richardfjbrown

Living in a box

I watched the ponderously-titled \’Big Chef Takes On Little Chef\’, wherein Heston Blumenthal seeks to revive Little Chef, with a creeping and dismal sense of familiarity.

The show pivots on an initially contrived, but subsequently all-too-real clash between Blumenthal and Little Chef boss Ian Pegler. The problem is something like this: Blumenthal sees his role as recovering the reputation of a British classic and, for all his culinary curiosity, seems to nurse a genuine interest in and affection for the traditions of British cooking.

Pegler, however, seems to view Blumenthal as a performing food monkey, who will bring \’blue skies thinking\’ to bear on Little Chef\’s tired menus (but doesn\’t need to worry his little head with anything like business models).

I don\’t know much about catering, but my experiences on the fringe of architecture suggest that the clients who demand wacky, iconic designs for buildings with a \’wow factor\’ are those least likely to understand the careful, pains-taking accretion of change that the best architects can orchestrate. The neophiles want the glamour and the buzz, but are too superficial to consider the sweat and the craft that underpins it.

They want \’thinking outside of the box\’ (Ian Pegler came up with this with a mere two minutes of TV programme to go). To which my architect friend Mark has the only sensible response: \”Err, I don\’t really think in a box.\”

All meat on the same bone

It\’s easy to feel remote from your fellow-countrymen. I felt like a visitor from another planet when the nation went into collective mourning for Princess Diana, and I did again last week, as tens of thousands of people began baying for the blood of radio presenters.

Initially I felt irritated by \’Manuelgate\’; the furore seemed like a distraction from \’real\’ news, like the continuing collapse of global capitalism. Then I realised that these were actually the same story: while regulators dozed, infantile over-paid idiots with egos the size of counties caused havoc with their reckless speculation. Both disasters started out small, noticed only by the aficionados, but rapidly snow-balled to become national (if not global) crises.

To stretch the comparison, we are now assured that there will be a retreat from risk-taking. Bankers will no longer trade arcane and spectral financial instruments, but will return to their \’boring\’ core business of offering punters somewhere to keep their money (which they can lend out to other punters). Similarly, BBC radio hosts will have to find something interesting or amusing to say between playing records (which doesn\’t necessarily involve prank calls, rude words or sex with burlesque stars).

A retreat from risk may seem reasonable, especially after the turmoil we have witnessed in recent months, but slipping back into stagnation, culturally and financially, does not seem very appealing either. Are we even capable of finding a happy medium, between stodgy and stifling conformity on the one hand, and the unconstrained exuberance of adrenaline-charged nutters on the other? It\’s too early to tell, but the omens are hardly promising.

From goose to snake

Watching Newsnight\’s \’trial\’ to examine who was to blame for the near-collapse of global capitalism last night, I could only wonder at the sheer quantity of bad faith on display.

The programme began with the results of a telephone survey, showing that the vast majority of the public blamed speculation in particular or banks in general for their irresponsibility, with s smaller proportion blaming the government, and five per cent each blaming regulators and the borrowing public.

The various \’accused\’ explained why it was not their fault. Paul Mason, the usually sensible Newsnight Economics Editor, talked in horror-struck tones of bankers being motivated to lend recklessly by the \”personal enrichment\” that could follow (as opposed to the altruism that usually prevails in financial services), and Will Hutton lambasted banks for not unilaterally cutting back their remuneration to a level that could be described as sane (and would no doubt lead to a swift leakage of skilled personnel).

So, the mess we\’re in is all a result of these evil institutions, which apparently operate in an entirely parallel universe from the rest of us? No. The simple truth, however unpalatable, is that – whenever we have rejoiced in cheap mortgages, easy credit card transfers or stockmarket gains – we have added air to the bubble. We may wriggle to avoid blame (and everyone else involved is, so why not?), but most of us were complicit in the system.

But now, less than a year after we were worrying about the terrible implications of asking rich people to pay tax, when all the talk was of killing geese that lay golden eggs, we stand astonished that financial institutions have been playing as fast and loose as they can, in order to maximise their profits.

Perhaps it\’s because I am a child of the Thatcher years, but I can\’t find it in my heart to expect capitalist institutions to be anything other than ruthlessly – and even recklessly – self-interested. You may not like it (and I don\’t much), but it\’s the world in which we live. As Michael Foot recently observed (a footnote to this), there was an alternative, but we chose a different path 25 years ago.

I\’m reminded of Al Wilson\’s Northern Soul classic, The Snake: a kindly woman takes in and looks after a snake that is dying of cold. Recovered, the snake duly bites her. As the venom takes hold, the woman complains of how her hospitality has been repaid, but the snake is having none of it:

\”Oh shut up, silly woman\”, said the reptile with a grin.
\”You knew darn well I was a snake before you took me in!\”

Legless at Glasto

Newspaper coverage of last weekend\’s Glastonbury Festival suggests a new parlour game. In recent years, the press have picked up on a few defining features of Glastonbury: it\’s quite muddy, the sanitary facilities leave something to be desired, there are young people there, some of them are dressed oddly, many of them take drugs. Oh, and there\’s some music too.

So, the obvious response is to cast round for the journalist least likely to enjoy this unique mixture of charms, and send them out there. Last year the Guardian sent tent-hating Charlie Brooker, this year it was veteran columnist Alexander Chancellor. The Telegraph followed bearded Westminster mystic Christopher Howse with a smartly-tied parliamentary sketch writer Andrew Gimson.

The Daily Mail, however, possibly won, by sending whiney fashionista Liz Jones. Unlike the others, all of whom wrote variations on \”I enjoyed it despite everything\”, Jones appears to have had an authentically miserable time (even if some cast doubt on whether her tent was actually there).

So, here\’s the game. Who should the newspapers send next year? Anna Wintour? Brian Sewell? The Duchess of Devonshire? Nominations welcome.

In praise of indifference

Last week, I visited a friend who now lives in a medium-sized Midlands town. He\’d been in London a few weeks earlier, he told me, at a party. Later in the evening, with a few other fairly intoxicated late-30s types, he\’d ended up in a drum-and-bass club in Islington.

He was amazed at how little attention this frazzled group attracted, despite being the oldest people there by about fifteen years. It would have been very different in his home town, and not in a particularly positive way.

I started to say something about London being \’inclusive\’ and then stopped myself. I\’ve been writing too many public sector policy documents. The people in that club weren\’t being inclusive; they had just erected screens of privacy around themselves and their friends. Unless and until the newcomers did something outrageous – stripping, starting fights, lighting cigarettes – they were invisible.

Tonight, in Brixton, in Brick Lane, in Soho, people from all ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities and classes will gather to enjoy a Saturday night out. They will be in the same places, but they won\’t be together in any real sense.

Big cities like London may have weak \’social capital\’, to borrow the concept popularised by Robert Putnam in \’Bowling Alone\’, but they are also places where an astonishing variety of people manage to live (for the most part peacefully) in close proximity to others with whom they have little in common. In the urban context, strong communities can be exclusive and antagonistic, as the murderous turf wars of London gangs illustrate.

Outside the world of well-meaning platitude, Londoners do not spend an enormous amount of time \”celebrating diversity\”. Rather, we are indifferent to difference, preserving privacy in the crowd.

The age of change?

The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Hilaire Belloc

Personality politics

London voters will now have received the candidate leaflet for Thursday’s mayoral election. Reading some of the policies in the document, you wonder whether to laugh or cry. Among the many powers that the Mayor of London does not have are the power to stop immigration, to pull troops out of Iraq, to declare St George’s Day a national holiday, to promote marriage, or to insist all employers pay the London Living Wage.

But the London mayoralty is not really about policy. Try as they might, Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are hard-pushed to find serious areas of disagreement: pledging to \”consult residents…on whether we should keep the Western [congestion charge] extension\”, as Johnson has promised, is hardly an ideological rallying call.

The London Mayor is primarily a city manager: he or she needs to be able to represent the capital, to strike deals, to make things work better. This means having a clear idea of what London needs, and the political smarts to be able to lobby, haggle and argue with a jealous central government to get it. It’s personality politics, but it’s far from trivial.

This is where a difference begins to emerge between the two front-runners. Ken Livingstone has secured more powers for the Mayor, commitment to Crossrail, and billions of pounds of investment to fund the London 2012 Games and legacy. Admittedly this has been a Labour mayor working with a Labour government, but the relationship has not always been an easy one.

An incumbent always has the advantage of pointing to his record (though Livingstone\’s opponents have found plenty of ammunition there too). But some of the signals sent out by the Boris Johnson campaign are worrying. While Livingstone’s inner circle of advisors are not people who feel particularly at home in the Labour Party headquarters, Johnson’s campaign has been closely managed by some of his party’s top strategists, from Lynton Crosby to Nick Boles.

In addition, some newspapers have pointed to Johnson as a poster-boy for socially-liberal cameronite conservatism, a one-man vanguard for the coming general election. Johnson is insisting that he is his own man (just as Steve Norris did in previous elections). But it is hard to see in him the same cussedly independent streak, and willingness to denounce his ‘comrades’, that has endeared Livingstone to so few people in his own party and, at least in previous elections, to so many people in London.

Whatever policies the mayoral candidates espouse, the test of their mettle will be how they deal with government. Whether the government in question is Conservative or Labour should be almost immaterial. The capital needs a Mayor whose interests lie in securing the best for London, not in letting City Hall be used as a second front in Westminster’s wars.

There should be a law against us

Today\’s story, of a teenage boy who badly burnt himself in an un-staffed tanning salon, only merited a few lines in most papers, but one comment offered a sharp insight into the state of modern capitalism.

Asked about the unfortunate incident, salon owner Steve James said that he could not afford to have staff on duty all the time if he was to remain competitive. He said: “I’m really disappointed this has happened. We are not operating illegally. If laws were passed to make all salons staffed all the time it would solve the problem.”

It is worth pausing over this statement. Mr James does not seek to defend his business practices on any grounds apart from their legality and the need to remain competitive. Indeed, in calling for legal changes, he implicitly acknowledges that, without tougher regulation, salons like his will operate in an irresponsible manner. In effect, he is saying: “There should be a law against us.”

You could hardly ask for a more damning indictment of contemporary capitalism. In an era of global and local competition, businesses cannot afford to let any moral considerations to dull their competitive edge. Conscientious entrepreneurs are cornered, and end up actively seeking regulation by the state, as their only defence against a relentless descent to the bottom line.

Consumer pressure, on sweated labour for example, can act as a gentle inhibitor of the worst practices, but shareholders will swiftly punish any working practices that raise costs (without a parallel boost to profits). Codes of conduct and self-regulation offer only uneasy stand-offs, which hold for as long as their least scrupulous member.

There is an irony here. After years of rolling back the state, building bonfires of red tape and so forth, businessmen like Steve James see state regulation as the only thing that can rescue them from the callous consequences of relentless competition.

Civilisation under attack!

Under a great headline (\’Pranks cannot resist the brilliance of Olympic sacred fire\’), the People\’s Daily has this to say about the Olympic torch farrago (my italics):

Many netizens issued a warning. The few Tibet independence elements have a wishful thinking. The Olympic torch does not belong to China alone, but belong all the more to the world. Tibet independence elements now stand in the opposite to the peace-loving people across the world, and their evil deeds are sure to be subjected to denunciations by people worldwide.

The Olympic sacred fire is a vital, important symbol of human values with respect to the modern Olympic Games. Every torch relay represents a spread of human civilization. It is precisely because of this sense that people worldwide have all along regarded the Olympic torch relay as a lofty, sacred ceremony….So any deeds to interfere with and sabotage the Olympic sacred fire constitutes not only a blaspheme of the Olympic spirit but a grave challenge to the human civilization.

And I thought it was just a crappy outsize cigarette lighter, and an excuse for a bit of traditional western argy-bargy….