36 Days to Go! How Can We Bear It?

36 days to go ( as it says, menacingly, on the screen of BBC’s News channel broadcasts)! Can we possibly stay awake? Can we bear this lifeless battle of the blancmanges for all that time?

 

Today we have business men weighing in the side of the Tories. Well, that’s only interesting because lots of these these curious people have in the past been equally keen on the other lot. Do they know what they are doing?

 

 

I have never been sure why businessmen or business women (or ‘business ladies’ as Jimmy Savile memorably called them in those old British Rail TV commercials that I am sure lots of people would like to forget) are supposed to be the source of political wisdom. Business is what they are good at, well, supposedly – though I have never been quite sure how much of business success is just luck plus hard work, like so many other trades.

 

Different sorts of businessmen have different political needs. Big business, for instance, is quite keen on heavy regulation, health and safety, national agreements with trades unions, minimum wages and so forth.

 

Small business hates regulation of this kind. That’s one of the reasons why big business likes it – it’s a brake on competitors and helps big industrial dinosaurs stay on top and fight off challenges from small new rivals.

 

And in many cases, businessmen know as much about the great issues of our time as, well, you or I.  Or less. I still feel a great sense of joy at recalling Sir Richard Branson’s attempts to explain on TV why it would be a good idea for us to join the European single currency. What a grasp that man has.

 

What is it that people learn at these grandiose business schools which so many of the great universities have now established? Are they, having done these courses, actually any better at business than a sharp barrow boy who knows how to pile it high and sell it cheap, to work every hour God sends,  and that the customer is always right (not a maxim much beloved in today's business, I find)?

Somerset Maugham long ago wrote a beautiful short story  (‘The Verger’ – spoiler alert, do not read on unless you have read this story)…

 

It is about a man who was sacked from his job as verger of a fashionable London church when the rector found him to be illiterate. As a result, he set up in business with a tobacconists’ shop, and worked so hard, and had such a  knack for picking the right spot for a new shop, that he soon owned a chain of such shops and became very rich and successful. Late in life,  a fellow business man discovered by accident that the man was still unlettered. He said ‘Imagine! And you achieved all this without being able to read and write’ and then asks ‘What would you have become if you *had* been able to read and write?’

 

And the fabulously rich old man replies ‘Why, I can tell you exactly what I would have become. I would still be the verger of St Jude’s, Kensington Square’,  (or whatever it was) .

 

 

….But I digress, a bit.

 

These thoughts trickle through my mind as I listen to the incessant repetition of the news that some great gathering of businesspersons has endorsed the Tory party. Should we care? Some of these people admit having endorsed New Labour in the past - and there is no doubt in my mind that New Labour’s wild (but wholly predictable) decision to go for a huge expansion of public spending in the year 1998  - see here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11277023/Was-this-the-worst-ever-political-blunder-in-our-history.html

 

 

did immense and lasting damage to our economy. The Tories at the time were powerless to resist, having more or less conceded moral superiority to New Labour during the Major era, and having 9 at that stage and since) nothing especially interesting or different to say about the economy or anything else.

 

My favourite example of this is Gordon Brown’s disastrous sale of our gold reserves at rock bottom prices http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/gold/7511589/Explain-why-you-sold-Britains-gold-Gordon-Brown-told.html

 

I well remember, at the time, trying to work up a controversy about this for my Talk Radio programme. I thought (rightly) that the decision was unhinged.   A prominent Tory economic commentator, who shall remain nameless in case I get carried away and say what I really think of him, agreed to come on to the programme, but, as soon as he was in front of the microphone, said he thought the sale was a good plan, thus torpedoing the whole segment.

 

The Tory front bench were utterly uninterested, and made no protests in the Commons – the only person to do so was the majestic backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell, a man who knows a thing or two and will be missed now he has retired.  The Tory Party has since discovered a retroactive fury about this action by Mr Brown, but whenever I write to the authors of these denunciations and ask them where they and their party were at the time, they fall wonderfully silent.

 

The truth is, most politicians know more or less nothing at all about business, economics or anything else. If they do, they’ll swiftly be exiled to the backbenches, where they can’t rock the boat. Businessmen who commend political parties should be warned that their endorsements will be carefully stored, and brought out again five years’ hence, to be displayed as prominently as they were the first time. That should give them pause.