It’s a funny old game, capitalism, to borrow a footballing cliché from my colleagues on the red-top tabloids. The sale of Liverpool Football Club came off the sport pages with good effect in recent days. For it was not just a rollicking boardroom soap opera. It also raised some wider moral questions about the acceptable and unacceptable aspects of the laissez-faire economics which has been the default in Britain ever since Margaret Thatcher declared that there is no alternative. Obviously she had never heard of 4-5-1.
Leveraged buy-outs were a key part of the blowing up of the global financial bubble which has now been pricked with such devastating international consequences. An LBO, in layman’s terms, means borrowing-to-buy. And how. These complex financial instruments rarely struggle off the financial pages but football has hurled them into the general spotlight – where they turn out to be pretty dubious devices.
LBOs took off in the 1980s when a firm would buy another by putting up just 10 per cent of the price and borrowing the rest. The resulting investments were known, for obvious reasons, as junk bonds. They went a bit out of fashion in the 1990s but boomed again in the last decade. The amounts borrowed rose, in the United States alone, from $30bn in 2001 to over $450bn just before the crash. One of those who made a fortune from leveraged buy-outs in the boom years was a buccaneering Texan named Tom Hicks.
Hicks is one of the two Americans who has just been forced to sell Liverpool, the club at which he arrived promising he would not “do a Glazer” – and then did exactly what the Florida-based Glazer family had engineered down the M62 at Manchester United.
Defenders of the leveraged buy-out say it is pretty much what most of us do when we buy a house. In the good old days you put down a deposit of £20,000 on a £200,000 house. Then, after a decade of rising house prices, you sold the place for £300,000, pay off the balance on the mortgage, and walked away with £120,000 profit to put down on a bigger house.
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My son will not remember it as I do. The rasp of the spade as it cut through the clay. The grunt of exertion as my father’s heavy shoe hit down on the lug and the blade bit into the claggy soil and he lifted and turned it. Or later in the year – this time of year – came the easier movement of the garden fork as the tines brushed aside the withered foliage and pushed through the friable worked soil to lift the potatoes.
It was something I did not do in his stead when he had gone. My son has never seen Britain’s great staple food emerge from the crumbly loam. For his generation potatoes come washed and bagged from the supermarket. His eyebrows raised the first time he went to the farmshop next door to his Grandma’s and found that this king of vegetables came covered in organic black soil. But at least he knew from Grandma’s cooking that these potatoes tasted better than the supermarket variety. Ours is a generation which has forgotten what a range of tastes a potato can encompass.
That farmshop, Manic Organic, is a few doors down the road from where the Cropper Brothers, John and Robin, farm at Aughton on the flat loamy Lancashire plain outside Ormskirk. On Mill End Farm they will lift 80 per cent of their 350 acre potato crop this month. They always do in October, which is traditionally why schools have their autumn half-term holiday this week. In the old days, when potato lifting was a labour-intensive activity, children formed an important part of the workforce. “It was always regarded as the potato picking holiday,” recalls Robin. “When I was a boy, 40 years ago, large numbers of schoolchildren between the ages of 14 and 16 came to help.”
The story of the potato is one of the stories of our nation’s history. Despite popular expressions like “as British as fish and chips” the potato is, of course, an immigrant to these shores. For thousands of years Britons survived on bread and ale. Though the potato was probably first domesticated in Peru or Chile over 4,000 years ago, it was only brought to Europe after the Spanish adventurer Pizarro destroyed the Incan empire and brought back its staple carbohydrate as part of his plunder. The story goes that it was brought to England by Walter Raleigh or Francis Drake in the 1580s along with other booty plundered from Spanish ships by British privateers. Certainly the English herbalist John Gerard was growing potatoes in London by 1597.
A last letter seared in fierce flames
It is a long steep climb from the little Pennine milltown of Hebden Bridge to the hilltop village of Hepstonstall. I once met a man who had lived there for 35 years. The locals still called him an “offcumdun” because he had been born elsewhere in Yorkshire. Memories are long in that part of the world. That perhaps explains why the tombstone of the poet Sylvia Plath, who was buried there nearly 50 years ago, is still routinely defaced.
“Sylvia Plath Hughes, 1934-1963,” the stone says, above the words “Even amidst fierce flames – the golden lotus can be planted.” The church in whose grounds she lies is dedicated to St Thomas a Becket, a martyr, which is apt for Plath, at least in the eyes of those of her fans who blame her untimely death on her poet husband Ted Hughes, who owned a house nearby. He had left her for another woman just before she took her own life. His name has repeatedly been daubed, or even chiselled, from the granite.
The discovery this week of a poem by Hughes about Plath’s final hours has resurrected the old anger at an unhappy story which has over the years been elevated to a tragedy of romantic proportion. These were star-crossed lovers, ill-met by Magdaelene, a study in contrasts. He, as dark and dour as his hometown of Mytholmroyd, down the valley from Hebden, a world where beauty and cruelty co-existed as in the eponymous Hawk in the Rain of his first volume of poems. She, a privileged and preppy American, luminous and brittle, whose poetic intelligence burned, as she put it, “bright as a Nazi lampshade”.
An aid worker went to an African village and asked what the community needed. This is not a parable, but a true story (though, of course, it is probably both). It was told to me by Charles Elliott from his time as director of Christian Aid. The elders were asked whether they would like a well, or a school, or a clinic, or latrines.
After conferring they said: “We would like a new graveyard”. The aid worker was perplexed. “We don’t do cemeteries,” he replied, “it’s not part of our development brief. Would you like something else?” The elders deliberated again and then replied: “No, if we can’t have that, we won’t have anything thanks”.
What is development for? This week the think-tank Theos, along with Cafod and Tearfund, held a seminar with that title to question the received wisdom that to live well all we have to do is strive to maximise our personal wealth, freedom and choice. That consumerist approach brings us ever-more stuff – but it also brings overwork, stress, addictive activity, depression, anti-social behaviour and family dislocation. Poverty, as Tearfund’s mission statement points out, can be spiritual as well as material. Is this the kind of ‘development’ we want to offer the world’s poorest people?
Definitions of the good life vary according to circumstance. “Development is the new name for peace,” said Pope Paul, during the Cold War. But in a culture like ours, whose default impulse is Utilitarian, we might take as a starting point what it is that makes people happy.
A few years ago there was an interesting experiment in which a group of psychologists descended on Slough, of all places, to try to make people there happier. We all generally misjudge what makes us happy. It is not winning the lottery or celebrity, they proclaimed, but a peculiar cocktail of more exercise, more sleep, less tv, more time with friends, and more laughter.
The good folk of Slough were encouraged to smile at a stranger, phone a friend, indulge in a small treat, do a random act of kindness for someone, and count five blessings at bedtime every day. They were asked to plant something and watch it grow, and have an hour-long uninterrupted conversation with their spouse each week. All this reduces our sense of alienation from the modern world and we become happier. We could all add to that list: singing with others is a key thing for me. And any communal activity creates purpose as well as closeness.
One of the great figures of the twentieth century vowed he was going into retirement yesterday. Do not believe it. Desmond Tutu has retired before and whenever a serious injustice reared its head he has returned.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was one the central forces in the dismantling of the apartheid state which kept a white elite in power over the black majority in South Africa for nearly five decades, causing untold death and suffering.
In the early years of apartheid various movements of political protest and resistance arose. The white regime responded by arresting tens of thousands of black activists. Many more in the African National Congress (ANC) went into exile, to continue their opposition from abroad.
The torch of resistance back home was passed largely to the South African churches, the one group the white government could not outlaw. Its most prominent leader was Desmond Tutu who in 1975 had become the first black man to be appointed Dean of St. Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg. “It was people of faith who by and large kept the fires of revolution burning,” he later said in an interview for a BBC documentary I presented.
The Vatican’s missed Nobel opportunity
It was with a bit of a sigh that I read the headline: “Vatican official criticises Nobel win for IVF pioneer”. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Professor Robert Edwards, for decades of work to fertilise a human egg outside the womb, ignored the ethical questions raised by the breakthrough, the Vatican’s top bioethicist announced.
It is true that in vitro fertilisation opens a Pandora’s box of ethical dilemmas. But the motor car has led to countless deaths on the roads. It seems a jaundiced response to technological developments to seize upon their downside before celebrating their manifold blessings.
In the case of IVF those blessings number four million, which is how many babies have now been born using the technique. As the Nobel medicine prize committee in Oslo said, Professor Edwards’ work has brought “joy to infertile people all over the world” – no insignificant matter since infertility is affects 10 per cent of couples worldwide. For them IVF has answered one of the deepest of human desires. “The most important thing in life is having a child,” Dr Edwards once said. IVF now accounts for 2 to 3 per cent of all births.
For Rome to respond to all that with a tone which was at best caveated, and at worst carping, seemed joyless for a church which routinely styles itself as ‘pro-life’.
I predict a riot… Protest and the madness of crowds
It is, of course, an extreme case. A few days ago the president of Ecuador was besieged by his own riot police inside a hospital where he had taken refuge after one protesting policeman hurled a tear-gas canister at his elected leader. The police had taken to the streets in indignation at plans by the government, led by the leftist economist Rafael Correa, to introduce a national austerity package in response to the cost of the global banking crisis. Police bonuses were being slashed and their promotions curtailed. Two people died and 37 were injured. At one point President Correa appeared on a balcony, surrounded by troops, tearing at his shirt and taunting the rioting policemen to kill him now if they dared.
Contrast that with the demonstration against planned public spending cuts which took place outside the Liberal Democrat conference two weeks back. There the Liverpool Socialist Choir – clutching their songsheets, cagoule hoods up and sheltering beneath brollies – sang their new anti-cuts anthem to the jaunty tune of the Marie Lloyd’s Victorian music hall comic ditty Oh! Mr Porter. Cutting-edge satire, it suggested that bringing back the guillotine for Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne was the only kind of cuts they wanted to see. Death by a thousand lampoons. That will show the buggers.
Yet if the madness of crowds varies wildly from one nation to another there can be little doubt that the sense of outrage of the ordinary Joe and Josephine is growing. In their cross-hairs is the madness of the markets – and the greedy bankers who sought to benefit from that, and then ended up nearly stalling the entire international economy.
Experts in bereavement will tell you there are five classic stages in the human response to death; they apply, it seems, equally aptly to our collective reaction to the death of the boom-without-bust good life. First comes shock and then denial. But the third stage is anger, and that is what is rising in the global gorge everywhere you look.
The eyes had it. When the candidates for the Labour leadership emerged having been told the result the Miliband brothers wrong-footed most of the observers in the room. David, chin up and grinning, had lost. Ed, unblinking and grim-faced, had won. The commentators read the runes, and got it wrong.
They had not looked at the eyes. The elder brother’s smile did not reach his. The younger brother’s were brimmed with tears. When the result was announced and the elder brother walked across to the younger we saw the victor’s face. The commentators rowed back, saying the victory was so narrow – and won by union votes against the preference of MPs and party members – that the new leader felt triumph was tinged with trouble.
My suspicion was immediately the opposite: Ed Miliband had suddenly realised the enormity of what he had done to his brother. And indeed it was later reported that, when he privately found he had won, Ed had turned to his campaign manager and whispered: “What have I done to David?”
Too late. He did not do it then, of course, but rather when he first made the decision to stand against his big brother who was generally regarded as Labour’s leader-in-waiting. Others had the foresight to predict such difficulties, which was why Yvette Cooper when pressed to stand for leader, stood aside and let her husband Ed Balls run for the job.
Does it matter how many gays there are in Britain?
The giveaway was the adverb. One in 100 adults is gay, according to figures from Office of National Statistics in the first-ever official count of the sexuality of the British population. “Only one in 100”, trumpeted a number of newspapers. To be fair, they could have been saying “only” because previous official estimates suggested that between five and seven per cent of the nation was homosexual. After all, the Treasury had announced it was working on that larger figure in the run-up to the civil partnership act in 2004 with the assumption that about 3.5 million Britons were gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.
But there was a blast of triumphalism in the way that the news was presented by some papers. Just 1.5 per cent of the population described themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual in interviews with 247,623 people, the biggest pool of social data ever assembled in Britain outside a full national census. That number, one right-wing newspaper observed, is “far lower than the estimate used as a basis for the distribution of millions of pounds in public money to sexual equality causes”.
Such responses explain why gay lobbyists were defensive in their reaction. The way statistics were collected may mean the new figure is too low, the gay rights charity Stonewall swiftly riposted. Asking people on doorsteps or over the phone might have deterred some people from giving accurate responses, particularly those who were not openly gay at home.
In fact, the statisticians had gone out of their way to minimise such problems. Those being asked were given a card – one of a series of cards – with different code numbers alongside each response, and asked to read out the appropriate number. Differently coded-cards were used for different members of a family living at the same address to ensure a father did not know what his son’s answers might mean. The survey quizzed more than twenty times as many as the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles had done in 2000 using a database of 12,000.
So does it matter how many people are gay? Philosophically, of course not. No-one would argue that we have to show greater respect to Muslims than to Jews because there are more of them; the same survey showed that only 0.6 per cent of the population are Jewish compared with Muslims who constitute 4.2 per cent. But what is philosophically preposterous can sometimes be politically potent.
It’s a good job they didn’t ask me to vote
One night a few weeks back I stood outside a London pub with a group of friends. “Who should I vote for in the Labour leadership ballot?” one asked. The assembled company, all broadly Christian socialist types, gave the overwhelming response: None of the Above. It was not a helpful reaction, of course, since a decision had to be made. But it gave some indication of the lack of enthusiasm for the contest, and a general gloom at the fact that a party the size of Labour could not throw up a better quality of candidates than those on offer. You’ll have to go for the lesser of weevils, one wag suggested. Ah, but which was that?
“You can’t vote for someone with a lisp,” someone suggested. Apparently Ed Balls has one, though I’d never noticed. “Well the Miliband brothers both have a-speak-your-weight machine android quality about them,” said someone else. Andy Burnham was adjudged a light-weight who had never said anything profound, revealing, interesting or even witty. Diana Abbott was a destructive loudmouth. As you can see the level of analysis was pretty profound.
The obvious jumping-off point was to ask which of them would make the most credible prime minister-in-waiting. On that David Miliband scored highest in our bar-room focus group by virtue of his past positions, his high support among MPs and, said those who had encountered him personally, his intellectual horsepower. But had he the killer instinct? He had had several chances to move against Gordon Brown and had bottled them all. And he would be Blair II; would that put enough clear water between him and David Cameron?
Ed Miliband had made better noises about detaching our foreign policy from the coat-tails of Washington, in a way his big brother had signally failed to do when he was Foreign Secretary. And as Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change he had shown more urgency about pushing international action on global warming than most politicians. But was there a danger of him setting out too leftist a stall, in pursuit of the union vote, and alienating the middle ground of British voters?
So what did we learn from the Pope’s visit?
AND another thing, fulminated the anti-papal protestor to the BBC, “I have just found out that the Queen has to wear black when she meets the Pope as a sign of deference.” It was unfortunate, therefore, that when the monarch had met the pontiff two days earlier the BBC television footage showed the Queen was wearing what my fashion advisers describe as a fetching shade of winter teal – very pale green to my untutored eyes. Clearly this particular protestor was not one of the billion people round the world who tuned in to watch Pope Benedict’s visit. Either that or it was a case of never let the facts get in the way of a good protest.
Will the first official visit of a Pope to the United Kingdom change anything? It’s too soon to say, said Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Professor of Church History at Oxford, echoing the famous judgement of the Chinese premier Chou en-Lai when he was asked what had been the consequences of the French Revolution.
Not much has changed for our noisy neighbours in the Protest the Pope movement. They have some legitimate complaints about the policy of the Catholic Church but much of their criticism has not only been characterised by spittle-flecked invective but also by a reluctance to check many of the so-called facts which they parrot from one another. Any stick will do to beat a dogma, even a bent one, the stick that is, though some of the dogma may be too.
Hey Nick Clegg, I can do that, gizza job!
It is little more than a mile from Everton Brow to the shiny new conference hall on the Liverpool dockside where the Liberal Democrat party is holding its annual conference. But the two places are a world apart.
Those LibDems who are preening themselves that this is the party’s first conference in government for 65 years might do well to make the short journey. If they did, they would discover the consequences of their decision to renege on their manifesto pledge not to back public spending cuts as hard or as fast as Conservative ministers have decreed.
They might meet Danny Vaughan, a 29-year-old who is doing community work under a scheme called Future Jobs. He is a tall taciturn young man who, until he joined the project, had been on the dole for six months after getting laid off from a labouring job. “I tried to get another but there’s just no work out there,” he tells me.
He is standing in the foyer of the West Everton Community Centre – know to everyone locally as The Wek, pronounced with a guttural Scouse click on the k. He is talking to Ann Roach, who is the chair of the centre and also the supervisor of the Future Jobs scheme. “Danny is so keen he comes in at 7.30 though he’s not supposed to start till 9am,” she says.
His job is to help old people locally with their cleaning, decorating and other odd jobs. “Danny is the new Yosser Hughes,” Ann says referring to the character from The Boys from the Blackstuff, a tv drama series from the 1980s recession who became famous for his catchphrase ‘Gizza Job’.
“I’ll do any job. I’ll go down the sewer and sort the hard shite from the soft shite if you want,” says Danny eloquently, “so long as it gives me a job.”
The task he has been given is more mundane but far more useful. “Yesterday we got a call from an 80 year old lady whose house was full of wasps,” he says. “I went in and killed 50 then we got someone in from the council to take the nest away. There are lots of old folk in the community who need help, who are stuck in their house and never go out, and where no-one normally ever knocks on the door.”
