring day such as this?

Yet, as my old training incumbent used to say, every silver lining has a cloud. The cloud here is the unavailability of a fast data network my dongle can access through T-Mobile. All I can get is a strong but utterly, pathetically slow GPRS network. So out goes any notion of a film review on Michael Caine’s latest, because I couldn't conceive of moving video files around at this connection speed. I suddenly am brought hard up against the reality of life at last century’s connection speeds. Uploading a modest snail takes almost 10 minutes!! O Life how short, Eternity How long!

And I just wonder whether, among other reactions to the current depression, the government might care to consider upgrading the infrastructure of this country à la Singapore. Fast free data for all. This would stimulate business, commerce, life, industry, social development. It would be comparatively cheap, certainly compared to some of the things money has been lavished on just recently. And some people would find such a plan at least as effective an investment for the future as paying out plushy six figure annual pensions for Fred the Shred and his layabout incompetent chums.

Any merit?

Banking: The Way We Were (1964)

Financial Intercourse began
in Nineteen Seventy Nine,
Between the end of Callaghan
and the Flying Lizards’ Line:
I want money, that’s what I want...
What was life like before we entered Mrs Thatcher’s brave new world? Did they have money? And if they did, did most people keep it under the bed?

Well in 1964, bank managers were slightly stuffy people working for low wages in what were often family businesses, some of whom, according to the TV advertising of the day, lurked in people's wardrobes offering financial advice to the family. O tempora! O mores! Rooting in the attic the other day I found a copy of the Twentieth Century for Spring 1964, featuring an interview with the chief cashier of a high street bank on the subject of his career in Banking and its temptations. Read, mark and learn from this delightful vignette of Banking, and the kind of people who did it, 45 years ago, before Fred the Shred and his chums got their grimy hands on our cash:

Today, on £1,240 a year, plus a London allowance, I have reached, at the age of 57, a moderately comfortable level. I rose to be number two man in a five-man branch, and took my present post as chief cashier in a busy commercial branch when I discovered that I was not going to become manager where I was. I have succeeded in making a home, and paying off the house. We have no crying need for any major item of domestic equipment. We were able to buy a washing machine before the war, and five years ago I was able to afford a refrigerator, We have no television, and no desire for one.

I allow my wife £8 a week for housekeeping and £2 a week for herself. My lunches average 5 shillings (25p) a day, and I spend 10s (50p) a week on tobacco, We do not live to a budget - there are no boxes on the mantelpiece. But we do put 5s, a week by for Christmas presents. Our only extravagance is a theatre once every two months, when we have dinner in town. We always have sherry in the house, and a bottle of whisky for medicinal purposes. We do not deny ourselves, But I feel this is a point we should have reached ten years ago. It is only recently that I have been able to gather any savings, and only recently that I have been able to ride out the surprise bill, say, £30 for repairing the chimney, that comes along. Ten years ago we would never have been able to go into a shop and buy there and then something that took our fancy, in the way that we bought a nest of coffee tables last year for £20, and a gas fire to replace a coal grate. As it is, a large part of my salary is set aside for routine bills. I have two life assurances that I took out early in life. They come to £49 a year. My gas bill is £25, my electricity £10, and my coke £12 a year. I have a new suit every year. In the bank you must maintain a certain amount of tidiness. They still say that bank men are the tidiest of office workers, and I know that I have never gone to the office in a scruffy suit. Nowadays we spend £80 on our annual holiday (we never go abroad) and I take a week each year with my mother in Scotland that costs me £25 ...

The way things have turned out has not embittered me, I am just not of an envious nature. I look on that not as a virtue but as just a kind of kink in me. If I had been a bit more envious, a bit more covetous, I would have been more ambitious in life and taken chances with my career; been the kind of man who makes up his mind exactly where he is going, and plans out step by step how to get there - as my son-in-law has. But I do not believe that money is conducive to happiness. That doesn't mean I believe that one should be contented with one's lot in life. But surely happiness to a large extent devolves upon oneself, and on one's immediate friends and relatives, on one's wife and family.

Of course I would have been happier with more money - I would have been able to run a car, to take more expensive holidays, for example - but the lack of money has never tempted me to gamble or be dishonest. I believe a person who would be tempted to embezzlement would be tempted not because of his circumstances but because of his character and failings. I have never gambled, but I spend 5s (25p) a week on the pools, I don't daydream about getting a large win. If I did win a big sum it would make no difference to my way of living at all. I would invest it. It would simply enable me to live a little more comfortably than now - and of course, a man with £50,000 in his pocket can afford to risk expressing his opinions a little more forcibly to his employers.

...A young chap who joins the bank nowadays and finds the work boring after a year or two is not afraid of giving it up. He hasn't the loyalty, the fantastic loyalty,that the older bank officials have. A loyalty bred by their personal upbringing, by living through the depression, by handling a trustworthy job. A loyalty that for so many bank men now reaching their sixties has gone unrewarded.

It was thirty years ago today...

Mrs Thatcher taught the band to play. On this day in 1979 the Callaghan government lost a confidence motion in the house of commons (by 2 votes in over 600, I seem to remember) bringing to an end postwar concensus government — In Blairspeak, a pivotal point in British political history. The story may demonstrate the peril of delay in politics— it’s arguable that had Sunny Jim gone to the country the autumn before the winter of discontent, he might well have squeaked home on a sympathy vote. Still being counterfactual, had General Gaultieri managed to keep his army in his trousers and off the Falklands, the fortunes of the first Thatcher administration, deeply unpopular in 1982, might have been different. Who can say?

Thirty years on, the historical jury is out on what followed. One narrative says unions were tamed and the economy renewed as an enterprise engine, driven by financial wizards, unbridled by regulation. Another points out that social inequality soared, driven by a housing bubble and short-termism. Both narratives are right on their own buttons. Certainly banks ceased to be rather dowdy traditional “word is my bond” institutions, like the place Mary Poppins kept her umbrella.

Woody Allen once suggested all nature was a vast restaurant, everything eating everything. In that spirit Thatcherism released the genie that transformed all commerce into a vast betting shop. Recently, imagine if instead of bailing out banks from the top, government had helped people paying sub-prime mortgages from the other end. Could we have refloated the banks, through the micro-economy, bottom up? Of course not! That would be subsidizing fecklessness and irresponsibility.

So instead we've squirted billions into the banks from the top down to avert commercial kismet, hoping they’d start doing lovely things with the lolly. I do wonder what Mrs Thatcher’s old dad, a paragon of thrift and hard work, would have made of Fred the Shred, flying in fruit every day from Paris, replacing carpets rather than cleaning them, and sacking staff over the colour of the biscuits, whilst studiously ignoring abundant evidence that he was steering his liner over financial Niagara Falls. Apparently that was not feckless or irresponsible. It was wealth creating. Really?

If RBS had been allowed to go bust...? Among other things, Fred’s pension would have to have been be paid by the guarantee scheme, capped at £27,000. And if he had thought that sum insufficient he could, at the age of 51, have gone out and got a job. I can imagine Alderman Roberts wondering what would be so terribly wrong with that...

Credit Crunch Bank Bust: King Rat?

Brilliantly rendered graphically by Jonathan Jarvis: h/t Euan Semple:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
This side of the pond, Sir Fred Goodwin wrestles internally with Jiminy Cricket over his £650,000 a year life pension from age 50, his reward for delivering the biggest cockup ever in UK corporate history, a record breaking loss of £24,000,000,000, at a cost to his fellow citizens of £20,000,000,000, including the ruin of many of his colleagues and customers.

Give it back, or what be stripped of it? I don’t believe anyone should do anything illegal or vindictive. There are plenty of others out there as bad, but less public, no doubt. But if I were Sir Fred, I’d scrabble up as much of the offending money as I could and do something genuinely altruistic with it, perhaps an investment that helps poor people through hard times. That way some good comes of his cockup, nobody breaks the law, and he can recover a bit of respect in the community. Howzat?

Meanwhile the Long Johns (Bird and Fortune) explain the matter perfectly clearly, as is their wont: