Capitalism's Last Gasp?

If the latest plethora of books on the subject is anything to go by - probably not. An article in The Spectator critiques the latest offering by a C4 presenter and Left wing ideologue. Yet again, a left winger is predicting that Capitalism is doomed, and that it will be replaced by 'greater sharing of resources' - which seems to be Left wing speak for 'Sodomy non sapiens'. Essentially, this prediction has been trotted out since Marx and probably before him and they still haven't managed to come up with a workable alternative.

Capitalism is as old as humanity. I would suggest that it began when Ugg first discovered that he could trade a leg of mammoth for a months supply of fish, which could be traded for a wife, new sandals, a years supply of leather loincloths and a bag full of freshly napped arrow heads and axes. That he could trade those for the rest of the year and keep everyone else working to supply him with more trade opportunities and food probably arrived at the same moment. And, I would venture, that ever since some 'thinker' in the group has whinged that Ugg's enterprise approach to trade is 'unfair' and fails to 'distribute the proceeds evenly.

I suspect that Capitalism, love it or hate it, will always be around in some form. The reason is that, unlike the Left's ideal society and system, it is flexible. It responds to change. It adapts, and it rewards effort, enterprise and innovation - all of which are anathema to the sort of 'managed' redistributive economic systems favoured by most people on the Left of the political spectrum. Ironically efforts to 'control' economic activity, or to redistribute the rewards usually result in a widening of the gaps between 'rich' and 'poor' and ultimately in the 'means of production' actually being moved entirely abroad.

Recently I have indulged myself, reading some of Owen Jones' work and making an attempt to read several other tomes on 'non-capitalist' economic systems. I've given up. None of them seems able to see that any system such as they propose doesn't actually 'fix' anything. In fact they simply exchange to entrepreneur with some Party Hack and associated Apparatchiks who reward themselves and patronise everyone else in the name of 'fairness'. Nor do they seem able to recognise that every attempt to create the sort of systems they favour fail for the same reason every time. People do not like being told what they may and may not have. They do not like having some faceless bureaucrat serving a 'leader' enjoying the fruits of everyone else's labours, telling them they aren't entitled to some reward for their efforts because it is 'unfair' to the bone idle twerp they work alongside.

As The Spectator article says -

Oddly enough, the recent batch of left-wing doom and conspiracy books, from those of Russell Brand and Owen Jones to the more serious and informed Mason, point to a unified worldview. This sees human beings in democracies not as people with free will and unimaginable potential, but as inanimate beings to whom things are done. 

I do agree that raw unadulterated Capitalism produces some big inequalities, but teaching me to be envious of the guy who ventures his capital (earned or unearned) in some new business venture and strikes it rich, isn't addressing the problem. Most folk need only three things - a regular income, security and a 'home'. Yes there are those who live in sixty room mansions, own a yacht and four cars, but most of us never could even if we lived in some Left wing Utopia.

If there is one thing I have learned reading history and travelling in my work capacity, it is that there is a distinction between ideological theory and reality. I would love to see a more equal society in which no one goes hungry, no one is homeless or without medical care, but I also recognise that, no matter how attractive the ideological theory, it is unlikely to be achieved in any human society. Simply because humans are not all the same. We come with all manner of personal abilities, skills and ambitions. Ideology seldom takes account of that. In addition every Left wing regime I have ever encountered ran on the same principle - the belief that the 'State' owned the money in everyone's pockets and could spend it. So they floated loans, printed more money, raised taxes until it hurt, spent the money and then wondered why their economies flatlined. As Mr Micawber famously said; "Income Twenty Pounds per annum, Expenditure Nineteen Pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence - happiness. Expenditure Twenty Pounds and sixpence - disaster." A lesson there the Left simply refuse to learn. Their solution to everything - raise taxes! Tax the rich until the pips squeak as one Left wing Chancellor of the Exchequer put it. The result of his idiocy was a massive departure of 'capital' and a fall in revenue income.

Recently I was surprised to learn that in present day Russia income tax is a flat rate irrespective of income. Health care, social welfare and so on are all set at 'basic' levels. If you want better, you are free to buy it, but the 'State' doesn't provide it. That applies across a range of former communist countries, and, contrary to what writers like Owen Jones believe was the case, often this replaces a system where everyone paid for the best for the ruling elites, and got just the basic care themselves. Many other nations have similar systems. Hong Kong was one and still is, and China, Taiwan, India and several other major growing economies have the same idea - one rate of tax for everyone. In Hong Kong the super rich were encouraged to be 'philanthropic' - and they were often very generous.

I have to agree with the writer of The Spectator article. There is clearly something in the left wing mindset that refuses to acknowledge that no system is entirely 'fair'. Or that there will always be inequalities. That, after all, is the human condition.

Some Interesting Reading

My reading list lately has included a hefty tome by Prof Jane Humphries of Oxford University entitled Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, and another book entitled The Establishment - And how they get away with it by Owen Jones. Both are not easy reading, but they are certainly eye opening. The first exposes how Britain's wealthy and Middle Classes benefited from the mass exploitation of children in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It describes how children from the age of six or less were employed in mines and mills at absolute minimum wages, often putting in 16 hour shifts in the mines where they hauled the waggons, or gathered the coal from spaces too small for an adult. In the cotton mills, children were used to gather waste beneath the machines while they were operating. Deaths and injuries were too numerous to count, and the resistance in Parliament to any restrictions, or the imposition of any safety measures was unbelievable.

Which leads me to the second book. Written by an angry young man I found I have observed many of the things he speaks of at first hand. "The Establishment" is a very well organised 'clique' of the wealthy and the powerful, and, if this book is to be believed, they exercise some very far reaching control over the civil service, the political landscape and the access to wealth. As I said, I can attest to having witnessed certain aspects he mentions, but not being a part of the "Establishment" myself, cannot say whether everything he mentions is as he says. I have long suspected much of this, and I would agree the circumstantial evidence points to it, but I cannot see anyone actually provided proof 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

The first book I found difficult because of the emotions it stirred. After all, the vast majority of us, born two hundred to a hundred years ago, would have followed at least some of the 'career path' described in it. As Prof Humphries points out, in many of the 'trades' a boy would be lucky to reach 25, and as for reaching a 'retirment age' - well very few did. For the girls it was as bad if not worse in some aspects. I felt a deep sense of thankfulness for the efforts of my great grandparents, grandparents and their antecedents for their efforts to break out of that mould and give my brother and I a chance of something better. Her book prompted me to look into the whole 'Workhouse' and Poor Law administration and the manner in which orphans were handled. Some of it made so angry I had to stop, and to me the worst aspect is that the modern 'Benefits' system is administered by the same mindset and the same 'social class' that set up the Workhouses. Worse, they seem to have the same motivation as their forebears - don't 'improve' anything, as the recipients might then break the cycle of patronage ...

What is fascinating about the revelations in both books is just how far those who do hold the keys to wealth and power will go to defend their control, and the lengths they will employ to ensure that they and their families, friends and close associates remain in control. Students of history will know how the Roman aristocracy used Circuses, 'free bread' and other populist handouts and entertainments to keep the populace 'happy' and unwilling to challenge the status quo. We can see a similar pattern in our own society, with 'football' extravaganzas and other 'sporting' entertainments. The 'arts' are funded to the hilt because they keep a population from asking awkward questions, and there is also that wonderful stand-by, fear of the 'enemy'. Here we can take our pick of a wide range, from 'being overwhelmed by immigrants', through 'runaway climate change' and 'loss of sovereignty' right down to all the 'something'-phobias we are constantly told we engage in.

Anything and everything to make sure we don't ask questions like, 'how does a man enter the political 'career' as a penniless graduate struggling to pay his loans become, in a few years, a millionaire property owner?' Or how a company with no expertise in some technical area get awarded huge contracts to perform work in that field? Or, Why does the Treasury have a list of 'preferred bidders' who can bypass the tendering process, but who all seem to be major companies with links to MPs, senior civil servants or other 'power' figures?

It is said that history is written by the victors, but I suspect this is not always true. What is true is that those in power have always been very good at manipulating our thinking, and in redirecting our attention away from their activities. Hence "Climate Change" (take a look at who the main promoters really are), or the Anti-Eu or any other convenient 'enemy'. As Owen Jones points out "Sovereignty" is, today a total illusion. The agenda is set by unelected officials in the UN, the EU and numerous other 'international' bodies. Once signed up to, parliaments have little scope for adjustment.

In the UK much is made of the 'unelected' nature of the Commission and the Council of Ministers, yet the politicians will argue that both are 'indirectly' elected bodies - the Council by National electors voting for the Party or Minister on the Council and the Commission by virtue of the fact its appointees are 'elected' by the Council and approved by the European Parliament.Mr Jones argues, and I believe he has a point, that this is a sham, since the Ministers are representatives of the political elites of the various member countries, the Commissioners are drawn from their ranks and the Parliament is also stuffed with members of the same political class.

The problem is, of course, that they can and do argue that we, the gullible voters, voted for them.

What is very clear is that in any age, and in every age, the wealthy and powerful will look after each other first and last. If there is any benefit lower down it is usually because some have managed to break out of the mould and claw their way upward by their own efforts, not because anyone in power made it easier or even helped them. This is where the Trades Unions have, in my view, gone badly wrong. The leaders of the Unions have joined the Establishment and become a part of the problem. No, I am not calling for a more radical Union movement, I am calling for a better understanding of what the working people - everyone who has to earn a salary or a wage to pay the bills - really want and need. Stuff the ideology where the sun doesn't shine. Let's recognise that for our society to prosper as a whole we need less division, less isolation and a damned sight more recognition of the partnership between 'worker' and 'manager/investor/owner'.

Yes, reading this made me angry at the abuse and the duplicity, but it also made me very proud of the boys, girls, men and women who managed to claw their way out of the pits of the slums, the poverty, the exploitation - and give their children a better chance. For the record, my paternal grandfather - the youngest of four children and the only surviving male - was apprenticed as a coffin-maker at 13. His future wife, the daughter of a small holder, apprenticed as a seamstress at 12. My maternal great grandfathers were respectively Colour Sergeant in the Royal Irish Rifles and a farmer. Great grandmother Heron's father was a Gardener on the Mount Stewart Estate. Their children managed to rise to become a Postmistress and to run his own business. My paternal grandfather finished his schooling on his own, taught himself accountancy and worked as a bookkeeper well past retirement age. I salute them all.

I commend both these books to my readers here, some of this is what inspired my latest book, due out soon. Limehouse Boys follows the paths of a trio of orphans in the 1830s East End of London. Watch this space for more details of its release.

Captains and Kings

The Greek drama continues. Mr Tsipras may have hoped he'd get an easy ride when he came back to Brussels and presented the original proposals as 'his'. He hasn't had it. The Belgian PM went for him in no uncertain terms, and several of the other national leaders have made it clear he's really going to have to deliver this time round. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious and hurting so many people. As the Belgian PM pointed out, Greece has had a better deal than many others, in fact it has enjoyed benefits and bailouts no one else has got and it has failed to deliver anything so far.

He isn't getting an easy ride at home either. His own Party is split between those who want to bite the bullet, and the hardliners who still think they can get away with robbing the bank and not paying the penalty. And the populace are angry, with most demanding he find a solution that lets them stay in the EU and the €uro - there seems to be little liking now for the concept of returning to the Drachma and the freefalling economy not reforming anything promises. I think Mr Tsipras is learning at first hand Abraham Lincoln's dictum - you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

I suspect that a deal will be struck, but Mr Tsipras is going to have to accept some things he won't like, and Brussels/the ECB will make some small concessions to sweeten the pill, but there will be some big penalties if the reforms aren't delivered. And in the meantime the 'little people' - the voters - continue to suffer the consequences of successive regimes that thought they could give handouts endlessly in pursuit of popularity in the polls. For a government to balance its books, it needs to have a realistic income, and that can come only from tax. If you don't collect them, you can't expect to get everyone else to fund you.

As the Belgian PM pointed out rather forcefully, the Greek populace enjoy a generous set of benefits the Belgians and everyone else is paying for. Their 'Minimum Wage' is almost twice that of five other EU states, and they enjoy a pension age at least 17 years younger than anyone else. Time to reform, and more important, time to actually do what they have talked about for the last five years,

Left? Right? Centre?

In the interests of clarity, I'd just like to check. The 'Troika' is under fire from both the 'left' and the 'right' and both claim to be doing it in defence of Greek democracy. The Left claiming that the demands to reform the Greek economy before any 'relief' package can be handed over, is 'damaging the economy and denying vital services', while the right claim it is undemocratic to demand any controls at all. Both, presumably, would like the Greeks to be allowed to continue on their merry way, funding their corruption with everyone else's money.

Once you add in the UK Media which seems to simply put a negative spin on anything to do with the €uro or the EU and one rapidly comes to the conclusion that the 'Troika' (which I understand to be the German Federal government, the European Central Bank and the EU Commission) may actually be right. That they aren't popular with the Left or the Right is a given. The Right love to hate them as being about 'stealing sovereignty' and trying to create a 'Fourth Reich' to use the populist UKIP label, and the Left love to hate them because they won't allow freewheeling spending. The Greeks currently hate them because they want to keep on with their freewheeling spending - using the rest of Europe's money as the former Latvian PM said on our television recently. Funny how the media love to show us all the hard Right and hard Left banging on about the 'evil' EU restricting Democracy on the one hand, and the 'evil' Troika on the other for imposing controls on free spending handouts.

The irony is that both sides earnestly believe they are defending the 'democratic' rights of everyone to determine their own affairs. Both seem to forget that the currency is currently the world's second largest 'Reserve' currency and has actually proved reasonably stable in the sixteen years since it was created. The Greek government actually cooked their books to get in in 2000, joining at a Rate of 340.75 Drachma to the €uro. What we now know is that they did so because the Drachma was on the point of collapse, and perhaps Brussels and the Commission should have looked at the glossy figures a little more thoroughly when they were presented by a rather large UK based international accountancy firm that handles major corporate tax affairs for several companies who pay little or no tax to the countries they operate in.

The argument advanced by Mr Farage in an interview aired last night is that the Greeks have 'lost their sovereignty' because they are unable to 'adjust their economy' be devaluing their currency. I got the impression he felt that, to help Greece, everyone else in the Eurozone should allow the Greek government to run the printing presses, flood the market with devalued €uros and allow runaway inflation everywhere else. Ironically, this is what Die Linke and their fellow 'socialist' supporters in the Greens and other 'left' parties want.

Just so the Greeks can carry on doing the spending they are doing. Not unnaturally that suggestion has the more prudent Finance Ministers - and Hr Schauble is just one (though he happens to control the largest €uro based economy, and does it rather well) - rather cross. Especially the Baltic States, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.

Having lived in a country where printing money was used to address economic downturns, and devaluation employed to improve export trade, my own feeling is that those who feel this is the right way are either mad, or they are deliberately and dangerously trying to ruin the whole European economy. I'm starting to believe the latter in fact. Which makes me think that none of them have any concept of the misery it will inflict. As I said, I have lived through it. I have lived with an 'official' inflation rate of 12.5% year on year and the consequences were that though my salary was automatically 'adjusted for inflation' and I usually got at least 5% annual increments - my actual spending power decreased annually by a minimum of 7 - 10%.

Why? Because the 'official' inflation rate was roughly half the actual. That is what allowing Greece to 'devalue' the €uro would produce in the longer term. Thank you all the Left wing commentators in the UK and US media trying to talk the €uro out of existence, or talk it into devaluation. I can't use the expression here that I would say to their faces, but I will use the Shakespearean curse - A pox on all your houses.

Perhaps it is time for a reality check for the ideologues of the 'left' and the 'right' - and maybe the 'centre' as well. Economies are built on trade, productivity, goods, services, savings and prudent management of the resources of any nation or group. The EU isn't perfect, but it is doing a remarkable job of holding together a very disparate group of people and cultures. As Josephus has reminded me from time to time, one of the biggest problems is the divide between the frugal and industrious 'northern' nations and the more laid back and less industrialised southern ones. That is perhaps most evident when one looks at the divide between Southern Italy and Northern Italy, or those South Eastern States once part of the Austrian Empire and those that were run by the Ottomans.  A similar divide almost tore the US apart in the 1860s, less than a hundred years after its Founding.

The Germans are very, very touchy about inflation and falling productivity. They remember all to clearly how runaway inflation in the 1920s and early 30s brought a certain Party to power that plunged them into almost total destruction, and they won't allow anyone to take them there again. In the last weeks the Greek government has repeatedly come to the table with the same proposal - no cuts, no immediate reform, just give us the money and we'll see what we can do. Understandably, Hr Schauble is angry, after all Germans are going without some of the benefits they are paying for the Greeks to enjoy. It might pay the UK Media to be a little less 'anti-German' and get their heads out of the 1940s mindset. The German economy is remarkably stable, partly because they don't have the same lurching from 'socialist' to 'neo-socialist' and 'capitalist' economic dispensations and flights of fancy as we do. They aren't the threat, and neither is Brussels - the real threat is the idiocy that says fragmenting Europe into a myriad small states with parochial politics is the right way to go in the world as it is developing today.

As for the current crisis, Mr Tsipras is going to have to come up with a bit more than rhetoric and lots of glad-handing people like Mr Farage to get any change from the Troika and no amount of Farage Fulmination and Leftist whinging is going to change it.

Who really owns the money?

From many comments on the current financial crisis in Greece - and from the utterances of the Greek PM and his so-called Finance Minister - I get the impression that a majority of people have no idea of how Banks operate, and even less idea of where they get the money. It doesn't seem to register that the 'money in the bank' is actually 'owned' by the people who deposit it there, not the Bank. Nor do they seem to appreciate that the friendly 'High Street' banker is in a totally different league to the so-called 'Merchant Banking' operations in the City. For one thing your High Street manager doesn't get to play with Fund Investment - probably the worst he can do is lend a client a bit too much or allow to big an overdraft.

The guys in the city are another world. These are the guys who can move billions at the touch of a button, the men who lend huge sums to companies and to governments. But there are also limits to how much and whose money - and again, it isn't theirs or the banks. Once again, it is money entrusted to them by investors and depositors. The trick is that the Banks work for their investors and their shareholders - famously a court in the US decreed in the 1930s that the sole function of a corporation is to make a profit for its shareholders. That is what banks do when they lend anyone money, which is also why most of us don't borrow any more than we need to. After all, why pay more than you absolutely have to for the privilege.

There is much fulminating about the Banks having lent too much, or the Banks making profits at the expense of the people - but who forced anyone to borrow the money in the first place? Until the 1990s, Bank Regulation meant they had to 'hold' in their vaulty a considerable portion of the money deposited with them. Then, presumably in the belief this would bring 'growth', governments decided to allow a bank to lend almost everything it held on deposit. Thus, if a depositor put in §100, the bank could lend a borrower §90, and when he paid that into his bank account, they could lend up to §81 of that, and so on ... That fueled the 'credit boom'.

The next problem is that of governments themselves. They have, in reality, only the money they can gather in taxes to spend. If you push tax to high, the big money leaves and tax revenue falls, so goivernments are forced to balance spending and income by taking loans usually organised by the IMF. The alternative is to simply 'print more' a trick that saw the value of the British Pound collapse under the free spending Labour governments of the 1970s. Those who scream about how the €uro has 'denied nations their democratic right' to resort to the printing presses forget that the value of the money is only as good as the gold, trade or whatever that underwrites it. Bank of England notes still contain the legend 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand ...' and technically you could take your Bank Notes to the Bank that issued them and demand the hard cash in coin, preferably gold.

For years now the Greek crisis has been brewing and all the other countries caught up in it have managed to find solutions. Some, like Ireland, took the pain, fixed their overspending problem, and are now recovering, others lag, but are dealing with it. Greece alone has refused any reform. Their PM and Finance Minister have caused enormous frustration by repeatedly coming to the table with the same empty hands. As one Minister put it, they smile, they shrug, and say, you make a proposal, we'll consider it. Now they claim they want the debt written down - in other words, they want to stick their hands into the pockets of every taxpayer, depositor and investor yet again, and take even more out of everyone else's pockets while still refusing to reform their freespending.

More worrying is the fact that many of those asked, on leaving the Polling Stations, say they voted No to 'punish the banks' or to 'punish Brussels'. Fine, but tomorrow, when the banks have nothing to offer, or when Tsipras and his henchmen print Drachmas and try to pass them off on a 1 for 1 basis, it will probably take less than 24 hours for the value to crash.

Well, the people have spoken. Whether they stay in the €uro or not is a moot point. Some believe Europe will bend over backwards to keep them in. I'm not so sure they will, Mr Tsipras and his Finance Minister have annoyed everyone. So they refuse to pay their debts? Greece will find it incredibly hard to get fuel, medical supplies and a whole range of other things they can't make themselves. Countries having to work on 'cash up front' generally run into massive problems very quickly.

Will it 'kill the €uro' as so many British commentators and media 'experts' seem to hope? I doubt it. That would cause a much, much bigger problem economically for the International community than many realise and it will hurt everyone. It might be a good idea for all those journalists, campaigners and the rest, calling for Europe to 'write off the debt' or 'give emergency aid' to back off a little and consider. The Greek Referendum has been used to 'send a message' and to cover up the fact the Greek government refuses to carry out meaningful reform of an economy based on other people's money.

The Greeks have been living on and spending everyone else's money since they cheated their way into the €uro. They were eager enough in the early days to get into the €uro for the very simple reason the Drachma was shot to ribbons and only just still viable. They wanted the €uro then, because it gave them, they thought, a limitless source of funds to cover their profilgacy. They've made no effort to collect their own taxes, they allowed capital to vanish, and even the EU subsidies to disappear into projects that were just to boost the wealth of a few. They've been refusing to reform for the last five years, and now its caught up with them. Mr Tsipras wants 30% of government debt written off - which means the rest of the EU, the depositors and taxpayers must pick up his bill, presumably so he can carry on spending.

I know what my answer would be if I were a bank manager and a debtor approached me with that sort of demand. This argument is not about 'democracy' or even control of their own economy, it is about paying your own way, and paying your debts. They don't 'own' the money supply, neither does Brussels or anyone else - it belongs to us, the taxpayers, depositors, and investors.

Human Migrations

Humans have been migrating, I suspect, since the dawn of time. There have been many reasons for it I suspect, starting with the need to move when a familiar area can no longer support the tribe, clan, family and going all the way up to conflict and the need to escape. Individually the reasons can range from the desire to find a sexual/breeding partner to the desire for wealth and power. Then there are those who can see no hope of leading a life of hope or fulfilment in the place of their birth, and need to move to find employment even of the most basic once they reach adulthood. And when even that is denied them through war, discrimination, crime and corruption or lack of any viable opportunity, they are forced to take desperate measures.

This is where we see the sort of tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean at present. As the latest death toll rises, we hear all the usual politicians wringing their hands and saying all the usual things about ‘addressing the problem at its roots’ but doing nothing.

Reading all the usual twaddle from politicians, ‘aid agencies’, UN officials (many from the countries that ARE the problem) and commentators on various news shows, one is struck, very forcibly, by the lack of any workable solution being proposed by any of them. The UN and various ‘humanitarian’ groups all want Europe to throw open its borders and let the hordes in. No checks, no restrictions - just take them in and presumably house, feed and clothe them. Our political leaders want to give more ‘aid’ or send ‘advisers’ and, of course, the Aid Agencies and NGOs all want more money so they can do more to ‘lift people out of poverty’. All very laudable, but none of it actually addresses the root of the problem - incompetent and utterly corrupt governments.

In our haste to ‘de-colonise’ Africa in particular, we overlooked something rather important. Very few of the new ‘nations’ we left south of the Sahara had any ‘tradition’ of settled civilisation prior to colonisation, and even fewer were actually homogenous peoples. Most included more than one tribal group, and most of those tribes were traditional enemies who preyed on each other until forced to stop by the colonial power. The Mashona were happily enslaving all their neighbours and selling them to Arab slave traders at Mombasa and Dar Es Salaam right up until the British - at the behest of none other than Cecil John Rhodes (whose statue has just been attacked and now removed from the campus at University of Cape Town) sent in the Army to put a stop to it in 1898. That’s right, 1898! Robert Mugabe, take note.

Southern Africa is the classic example of historic migrations, since ALL the current ‘Bantu’ tribes now claiming it as their ‘homeland’ actually only arrived there after 1700 - around 40 years after the Dutch established their trading post at the Cape. They displaced the indigenous peoples, the Khoi folk, who formed three groups, a coastal people known to the Dutch as Strandlopers, the ‘Bushmen’ who inhabited the drier inland regions, and the Hottentot peoples of the western Cape. Another group who inhabited the central plateau - now the Free State and Northern Cape - have vanished entirely, their only traces being dry stone constructions of cattle pens and strange ‘beehive’ houses entered on hands and knees through an angled tunnel entrance. Like the Khoi peoples, they were driven out, driven into the deserts, and eventually killed on sight by the invading Bantu. Though to hear it now, it was the Europeans ‘wot done it’. Sadly, for the builders of the stone huts, the White explorers that found their remains were about fifty years too late.

So what is driving today’s mass migrations? 

To a very large extent it appears to be the failure of the post-colonial governments of almost all the African states to provide any sort of stable government. Plus the total lack of any prospects for employment, education, or to house, feed, and clothe oneself decently. Almost certainly one of the most powerful drivers is overpopulation. There simply aren’t the natural resources to support the populations now trying to subsist on them. Water is an obvious one, but so is arable land. I suspect that one reason sub-saharan Africa has not produced any settled cities or permanent agriculture is that the soil and the water available cannot sustain them. 

Thus, until fairly recent ‘colonial’ history, the agriculture tended to be slash and burn, farm it until the soil and the water was exhausted - then move on. Most of Africa is not covered by dense jungle or forest - by far the largest portion of it is desert or semi-desert, and most tribal systems prior to the colonial rush, were hunter gatherer and nomadic. Neither of these systems is suited to the massive expansion of the populations all over Africa, and the lack of industries, and lack of commercial traditions (in the western sense) means that most now have to find ways to make a living independently of the sort of system the developed countries enjoy. Nor is it likely that these will develop in the short term, given that corruption is rampant, nepotism, tribalism and sometimes xenophobia reach into every aspect of daily life.

Only those folk who have seen the shanty towns, the lack of infrastructures, the sewerage running in the streets and the lack of even the most basic services in these countries can begin to understand the desperation many feel. Only when our political classes, who burble on about ‘poverty’ and ‘economic development’ as if throwing money at it will change it, even begin to understand how their approach is simply enriching the most corrupt, and grinding the poorest even further into the mire will we begin to find a solution. Tanzania’s President has recently sold almost the entire Masai Mara off to the Sultan of one of the Gulf States. One point 6 MILLION square kilometres of land, as a ‘private’ safari park. Pity about the Masai who are now being driven from the land their forefathers first settled around the time the ‘Prophet’ the Sultan follows was hiding out in the mountains. 

Mozambique is selling huge tracts of land to the Chinese and to Western entrepreneurs for ‘development’ - and turning to small subsistence farmers off, forcing them into squatter camps, or into the hands of people traffickers so they end up on overloaded boats drowning in the Med or elsewhere in their efforts to find a decent life somewhere. The same thing is happening all over Africa, and while the IMF, the UN and other applaud these deals and approve the funding on the grounds it will help ‘develop’ the country, the reality is that most of it finds its way straight back into Swiss and other bank accounts held by - you guessed it - the ‘governing’ families and Parties who sold land they don’t ‘own’ in the first place.

Is it any wonder then that everywhere you look in Africa there are conflicts, armed and otherwise? Everywhere you look there is grinding poverty that can never be addressed? Is it any wonder the people resort to such desperate measures as to board unsuitable vessels and take the risk of catastrophe to reach what our prosperity projects as the land in which the streets are paved with gold, and everyone is a millionaire?

Easy for idle protesters, many on State handouts, to ‘demand’ we simply open the borders and take them in. Easy to scream, rant and shout that ‘more must be done’ to save the boat people, but what do we do with them once they are here? We have unemployment, we have people in poverty, we have people in need of assistance, and much as we’d like to, we simply can’t take in all those we’d like to. The solution lays in Africa itself, and though it may be painful, that is where it has to be addressed. Not on the open sea between Europe and North Africa, and not in Italy, Southern France, Britain, Greece or anywhere else in Europe.

I would suggest it has to start with stripping the ill-gotten gains from those in power there, and, perhaps under international supervision, the construction of proper infrastructures, proper services and the founding of proper industries, commerce, and, of course, education. That would be the sensible way to go — but since we’re dealing with politicians (with their own peccadilloes to protect) I will not be holding my breath to see it happen.

Weapons of Mass Disruption

Any nation, people, or organisation has a range of 'weapons' at its disposal, ranging from those of obvious and deadly purpose, to the more subtle ones that most people do not recognise as 'weapons'. Few think of attempts to reduce, restrict or damage another countries economy as a 'weapon', or as an act of war. Yet, arguably, it is both.

Those who call for 'economic sanctions' or 'boycotts' or 'disinvestment' do so in the belief that these are alternatives to sending in the military to change a country. They fondly believe that their 'sanctions' offer an alternative to war, but is it? Is it not a weapon deployed in exactly the same manner as deploying a Trident missile would be? OK, the visible damage is not going to be as great, and perhaps you won't kill several hundred thousand people in achieving your objective  - to change a regime or a national culture - with 'sanctions/boycotts/disinvestments'. Or will you?

The unpleasant truth is that an economic blockade of a country can be just as damaging - over a longer term admittedly - as a short sharp 'little' shooting match. While bullets kill people, sanctions destroy livelihoods, they destroy opportunities, and they create hardships for the very ordinary people those who call for them claim to want to help. So those who want to impose them are, in the long term, likely to cause as much hardship as a 'hot' war will do. Why do I say this?

I have several reasons, one being that I have lived in a country under 'international sanctions'. The most observable effect was the steady increase in unemployment. Disinvestment was something of a two edged sword, many companies who did, walked away having 'sold' their holdings in local companies which simply found other sources of capital (a lot of it ironically, from the Far East and 'Communist' countries), while others simply pulled out, abandoning massively expensive infrastructures and leaving thousands unemployed in an already saturated employment market. Crime rates climbed steeply, with violent crimes such as murder and violent assaults becoming everyday.

And all the while, those imposing the sanctions talked of bringing the country to its knees economically in order to impose their vision of what the country should look like. When I had the opportunity to challenge someone who was a determined and very vocal advocate of sanctions, boycotts and disinvestment, they admitted it was a 'weapon' to be used 'for the good of the oppressed'. But when I pointed out that the 'oppressed' were suffering more than anyone else, the answer astonished me; "Well, some must suffer hardship for the good of the majority and the future."

Quite, as long as it is not the 'advocate' who suffers.

A flip through history reveals a number of interesting things about past 'sanctions' campaigns. Perhaps the most telling is the example of the sanctions against Japan in the 1930s. Intended to 'damage' Japan's ability to sustain its war in Manchuria, it actually convinced the Japanese that their only option was to go to war in order to secure the resources they needed to sustain their economy and population. Some historians still argue that the US policy may well have been deliberately designed to provoke exactly that response. At the very least, something those who advocate sanctions, boycotts or disinvestment should consider is that the response almost invariably invoked in the people on the receiving end, is a hardening of attitudes.

That can be seen today in Iran, in Russia, in Zimbabwe and in Israel.

Then there is the question of what happens once you have succeeded in destroying someones economy. Does it produce the happy smiling face you wanted to see? Or does it produce a failing state, struggling to stay afloat and unable to pay its way in the world economy? If some recent examples are anything to go by, the latter seems to be more likely. Iraq, having had sanctions imposed which ruined its currency and internal economy, then had 'regime change' imposed by a war, is a basket case. Even without the IS lunatics and all the other factions vying for power, it is a country in ruins because its economy is ruined - and it is likely to stay that way for a very long time.

Zimbabwe's economy all but collapsed toward the end of the long UDI government, so when Mugabe came to power, those who love this form of warfare, thought there would be a 'magic' recovery. There wasn't. The AID they poured in was stolen, then the banks were grabbed by Mugabe's thugs, and then the farms. Now? It is a subsistence economy at best. The same thing almost happened in South Africa, though it was better placed to survive, and the economy is at least now stable - but the corruption and white collar crime, coupled with a few other problems, is crippling any rebuilding of the economy. Yet another 'triumph' for the sanctions, boycotts and disinvestment advocates to rejoice over.

Sanctions/Economic Blockades do work. Again, if we consider history, we can see many examples. Britain's blockade of France during the Napoleonic wars crippled France's economy. Napoleon's 'Continental Blockade' of closed ports and trade bans in Northern Europe almost destroyed the British economy by smashing the Baltic Trade - worth over 42 million Pounds Sterling in 1809 and only 5 million Pounds Sterling five years later. The dramatic loss of market share almost destroyed the British economy in the middle of the war. The British blockade of German trade in 1914 - 18 smashed the German economy, and millions of Germans starved (so did millions of other Europeans caught between the 'Great Powers', what one might call 'collateral damage' today), and gave rise (as some always hope will happen when they demand sanctions) to mass civil unrest in German towns and cities. Communists seized town halls and other government buildings, but more crucially, the sanctions/blockade coupled with the demands of the Allies in the Versailles treaty, resulted in the rise of the National Socialists as a counter to the Communists.

Again and again we see the result of destroying an economy to compel regime change, and each time we see a situation resulting that is, if anything, worse than the first state. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few and very far between.

Those who call for sanctions, boycotts or disinvestment against a country need to think very carefully about what they are doing. In essence they are declaring war on another country, another people, and they are deploying a very dangerous Weapon of Mass Disruption with the deliberate intent of destroying a people's ability to feed and house themselves.

It often strikes me as ironic that those who always advocate the deployment of this weapon are usually also anti-war, anti-military, but none I have ever spoken to seem to see the contradiction.  

Schadenfreude

I have to thank Josephus for giving me the smile of the weekend, and I'll share it with you.

As is his wont, Josephus was ruminating on many other matters while performing an essential, but generally menial task. Contemplating a "Use by Date" on, of all things, a packet of frozen prawns, it occurred to him that the prawns 'expired' at around the same time that the current crop of 'millennial' young people will start to enter the workforce, albeit that these will be those who, having been forced to stay in school while having little or no desire to do so, will be exiting those fun factories with only a small amount of the knowledge they could have had, and almost no usable skills.

What employment prospects await them? Not much.

That led him to consider the next election, five years beyond this one. At that point the next tranche of 'millenial' young folk, this time with degrees and diplomas, will be leaving places of Higher Education and seeking work, and now the fun starts. They will enter a world of commerce and industry (and perhaps politics and the Public Services) in which they will find themselves perennially 'too young/inexperienced' for promotion. A world in which all the senior posts are held by the current crop of 'pre-millenial' types - the generation that turned my, and Josephus, age group from being 'too young/inexperienced' to 'dinosaur' and shoved us out to grass. And herein is the rub, because, having told my generation that we are the problem/undeserving recipients destroying the pensions system, they have changed the rules - and now cannot, themselves, retire as they forced us to do.

Because these now ageing 'dinosaurs' cannot retire at 60, not even at 65, but will plan to go on for another twenty years, thereby making real progress for most of the talented young guns very slow.

So the 'young guns' will plot, scheme, and undermine. Remember, that we are talking about the 'connected' generation. In collective ways, they will devise the means to overthrow the 'dinosaurs', just as they did to my and Josephus' generation. And this is where the current crop of power mongers, 'leaders' and 'thinkers' will come unstuck. They've destroyed the means for following a 'career path' in almost all services and industries, indeed they have done the same in commerce. They have 'poisoned the waters' against those with age and experience on their side, and now they will have an angry, frustrated, and above all creatively able generation snapping at their heels.

They will be discarded as we were, but with a big difference. Unlike people like myself and Josephus,  they will not be able to take any pension of any sort. They have made a trap for themselves, and soon it will slam shut behind them. They will be in their late fifties or early sixties with occupational pensions worth a fraction of their predecessors, because the erosion of those benefits in kind was one of their principle weapons, and their old age pensions are still many years in the future.

Will they be employable?  Their lifelong career will have been cut short by a revolution, so probably not. Except as 'Tescbury's' shelf stackers on the zero hours contracts they thought was such a great idea for everyone else working night shift. As another friend says - Karma is a b-1-tch!

Josephus was kinder. He wrote -

I do believe that the Germans have a word for what in English can only be rendered as "Nya-nya-na-nya-nya."

He's right, the German's do have a word for it, and it has found its way into the English Dictionary as well. The word is "Schadenfreude" - to take delight in a self-inflicted misfortune.

Sadly, those most likely to be worst affected by this bout of 'Schadenfreude' are likely to be the group caught between those who pushed Josephus and my generation aside, and the 'millenials' who will shove them out of the window. Karma is indeed a ....

Brain Drain

My thanks to Josephus for a couple of recent reports and articles on matters close to both our hearts. The first was an item on the finally published report on the tragic deaths of firefighters in Warwickshire in 2007. The report states, inter alia, that the Fire and Rescue Service training system had become limited in scope, and required significant review. It went on to say that the "Integrated Personal Development System" (IPDS) "competence based scheme" was not meeting the services' expectations as personnel were training to complete "portfolios" rather than focusing on "firemanship".

Funny that, this was exactly what both Josephus and I identified and argued when the scheme was first "rolled out" with great fanfare as the future of fire and rescue service training. The reality is that both of us were long enough in the tooth to have witnessed the failures of so-called "on station training" and "learning on the job" when not reinforced by formal progression training with examination and practical assessment. No amount of "ticks in boxes" can ever substitute for experience reinforced by knowledge, yet the champions of IPDS (all, one might add, rewarded with 'Honours' or very nice promotions and postings for their efforts) publicly declared that "knowledge of theory was unnecessary, you only had to know how to 'do' something".

Tragically, their wonderful scheme is now showing just how deeply flawed IPDS is. Deaths on duty have climbed steeply since its introduction and the scrapping of knowledge based examinations. There are other factors in play as well, however, one being played out right before our eyes at the present moment. While, on the surface, the battle over Fire Service Pensions appears to be simply about changing the retirement age, it is part of a much deeper ailment. It is now openly declared that a fire fighter should not expect to spend his/her entire career in the service. One young HR Director (in my day this post would have been filled by a crusty and battle scarred SDO or ACFO), blithely told me at a meeting that she discouraged people from thinking they could expect a 30 year career and a pension. In her view it was "healthy" for the Service to have a high staff turnover. Worryingly, at least in the meeting, the CFO of the FRS concerned, agreed with her!

Which brings me to the second article. It is rather long, and can be read here with the title "Inside the World of HR" . The author opens with the experience of Tesco, just a few years ago set to take over the world - or so it seemed - but now in deep trouble financially. The article identifies one of the major flaws that has entered business in the last 40 or so years - the haemorrhage of knowledge and experience due to high staff turnovers. The author cites several studies conducted by scientific bodies which identify that fact that any organisation actually 'owns' about 10% of its "knowledge" - the other 90% is in the heads of its employees. Now most employers will argue they "own" that as well, but the fact is they don't, and can't. Each individual has developed special and unique experience, it cannot be transmitted in any other way than the much maligned "sitting next to Nelly" system of sharing. Add to this now the most revealing findings of the studies cited in the article I've linked.

Most major organisations have a 15% per annum change of staff. The authors of the study from which that comes argue that this is a success; according to them, it makes business more flexible and less likely to be "locked into" the past. However, what they don't acknowledge is that it takes, on average, only 7 years for any organisation to undergo a complete change of staff at that rate. With that goes all knowledge of what worked and what didn't work in the past. Thus, as with Tesco, wheels get reinvented, mistakes get repeated and ultimately, a successful and healthy business ends up in trouble.

The reason is quite simple. It takes at least a year (in the FRS it is regarded as 2 years for a recruit firefighter and, in the past, a further 4 years as a firefighter before you could be considered for promotion) for a newcomer to an organisation to learn the ropes and become fully productive. Now comes another devastating statistic - in all the studies cited the maximum length of time most spend in an organisation is 5 years. So, as an employer and, if I'm lucky, my new recruit today, will have just reached his/her most useful range of knowledge and experience when they depart, taking 90% of the knowledge and experience I could use, with them. As the author of the article shows by example after example, this haemorrhage of knowledge and experience is steadily destroying organisations.

There are a number of factors at work here, among them the prominence and power of accountants who see everything in the short term and in terms of "cost". Pensions "cost" so the solution, for an accountant, is make sure you have only the minimum numbers qualifying for one. Experienced and long serving employees "cost" in terms of higher salaries, benefits and "on costs" such as pension contributions - so reduce the number you have on the books as much as possible. Then there is the whole question of "management" as a "profession" (and I'll confess that I have a number of "Management" qualifications). The academic belief that there is such a profession is, in my view, serious wrong. "Management" is a function, not a "profession", and, if one cares to look at the most successful managers in the world they are all people who have a very wide understanding and deep experience of the things they manage. If you want examples of poor management practice, look no further than an organisation which has "generalist" managers parachuting into senior roles with little or no understanding of what they are managing.

I was amused to see that the author of the article I have linked, cites the UK Civil Service as just such an example.

How does one fix this situation? I'm inclined to think it will require a major shift in thinking, and a return to the idea that a career is for life and not just a short term step on the ladder to the next "job". It will require a total rethink in what is being taught in MBA and various other "Management" courses, and it will require a complete change of direction in "Human Resources" so that the value of retaining staff, and the knowledge and experience they hold will be seen. It is perhaps too much to hope for that the "short-termism" of our western business culture can also be eroded and the longer vision held by other cultures adopted.

Answers on a post card please ...

Economics and Ecology - Differing points of view ...

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The World’s Resources aren’t Running Out” made very interesting reading. The author, Matt Ridley, is a journalist with a background in economics, and takes a look at a number of statements made by ecologists and scientists on the “Global Warming/Human is using up the planet’s resources” side of the argument. As he points out, most people would agree that humans are having an impact, particularly where there is overpopulation, but the impact is not quite what so many claim.

Where advocacy groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth promote to the idea that we will shortly run out of coal, oil, iron ore, etc., etc., an economist will point to the fact that using something does not mean it is ‘gone’ for good. Much of what is supposedly being ‘used up’ is simply taking a new form and can be recovered, reused, and reworked again and again. Many advocacy groups fail to grasp the difference between ‘estimated reserves’ of something and the likelihood that new ‘reserves’ are being mapped out almost daily. They also fail to take into account the recycling of these resources. Plastics are a good example, most are best described as ‘solidified hydrocarbon’ and that can be recycled to recover at least some of it. Nor is this the only area where simple economics takes a more optimistic view.

Since the rise of the ‘Green’ movements began we have been bombarded by dire predictions of agricultural collapse, warnings of ‘Peak Oil’, vanishing fresh water supplies and many more ‘tipping’ points that will wipe out our populations, our technology or our societies. Economists find this extremely frustrating, since again and a again such ‘tipping points’ have come and gone with no check at all on progress - largely because of innovations such as fertilisers, improved seeds for crops, insecticides, new technology for finding oil, gas and simultaneously reducing individual consumption through more efficient engines. Ironically, the very people who campaign so vigorously to ‘save the ecology/climate/planet’ also vigorously resist these advances. 

Mr Ridley acknowledges that he once (like most of us I suspect) carried the ‘ecology’ torch, believing in the ‘finite’ model and that growth must be restricted and limited. Since then, again like most of us, he has come to recognise that with growth comes innovation. Of necessity, we learn to do more with less. Efficiency is achieved through improved technology. Using the example of coal power stations - anathema to most ‘Greens’ - if we accept that new technology means that the waste gas in the chimney can be ‘scrubbed’ to extract that evil carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide (actually the process is quite simple and clever and is in use at most such plants now) which can then be recycled and either ‘stored’ or turned into something else, the plant is, according to Greenpeace, still only 47% efficient. They arrive at that number by measuring the heat ‘lost’ up the smoke stack and through the condensing process which returns the steam to water for the boilers, but it is far from an accurate number in reality. 

In many dry countries that ‘waste heat’ is used to distill water from sea water. This is how many of the cities in the Persian Gulf provide drinking water for their citizenry. It is how water can be, and is, provided for agriculture in some drought prone countries as well - but is never taken account of by the ‘ecologist’ camp. There are other innovations for producing fresh clean drinking water as well, one such coming from the maritime industry. Called a ‘Hydropore’ system, it uses micro filters to remove the salts and other particles from sea water to produce vast amounts of fresh drinking water - most of it cleaner and purer than what we drink in most European towns and cities. Such plants can operate on land as well, producing fresh water for towns or agriculture. As an example of the output, one of the USN’s Nuclear aircraft carriers can produce enough electricity for a medium sized city, and enough fresh water through their hydropower systems to water it as well.

While on the subject of ships, another recent Greenpeace campaign charged that these were the ‘biggest polluters’ of the oceans and the atmosphere and demanded a surcharge on fuel for them. This on the grounds that a single ship pumps out ‘tons’ of CO2 and other pollutants on its travels. It ignores, of course, the fact that such ships enable us to feed the world’s population by moving food from a producer with a surplus, to a consumer with a deficit, but there, that is part of the problem here. It also ignores the fact that the ‘waste gases’ from the engine pass through an ‘exhaust gas economiser’ which transfers heat to the ship’s hot water systems and preheats water for any boilers. Yes, such ships also consumes fuel at a rate of ‘Tons per Hour’ but we must also recognise that an average container ship shifts thousands of tons of produce very efficiently, far more efficiently than could be done by camels, trains or trucks. And the fuel consumption when under way is around one third of what used to be consumed by a transatlantic liner such as the France or the old Queen Elizabeth which burned around 40 tons of oil per hour at cruising speeds. Once again, more efficient machinery, means greater economy of operation, less consumption to achieve more.

Aircraft engines are going through a similar revolution/evolution. Not only are they now much more efficient, they are becoming quieter and less fuel hungry. 

Then there is the question of ‘resources’ such as iron ore, copper, manganese, chromite and many more. Extracting these from the ground is very ecologically damaging, and as the mines get deeper, more difficult, it is obvious that more efficient and less damaging means of recovering it need to be examined. And they have been. Open cast mines in operation are pretty ugly, but it is now common practice to ‘landscape’ such sites, often using them to store landfill - the rubbish generated in cities - and even restoring them to nature. Recycling is becoming much more efficient as well. Metals thrown into to rubbish are being recycled at a far greater rate than ever before. Electronic components are recovered, and reprocessed to extract the metals they contain in order to make new components. I read recently that ‘new’ appliances contain around 40% of metals recovered from old appliances thrown away, so you new iPhone/Android/Samsung probably has metal in it that cam from a reel to reel tape recorder!

Economists tell us that innovation is driven by growth and demand. If something is in short supply, two things happen, the price rises and new sources are found, and people find ways to use less more efficiently or reuse what is already available. This is the key thing most ‘Green’ advocates seem to miss. I still have reservations about the potential for unlimited growth (unless we can find ways to start to colonise planets in outer space), but I don’t think we are yet in danger of ‘running out’ of anything vital - as long as the legions of ‘Green’ campaigners can be persuaded to stop obstructing innovation and development of technologies that can and do meet the rising demand. 

Human Resources or Human Beings: The difference between 'things' and 'people'

Among my reading lately was an article on LinkedIn (which is why I cannot post a working link here) on the subject of getting “your” Human Resources Department to work properly. Obviously the article is aimed at managers and possibly at Human Resources staff, but it made interesting reading. The main thrust of the article was that many HR Departments are not functioning well or efficiently. The author flagged up several areas of concern, among them a ‘disconnect’ between the people they are supposed to be sourcing, developing or disciplining. In part this is because there are differences between what ‘Corporate Management’ think the department does, and what the HR Manager thinks it does, but there may also be a lack of certain skills within HR, or even a lack of communication between ‘cells’ within it. 

Many years ago now, I held the “HR” management function for my then employer, a Fire and Emergency Service. It was a very interesting task, and something of a major challenge, but I enjoyed it in the main. The foregoing will tell readers that I'm old enough to remember when "HR" was called "Personnel" and frankly, the change of title is part of the problem. Suddenly 'people' became a 'resource' and thus 'objects' or 'goods'. The very word ‘resource’ suggests some sort of warehouse from which ‘workers’ can be drawn at will, and which, when worn out or no longer required, can be discarded. Treat people as objects and soon their motivation to do anything more than the absolute minimum goes straight out the window. They also become very reluctant to discuss anything at all with anyone from ‘HR’ lest it be used against them, or used to impose new responsibilities or workloads on them. 

One of the points the article raised is that a properly functioning HR Department is also about ‘developing’ skills for an employer. For many corporate employers this is an ideal situation, but all too many don’t make proper use of the possibilities it offers. Coming from a uniformed service background, it is a function that is often separated from HR under the label of “Training and Development”. For a service such as mine it was and is a key function, and it can quite easily fit within a HR remit. However, I would also caution that it must be managed by someone who understands the difference between managing the kitchens of a hotel and being able to manage a fire station with multiple functions. While some skills of management are common and therefore transferable, some of the technical skills and knowledge required to make a good Station Manager/Commander/Officer in a fire service are unique and cannot be gained through an generalised management course. Once again, my experience of trying to explain some of this to HR managers leads me to think there may be a reluctance to accept that a NVQ for managing a shop or office is not a suitable qualification for managing a crew or station in an emergency service.

As I said earlier, I am a retired senior fire officer, and one of the things one learns in 'command' is to know your people, know them, trust them, and know what makes them tick. Far to many of the HR 'professionals' I have encountered in my latter years of employment didn't understand this and could frequently undo years of trust and respect by imposing some new system or policy without consultation. This is often compounded by a refusal to discuss anything of concern to individuals with the person. Many HR Managers I have encountered in recent years insist the person must take their concerns to “their Union” so it can be aired at a “Union Consultation”. In my view, this is not the right way to handle something, the “Union” often has a wider agenda, and the individual’s ‘issue’ may not fit it. As someone who was, at best, a reluctant member of a Trade Union (I disagree strongly with their direct involvement in political ideology and links to specific political Parties), I resented being made to join one (and continuously have to explain why I refused to make a ‘donation’ to an affiliated political party) just so I could get certain concerns about the manner in which contracts were being ‘adjusted’ without consultation or appeal.

I lost count of the number of times I have been told by HR managers that the department was there to 'provide support and services to 'the management' and not to 'staff'. An employee encountering that is likely to immediately clam up and avoid disclosing anything beyond what is demanded of them. I have also found that many of those I encountered didn't know the Employment Laws as well as they should. They often made something worse when they did take a wrong turn, by trying to blame the employee, or by creating a situation which brought about a conflict with the Unions. For me the worst moment came when I was told by an HR 'Director' (who had replaced a uniformed senior officer with many years experience and success at keeping the staff happy and onside) that “no one in the fire service should expect to have a career in it” and that the “average length of ‘career’ should not exceed 12 years”. The individual concerned did not understand the fact that the fire service relies heavily on experience as well as qualification. In fact, quite clearly, there was absolutely no interest at all in even being informed of it. Remove the experience element and you have a recipe for disaster, which, unfortunately, has been borne out in reality since that discussion.

In fairness, senior management can often put the HR personnel into an unenviable position of having to implement policies which they may know will cause hardship. The management is abusing their HR Department in this case, and using them as a buffer between themselves and the difficulties their policy may cause. A typical example is the ‘policy’ that imposes some operational requirement which those who will be affected by it know is going to cause them to come into conflict with the public. Having been there, I can tell you it is useless trying to raise those concerns, so you are faced with either disobeying the policy and hoping to get away with it - or letting the proverbial wheels fall off. Either way you know you, and you alone, as the “resource” involved will be blamed, and will be punished for it having gone wrong. No wonder “HR” are frequently seen as the enemy.

It is my experience that all to often, HR managers adopt an 'adverserial' approach to legitimate staff concerns and generally ramp up the conflict. Sometimes this is down to 'management' decisions requiring the shedding of staff, but more often than not it is down to sheer bad  communications skills and sometimes to clumsy efforts to change employment contracts by stealth. For many the concept of 'consultation' is to send round a letter stating something is to be ‘changed', and when the staff object, tell them to 'like it or leave it'. As you may gather, my experience of modern 'HR' is not a happy one. There is, I feel, too much emphasis on the ‘resource’ and not enough on the people. Too much generalisation instead of addressing some of the real problems and difficulties - like bullying, or constant playing of the ‘minority’ card to cover poor skills or knowledge gaps, and not enough attention to addressing identified problems rather than, as was common in my last employer, blaming everyone for the problems created by one or two individuals instead of dealing with the individuals concerned. I still remember with enormous anger having notices plastered everywhere setting out “our core values” (the same one’s I, and every other uniformed employee had worked to our entire careers) and threatening disciplinary action if we failed to adhere to them. I should mention that the very same people who put these up everywhere, were the worst offenders in breaking them …  

The author of the article that set me off on this listed ten suggestions for improving Human Resources functions. Four of the listed items would, in my view help. They included breaking down the tendency toward isolating skills within the department, adopting a more consultative approach, getting to know peoples’ needs and development ambitions and being less remote. I think that the first step is to have an HR manager who actually understands the 'operations' the 'Human Resources' he manages are engaged in, what stresses and strains those impose on individuals and then to find ways not to compound them. All too frequently, the HR Manager is someone from outside the organisation who has little, if any, knowledge of what the resources they are managing actually do. While it would be impossible to know in detail what each and every post does and how it does it, it would help to actually talk to the individual before attempting to change it. Consulting the Union doesn’t cut it, since the Union representative probably doesn’t know either. 

How do we fix the disconnect between what management think HR does, what HR think they do, and what the staff think HR is there for? It will certainly go a very long way if "HR" stops treating people as 'assets' in the manner of 'goods' to be pigeon-holed, costed and measured all the time.

Betraying their roots?

I have a new reason to detest and even oppose the creation of more offshore 'wind parks'. The impact they are having on the dolphin population. New research into why there has been a massive increase in dolphins stranding and dying in the North Sea area has found that it is because the victims are going deaf. It has taken a long time to find this out, and a lot more effort to find the cause. It turns out that the deafened dolphins are all from pods who lived and hunted in the vacinity of new wind parks. It has now been established that the cause of their going deaf is a direct result of the noise created when driving the 'piling' to create the foundations for the wind turbines.

A dolphin that cannot hear, cannot find food, cannot find its way, cannot detect obstructions, cannot ...

Now comes the really entertaining bit. Greenpeace has its origins in defending and protecting marine mammals - starting with the great whales, then expanding to cover Orca, dolphins and others. Now it seems, since Greenpeace are reaping large financial rewards from these same wind parks, that's no longer a priority. Pity about the dolphins, seals, fish and other marine life. No wonder more and more of the founders of Greenpeace are turning against them. I've come a long way down that road myself. It may surprise some to know that I once supported their campaigns to stop over fishing, the slaughter of dolphins and whales and so on. Now I will not give them ice in winter.

Building these wind turbines means driving massive piled foundations deep into the sea bed. This is done by 'hammering' using a massive falling weight which strikes the metal 'pile', each blow driving it deeper. The sound of the blow is amplified by the water, travelling as a kind of pressure wave. During the 'driving' operation these hammer blows are repeated at least once every minute, and all marine animals within a considerable radius of the source are subjected to this intense noise. Dolphins have a particularly sensitive ear - they need it - and the damage is rapid and permanent. Nor is it 'short duration' noise, the piling operations last for weeks. The underwater noise levels, if translated into the human environmental equivalent, would invoke an immediate ban by the Health and Safety Executive.

So, I expect Greenpeace will continue to put out its propaganda about 'Global Warming' and 'Climate Change', while ignoring the damage its favourite 'renewable' energy source is causing to all the marine and other wildlife it once thought so important. No, I will never again support them on any issue, and I will continue to object to the construction of useless windmills whose sole purpose seems to be to enrich their proponents.

Medical Dilemmas ...

Those who suffer allergic reactions are familiar with the need to take loads of antihistamines to suppress the reaction. Mine is an annual bout of battling pollen, and a month on antihistamines which always makes me wish someone would find a 'cure'. There are some supposed 'cures' but they are also high-risk and don't always work.

Some years ago I learned that Hayfever, Asthma and Eczema are all caused by the same gene defect, but it is rare for someone suffering from the first of these to develop the other two. Unfortunately, those who develop Eczema frequently also develop Asthma and it can get even more complex. Medical science focuses on treating the symptoms of these ailments, rather than treating the cause - difficult when it is caused by the bodies own defences 'reacting' to a non-infectious agent such as pollen. My own allergies are house dust and grass pollen, though I seem to be reacting to a few other species of pollen lately as well. Other folk react to animal hair, certain foods (some folk get migraines from eating chocolate) and a wide range of other 'trigger' substances.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we are basically 'Mk I' humans, and though we have adapted our environs, our genes haven't yet adapted to many of the things those adaptations have introduced. Add to that, the damage we take from various illnesses we suffer, exposure to some substances in our careers, or inadvertantly in our homes, and the cumulation means we wind up allergic to something.

Step forward the pharmaceutical industry.

While many ailments can be cured, others have to be 'managed' by palliative treatments. Like my hay fever. I dose myself with an antihistamine preparation which - most of the time - relieves the symptoms. I also resort to some 'old fashioned' practices, like flushing my nose with salt water, and, more recently, using a 'wand' type device which is inserted into the nostrils and bathes the reacting mucosa in red light. It is a case of just trying to get through the worst of the season as best one can - which is what our ancestors did for much of the time I suspect. I know many of mine resorted to becoming seafarers - no pollen at sea at least.

Now the problem with daily doses of antihistamine is that it affects more than just the parts of the system that are responding to the pollen. It affects the whole of the immune system. So, if you also suffer from some other underlying conditions, you reduce the bodies natural response to those as well. This is why I tend to 'take the meds' only when I'm already pretty desperate, which, of course, means they are much less effective. While Hayfever is very common, it isn't the focus of a great deal of research. Why? Largely because there is more money to be made in already available preparations which deal with the symptoms, than in trying to find a way to cure it.

That leads me to a recent article on treatments for cancer which is based on boosting the immune system. The problem with cancer cells is that they generate an agent which 'blocks' the immune system and prevents it from acting to destroy the cancer cell. So the discovery of that, and the development of the means to 'boost' the immune system so it does attack tumours is a major step forward. But now comes my question - how will this work for someone who needs to take an immune system suppressing agents to control - for example - Hayfever?

Perhaps it is time the pharmaceutical industry did take a look at finding ways to treat those of us who are sensitive to pollen, dust and other 'particulates'. Hayfever, Asthma and Eczema are possibly the most common allergy conditions in every population group. Yes, we are a lovely 'cash cow' for all the preparations we have little choice but to use when our 'affliction is upon us', but, since it is already known which gene causes it, and what the 'defect' looks like - why, of why, can't someone come up with a proper cure?

Could some 'researcher' reading this give it some thought please?
 

The wheel turns slowly ...

As someone who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s I sometimes look back and wonder at the hubris that sprang from the 'triumph' over Nazism and Japanese expansionism, which coupled with the Doomsday angst of the Cold War, to produce the world we live in now. As the saying is; "We didn't see THAT coming!" Mine was probably the last to grow up with teachers and parents word being 'law', in a world where 'drugs' were used by losers and idiots and we recycled everything glass, and even tin cans. Compost was something you made yourself if you were a gardener, and you didn't go to the supermarket for your groceries, meat, spare tyres, car parts and everything else. Even dog and cat food was bought raw from a butcher, and cooked, then minced by hand and sealed into 'preserve jars' and stored in the refrigerator.

Fresh vegetables came in bulk from the local 'German' Market held every Saturday in the Municipal Market Halls, which often supplied a plump fresh chicken for our Sunday dinner. Chickens and eggs were all 'free range' in those days, and, yes, not cheap. I look back in amazement now that roast chicken was our 'luxury' once a week, and we ate stews, meat loaf, fish pie and many other dishes which 'stretched' whatever meat was available. My grandmother (who lived above us with my grandfather) baked biscuits, cakes and other treats, and made jam - her speciality was orange marmalade - and also pickled and preserved a lot of the vegetables. Peas came in the pods, in large string sacks, and my brother and I had the job of shelling them and storing them in large glass storage bottles. Beans also had to be cut and the 'string' removed so they could be stored and there was very little went to waste. It wasn't that we couldn't afford the odd bit, it was more a case of being very aware that by some standards, we were very well off, and waste was definitely something to be avoided.

Groceries were bought daily from the local greengrocer who also stocked a range of tinned and bottled goods, liquor came from an 'off-licence' and meat from a local butcher (who happened to be my uncle). Fish we bought fresh from the fishing boats, or at our local fishmonger, milk was delivered in a hand drawn cart and the empties collected, washed and refilled, as were almost all other bottles. We could make a bit of pocket money going round looking for 'lost' empty cold drink bottles and returning them to the shops who paid 1d (One whole Penny!) per bottle. But then, a Mars Bar about three times as big as the ones you get now, cost 6d and a slab of Cadbury's chocolate cost 2s 0d (Two shillings, or twenty-four pennies, for the post metrication generation!). Wages were, by todays standards, low - my father earned only Thirty-two Pounds, ten shillings (32/10s/0d) a month and my mother around Twenty Pounds. Out of that they paid the rent, fed and clothed my brother and I and ran a car. There were few 'luxuries' - but heck, we had plenty and appreciated what we had.

Looking back I can now see the gradual change that came over our world, starting in the late 1950s, probably around 1958/9. First came the supermarket. Instead of carry a basket up to Henry's Shop as it was known locally, we all ended up going to the supermarket on Saturday after the German Market. Then we had to carry the shopping out to the car in the large paper bags. It wasn't long and 'Henry's Store' was downsizing, then closed. Our trips to the Market became less frequent - usually only now for the occasional fresh chicken. After all, we could get everything we needed at the supermarket - and it was cheaper.

Somewhere along this road, cold drinks stopped coming in glass bottles. First they went into tins - actually aluminium, and later into plastic 'bottles' which you threw away. Convenient, yes, but now we had a rubbish problem. Being a 'free-range' kid, something else I noticed was the way in which suburbs and townships were expanding. By the time I left school, a lot of the places I'd hiked through as a Scout were now covered in houses, laid out as townships and simply no longer 'wild space'. That accelerated from around 1965 and by the time I married whole tracts of land I'd camped on, or visited or known as farmland was covered in houses. And that brought with it the first 'ecological crisis' - rubbish.

Between 1945 and 1965 we'd somehow managed to shift from a society that minimised waste, recycled as much as possible (even clothing was 'passed down', collars and cuffs 'turned', shoes resoled and so on) to one which threw everything away at the first sign of wear, or the first sign of an 'improved' version, and the 'consumer' society took off. Great for the profits of the companies feeding this, not so good for the animals now being 'factory' farmed as things to be bred, fed, slaughtered and packed for the supermarket without compassion. Some say we turned the African Slave Trade into an 'industrial' process - you should see how we treat animals in our 'consumer' desire for cheap excess.

The first indication that something was going very wrong was the streamers of discarded plastic shopping bags adorning every fence around our cities (I grew up in Africa in case readers don't know) and the waste dumps began to overflow. It got worse, waste simply couldn't be cleared fast enough in some areas, and most of it was ecologically non-degradable. I hadn't been in the fire service lonbg when the first recycling businesses started to spring up, someone having realised there was more to the old Yorkshire saying of "where there's muck, there's brass" than just a quaint expression. At first though, they could only handle paper and clothing, but gradually that extended into other things.

For some of us, it was funny to watch as the wheel turned slowly back to doing things we remembered as kids as being 'normal'. This is why, now resident some six thousand miles north of where I was until 1987, I sometimes find it annoying to be lectured by soime snotty nosed 'Green' clutching his/her iPad/iPhone/Android/(Insert Name of Latest Gizmo Here) and dressed in designer jeans, teeshirt and synthetic jacket and expensive trainers, about the need to 'save' the planet by cutting down my 'consumerist' lifestyle. I should laugh, after all, my wife is constantly nagging me about wearing shirts I bought almost twenty years ago, or my extreme reluctance to give up perfectly serviceable furniture to the Crunchy-Munchy truck when I'm damned sure someone, somewhere out there would love to have it and use it.

Yes, it is convenient to be able to go to the supermarket and buy cheap produce. It is convenient to be able to discard my drinks carton/can/bottle, but there is a hidden cost to all this 'consumerism' and it is one we all end up paying. Yesterday I raised the issue of energy, and here again, I must point out that back in the 1950s, our power was locally generated by a small coal burning power plant (as Josephus pointed out, the coal creates steam, which turns the turbines, which ...) and our home had only one power socket per room, one central light fitting and in the kitchen we had a grand total of two power sockets, the light and an electric stove! Luxury. Power was expensive, and we didn't 'waste' it. If you left a room, you turned the light off. Nor did you waste water. the supply was metered and my father was always quick to 'have a go' if the monthly bill was higher than usual.

I think we have reached a turning point as a society. The straightforward 'consume-'til-you-bust' model is broken. The model most 'Green' organisations promote is unworkable and unsustainable with our populations at present levels. Somewhere between the two we need to find a balance, consume less, recycle more efficiently (I've just watched a perfectly good lounge suite be destroyed by the Crunchy-Munchy truck - one which, if there was a decent furniture recycling system in place would have been cleaned, any defects restored, and passed to someone who needed it) and relearn the art of living, rather than existing in a constant rush.

Yes, the 1950s were probably the apogee of the western dream lifestyle for many, but the naked consumerism that began in the 1960s is not an ideal model either. As Fagan says in Oliver Twist, "I t'ink I better t'ink it out again". Perhaps not me, but perhaps some of those very clever people in the corridors of power - assuming they can stop gourging long enough to do so ...

Mr Cameron? Mr Milliband? Mr Clegg? Frau Merkel? Anyone?

The High Cost of Green

Germany was very quick to shut down their ageing nuclear generating plants in the wake of Fukushima, driven to a large extent by the hysteria whipped up by Greenpeace and the Green Party here, both of which have long anti-nuclear credentials. The problem was, of course, how to replace them. All the 'renewable' technology is expensive, ecologically extremely damaging in the places where the necessary minerals have to come from, and needs to be supported by more 'conventional' technology. Plus, of course, the distribution 'grid' was not designed for rapid switching from one source to another, or to distribute power across very long distances.

Anyone familiar with electricity distribution and generation knows that ideally one has the generating station and the user as close as practicable to one another as possible to maximise efficiency. The greater the separation, the greater the power drop across the 'net' and the less efficient the whole thing becomes. Less efficiency also means more cost. And that is what is currently exercising the German government, industry and commerce - and the ordinary people more than anything else.

In the last sixteen years 'energy' prices have gone up exponentially for the ordinary householder. The rise starting in 1998 is due mainly to the drive to switch from coal and oil to wind and solar, but is now further complicated by the rushed closure of the nuclear plants in 2011. For the ordinary householder electricity has risen from €0.17,11c per kW/hr to €0.28,73c per kW/hr (3.5% per year). The main reason for this is that the biggest users - heavy industry - are being subsidised in order to protect jobs. To hold their costs low (and protect the employment of the individuals who pay for household use) the cost of the 'Greening' of energy is being passed to the private individual.

The problem for the 'Greens', most of whom are middle to upper income earners or students and others on 'supported incomes' is that the larger population has noticed, and are starting to complain bitterly. Their complaint is, as the Chancellor, Frau Merkel acknowledges, justified. But now everyone is between a rock and a hard place. Efforts to reduce energy use have failed, and failed spectacularly. Resistance to building more windmills is stiffening, with increasingly angry exchanges between rural communities and city dwelling Greens and energy chiefs who want to cover every landscape with towering windmills and, of course, the power lines for distribution.

The government here is acutely aware of these concerns and is trying to find alternatives. They are also very aware of the fact that a large slice of the gas used in generating and heating of homes comes from Russia - a particularly tricky source at the moment - while we are actually sitting on vast quantities of a material that sends the Greens into a frenzy - brown coal. Ironically most Green campaigners have failed to realise that diesel and gas turbine generators are being installed to 'support' their beloved 'renewables' while they furiously oppose the building of new clean technology conventional power plants. And don't even mention anything nuclear ...

So the costs continue to rise while the politicians struggle to balance the need to ensure a stable and secure power supply, the Greens continue to dream of 'restoring' the climate to a non-existent idyllic past 'norm' and the rest of us pay. The greatest irony is that the poorest members of society are, in effect, paying proportionately more for this than those who so passionately enforce their vision of a 'better world' on the rest of us. As they say, there is the view from the Ivory Tower, and then there is reality.