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This Greek chap isn't wearing sunblock but Maalox. Rhone-Poulenc's antacid remedy has become the must-have demo accessory of the year and sales are booming. For why? It neutralises tear gas - not actually a gas at all but a powder (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) that reacts with moisture on the skin, and which the aluminium hydroxide and magnesium hydroxide in Maalox very effectively stops irritating the eyes and mucous membranes.
It reminds me of that old saw about the Swiss and cuckoo clocks; conflict rapidly brings in its wake an accelerated development of both offensive and defensive solutions. But fails to answer why the Maalox solution was not discovered in Northern Ireland, often once clouded with CS gas ....
Construction is booming in the BRICs - but there's no good news here in the UK. A decade ago or so the specialist construction support partnerships - quantity surveyors, CDM planners, project managers, construction law specialists and the like - began to agglomerate into multi-skilled LLPs that could offer clients a whole raft of skills with one appointment, and the old structures, in which the specialist partners were personally and individually liable, disappeared. I can't think when last I saw a site board with the old purple RICS lion and the legend 'Quantity Surveyors'. 2008 hit these firms hard in the UK - most froze salaries and laid off staff, and many of the bigger ones started hoarding cash. Lots of cash.
Well, now they've started spending - but not in the UK. There has recently been a flurry of acquisitions and mergers and investments in similar firms offshore - not in the Gulf (a spent force) but in the BRICs. This is not however good news for UK construction support professionals. With university education and booming middle classes, they can recruit locally all the talent they need at a fraction of the cost of transferring a UK professional out. First class Quantity Surveyors from the Mumbai office can service a construction project in Guangzhou on salaries of £10k.
And of course there's increasing nervousness in the UK offices of such firms; only immigration controls prevent those same Mumbai-based QSs from servicing the live construction projects in the UK. It's all part of the rebalancing of the economy away from services and back to manufacturing; just as we're losing our competitive advantage in construction support, those same growing middle classes in the BRICs have created a new consumer market for quality and niche goods. Exports of Scotch are a good indicator. Forget the value of exports - as the £ devalues, the value will increase - but look instead at volume. Although this seems steady, with no dramatic increase, something fundamental is happening. Exports to the US, France and Germany, traditional stalwarts, have nosedived. But exports to Russia are up 60%, India up 50% and China up 20%.
So here's a message to the gloomy burghers of Merthyr Tydfil; stop whinging and pestering for handouts, and start making stuff that a 30-something professional in Rio wants to buy as a lifestyle defining product.
Rebekah Wade as was, Brooks as is, who hit the headlines when she allegedly beat the crap out of her hard-man ex husband Ross Kemp (earning her Private Eye's nick of 'The Slapper'), ex-chum of Cherry Blair, is deep in the doo-doo. Of course the 'Screws' paid cash to corrupt coppers for story leads and inside details; everyone knows the score. Rebekah's sin was to lie to a Parliamentary committee about it. As lowly as one rates individual MPs, as sleazy and corrupt a collective body as they are, we must preserve the rights of Parliament to be told the absolute truth.
As NOTW hacks and ex-hacks indulge in an orgy of back-stabbing and getting their retaliation in first as they dob each other for the Milly Dowler obscenity, we risk losing sight of the important story - Wade and some bent senior coppers lied to a Parliamentary committee. They must all be tried for this and serve time in jail if convicted. And Cameron is tarred by association - and this too will stick.
With Dick Puddlecote organising a smoke-in for Saturday at Stony Stratford (I'd like to be there but probably won't be), and Iceland proposing a total ban on the sale of cigarettes (I've always said the Nordics made the most enthusiastic Nazis) we need to look to Australia for how the truly absurd could arrive at a street near you soon.
This is King Street, in Newtown, a suburb of Sydney undergoing 'gentrification'. The local council responsible for the pavement on the left of the pic has just banned all outdoor smoking, but the pavement on the right, within the City of Sydney area, still permits smokers to sit at the outside tables. Cafe owners on the left side are up in arms; all their trade has crossed the street. Most absurd is that it's a busy four-lane road, and that particulates, smoke, and carcinogenic PAHs from vehicles are probably many thousands of times the levels produced if every smoker in Newtown was puffing away at the tables. This isn't about health at all; it's all just spite and bigotry. At times of economic stress people used to immolate elderly women; today's witches are we smokers.
We baby boomers, that is. We who have enjoyed free higher education, sustained high standards of living, the rewards of daft house-price inflation, full employment and all the rewards of a liberal social democratic post-war roll. Now, as John Redwood points out, we want to use our political muscle to get the State to pay for our care in old age so we can pass on our wealth intact to our children. The postman, the school cleaner, the Polish fruit-picker and the working young couple trapped in rented accommodation must pay taxes so our kids can keep their inheritance intact.
I'm sorry, but this stinks. Unlike Socialists who believe in equality of outcome, I believe only in equality of opportunity - a 'fair go' in antipodean terms. Call it equity. And it's not just intragenerational equity that's important but intergenerational equity. For my generation to take from the younguns for our own old-age care when we have wealth intact is simply not equitable. If I can't find extended family members to embrace my well-being in my decrepitude, then I must dig into my capital for it. And despite our political clout, this is one battle that my generation would be well advised to lose.
The current hand-wringing over council library closures conveniently manages to ignore the remarkable survival of the very first lending libraries in England - the Mechanics Institutes. Not the sort of places to be known to the like of Lady Toynbee, what with all those screws, nipples and shafts (sorry Mr Arthur, journals) these were founded in the early nineteenth century before even the rotten boroughs were abolished and our first round of democratic reforms.
Tavern Street in Ipswich has remarkably few taverns, but is home to a Mechanics Institute founded by Dr James Birkbeck in 1824; the one he founded in London went on to become Birkbeck College, but Ipswich just went on doing what it had always done - providing a reading source and meeting place for the artisans of Ipswich. Anyone who knows Ipswich will recognise the doorway, but I'll guess few have actually been inside. It's a sort of secret. And MIs owe their name to a more ancient usage of the word than now applies; Shakespeare's mechanicals you will recall were a tinker, a tailor, a weaver, a bellows-mender and a joiner.
Just as the 1911 National Insurance Act crowded-out the flourishing private provision of insurance, savings, mutuals and co-operatives, so the well-meaning State and its library-building benefactors such as Mr Andrew Carnegie crowded-out many flourishing private Mechanics Institutes.
So what's the point of this post, apart from a puff for Ipswich? Well, there's a hugely resilient technical and vocational streak amongst us, one that I'm pleased to say feels very strongly about itself. The comments to a post below, which was actually about unskilled site labour, angrily upbraided me for seeming to suggest that foreign engineers were better than native ones. The MIs in the early and mid nineteenth century played an important part in nurturing the skills and innovation that was to place the country at the world's industrial forefront in the latter half of the century, and did so not as the result of central economic planning by the State but by ordinary 'technicals' banding together. Could the answer to Britain's competitive advantage in the twenty-first century again lie with the grass roots?
I must admit I don't read Johann Hari and I've only vaguely heard of the Orwell Prize, but of course I shalln't allow either of these facts prevent me from venturing an opinion on the matter. Orwell of course consummately catalogued with great insight the deceptions, frauds, deceits, mendacities and outright dishonesty of the totalitarian Left. Given what this shit Hari has done, I can actually think of no-one more deserving of a prize in Orwell's name.
Alastair Campbell should have got one for 'Most Idiotic Plagiarism 2003', Gordon Brown for 'Best self-deception' in 2008 and 2009 and for 'Most bigoted stereotyping' in 2010 for that campaign trail description of Gillian Duffy, and of course Polly Toynbee should get an Orwell lifetime achievement award for 'Omission, distortion and misrepresentation above the call of duty'.
For a reasonably sized firm, one with a turnover from the tens of millions up to £100m or so, I would be surprised if the CE were paid more than about twelve times the clerical / admin salary. If this were £14k, it gives a ceiling of £168k for the CE's wedge. In between it gives all the room you need for an efficient, flat hierarchy based on a maximum span-of-control of eight and all with decent salary differentials. Of course, if profits are good and sustained, boards will tend to reward the top team over and above this.
As firms get bigger, with turnovers in the hundreds or even thousands of millions, so the hierarchy expands - you need more layers of management to maintain your span-of-control. You'll probably split the thing into business divisions, but then you'll need a separate Finance Division and HR Division to keep the centre in control and hold everything together. But even in the largest firm, I can't see the need to pay the CE more than twenty times the clerical / admin salary - a ceiling of £280k using the figure above. But then other factors come into play; there's the prestige of the firm, enhanced by having an unreasonably highly paid CE. Then there's the risk of poaching and all the other factors that HR Consultants will roll out to justify vast additions to the CE's wedge. But for a boring, steady company making normal profits, 20x the base salary is a sufficient gap to allow all the hierarchy you need.
And indeed when the profligacy of BBC top salaries was first in the press, and Mark Thompson's £850k package, I'm quite certain that a cap of "twenty times the lowest paid" was talked of. The Telegraph this morning even repeats it;
Lord (Chris) Patten, Britain's last governor of Hong Kong and a former Conservative Party chairman, hailed research by Will Hutton of the Work Foundation into a Government proposal to limit top public servants' pay to no more than 20 times that of their lowest paid staff.
This must have terrified the gilded dags in the executive suites who must have been pushing the little calculator buttons on their Blackberries like a school of monkeys with new typewriters. And lo and behold, for the same Marr show interview, the Guardian is putting out a completely different story, and one in which the lowest pay has magically (in an Orwellian sort of way) become median pay;
Patten said he was particularly interested in the "very good ideas" in Hutton's report on public sector pay, which rejected a suggestion that top pay in public sector bodies should be capped at 20 times median pay in the organisation.
The median salary is the figure below which half the BBC's employees are paid and above which half the BBC's employees are paid. My guess is that the figure's about £35k or so - giving a ceiling of £700k or so. Oh, how convenient! The base salary (excluding all the extras) of all the following are suddenly therefore fine and no change will be needed;
£647,000 Mark Thompson, Director General
£459,000 Mark Byford, Deputy Director General
£406,000 Jana Bennett, Director BBC Vision
£380,000 Jon Smith, Chief Executive BBC Worldwide
£370,000-£400,000 Peter Salamon, Director BBC North
£329,000 Zarin Patel, Chief Financial Officer
£328,000 Caroline Thompson, Chief Operating Officer
£314,000 Timothy Davie, Director Audio & Music
£310,000-£340,000 Alex Yentob, Creative Director BBC Finance; Erik Hughes, Director Future Media and Technology; Helen Boaden, Director BBC News; Sharon Baylay, Director Marketing, Communications and Audiences
£280,000-£310,000 Balraj Samara, Director Vision Operations; Pat Longhrey, Director Nation and Regions; Richard Sambrook, Director Global News
£250,000-£280,000 Dominic Coles, Chief Operating Officer Journalism; Jay Hunt, Controller BBC One; Roland Keating, Director of Archive Content (TV)
£220,000-£250,000 Daniel Cohen, Controller, BBC Three; Ed Williams, Director of Communications, Marketing; Janice Hadlow, Controller BBC Two; John Linwood, Chief Technology Officer, Future Media & Technology; John Yorke, Controller television drama production; Julie Gardner; Head of Independent Drama Commissioning; Nicholas Kroll, Director BBC Trust; Richard Deverell, Controller children’s television; Roger Mosey, Director sport
£190,000-£220,000 Andrew Parfitt, Controller RI/IXtra/Asian Network, Audio & Music; Andy Griffee, Editorial Director Project 1, Operations; Anne Morrison, Controller Network Production; Chris Day, Group Financial Controller; Chris Kane, Head of Corporate Real Estate; Dorothy Prior, Controller Production Resource; Emma Swan, Head of In-House Commissioning, BBC Vision; Graham Ellis, Controller Production, Audio and Music; John Vickerman, HR Shared Services Director; Liam Keelan, Controller daytime television; Marka Damazer, Controller Radio 4 and Radio 7; Mike Goodie, Director Employee Relations; Nicholas Eldred, Group General Counsel and Secretary; Peter Horrocks, Director World Service; Peter White, Chief Executive, BBC Digital UK; Richard Klein, Controller BBC Four; Robert Shennan, Controller Radio 2 and 6 Music; Roger Wright; Controller R3; Stephen Mitchell, Head of multimedia news programmes; Tom Archer, Controller factual production, BBC Vision
The Somme may have been bloodier (60,000 British casualties alone on the first day, compared to 50,000 from both sides over three days) but whilst 1st July marks in British minds the start of that disastrous offensive, to American minds it signifies the first day of Gettysburg. And in many ways the mass casualties of civil war have a capacity to wound the living unlike those of wars between nations; Kineton produced only 1,000 dead, a drop in the bloody bucket, yet the memory of those frozen corpses below Edgehill can still provoke silence and awe on that place.
And Lincoln articulated exactly why Gettysburg is important for us, too;
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth
(NB Amazon currently have the 4 hours of Ronald F Maxwell's definitive film on DVD for under £4. Buy.)
You must have noticed that when EUphiles and Fedarists are called upon to say something positive about the EU, all they can ever come up with are the many positives that rightly belong to Europe and exist completely independently without the EU. Architecture and culture? Music and fashion? Sleek motor cars? The rail networks? Glorious food and drink? Superlative literature? Stunning landscapes? All are defining factors of the continent and its constituent nations, not of the evil Behemoth that is robbing us of so many good things. Yet the EUphiles will without shame claim them all for the EU. The Polish PM Donald Tusk does exactly this when he proclaims "The European Union is great. It is the best place on Earth to be born and to live your life."
No Herr Tusk. Europe is great. It is the best place on Earth to be born and to live your life. And would be better still without the insufferable arrogance of the EU and its nomenklatura.
It was not long ago that the UK construction industry all took a Summer holiday at the same time. The annual August shut-down worked well; builders' merchants, suppliers, concrete batch plants all shut down at the same time, and even the Architects behaved themselves and flew off to the Algarve for a fortnight. The pressure from most developers these days is to keep going, and no programme I've seen in recent years has shown a Summer break at all. Which is bad news for contractors whose sites are being built by Portuguese labour. You see, the Portuguese all go home at the end of July, and return at the start of September. All over, there will be pressure on many migrant workers in the UK to go home to help with the harvest - whether this is grapes, wheat or roots. Tsk. You didn't think they were going to spend a month on the beach, did you?
These lads, living in crowded multi-occupied slums while here, remitting their earnings home, living parsimoniously, will go home to listen to granny nagging about the dilapidations that need fixing, the goat that got loose, the bad knee, the cost of everything, the muck-heap that needs spreading and a new hole that needs digging for the privy, whether working in a bar makes the granddaughter a putana and why no one is there to do stuff for them. And when they get back here, they'll have to work sixty hours a week to catch up on lost time on site. And they will do.
Iain Duncan-Smith may cry foul as loudly as he likes, but which sane employer would swap these lads for their British counterparts; soft, lazy, lippy, hungover, chippy, skiving, thieving whining asthmatics. Welfarism has robbed the working class not just of their independence but of all resilience, all hardness. Hard doesn't mean getting bladdered and fighting outside Witherspoons, it means grafting six days a week in gruelling and demanding labour for low reward. It spurs a hunger and thirst for education as a way out, it engenders a self-sufficient but interdependent network of clan, caste and kinship, and it recognises Merit and will fight for an 'equal go' (as the Australians have it). And we've lost it.
