Corporate governance again

Is not the problem that company law enshrines the primacy of the shareholder? Directors, whilst having regard to their stakeholders, have to put their owners first. 

As well as escalating dividends, this is manifest in share buybacks, using money that should have been invested in the business. Markets demand this as shown in comparative market ratings. It is also shown in the number of companies sold to overseas owners.

We may recall that Theresa May promised Company law

reform following her appointment as Prime Minister; nothing came of this. 

If Labour is serious about rebalancing the economy, Company law needs a radical overhaul to embrace all stakeholders, something that will demand the Wisdom of Solomon but also an eye to the practice in other countries.  

The role of private equity highlights the problem with so much of public life hidden from effective governance. 

Executive pay is demonstrably far too high as your leader and two previous articles rightly point out.

It seems that the coterie of senior executives and their counterparts in their large shareholders are some sort of mutual benefit society. However, what they are doing is not only legal it is almost encouraged by a company law that is wedded to the primacy of the shareholder. If you scratch my back…

Absurd levels of executive pay are bad enough, the primacy has for me an equally damaging impact: senior executives and shareholders all too often sell out to the highest bidder, leaving jobs at risk and the nation’s manufacturing sector denuded.

Theresa May said she was going to address this fundamental flaw and bring in wider responsibilities to all stakeholders. I hope that this government may at last take action.  

200,000 views of my random thoughts

 I write blogs on the subjects covered by my books: Military, Manufacturing, Biography. This blog is different and varied.  

My happy place - The British Library

I adore Shakespeare and so write of productions I have seen.

I am fed up with politics, but remain addicted

Some years ago I had a proper passion as chair of trustees at the Lincoln Arts Trust which ran the wonderful Drill Hall.

I love books and for some years chaired the Lincoln Book Festival. I offer occasional blogs on books I am reading. 

I hope you enjoy.

A wealth tax

 I have written elsewhere about the growing divide between the rich and everyone else. This wealth is substantially in the form of land and buildings which causes a problem since the payment of tax demands liquidity. That is a problem to be overcome.

I have written about the negative impact of wealth concentrated in the hands of the few and have suggested how such concentration may have happened. 

Recent debate about youth unemployment has prompted me to stand back from my research into the history of manufacturing and to see both how employment levels have varied and how the comparative shares of profit between capital and labour have shifted. 

AI brings another player on stage. How will that share be rewarded and how taxed? 

Youth Unemployment

Alan Milburn has published the first part of his report on Youth Unemployment. 

The Guardian ends its leader on target when it says say ‘there needs to be work’. What is the point in training for jobs that don’t exist?

I have spent the last five years exploring the story of British manufacturing witnessing from afar how more and more people were drawn into the business of making things. I have noted that there were years where jobs were good and reasonably paid. I have then seen jobs disappearing. 

Yes, some went overseas, but others went because the job was done. We had everything we needed; marketeers then worked at persuading us we needed more.  Or we can think of much of our infrastructure, the job was done we have a national grid. We now see that that that work needs doing again. 

Mechanisation did replace people, but if demand grew those people found work. Demand for many things is if anything shrinking. 

So what can young people do?

We need more houses and they need to be built by people. AI can’t do plumbing. The existing housing stock needs upgrading and insulating and this definitely needs people.

The care sector is growing and demand is not being met. The same is true within the NHS. These are people-facing jobs where AI won’t work.

People talk of fast growing tech businesses and it is true that these need people, but not that many and those needed require high qualifications. 

It may be true that ultimately it will be the few which drive the economy. When that becomes the case, people, not just young people, still need work. There are always jobs to be done and payment can be achieve by a universal basic income. 

Government needs to acknowledge that, as manufacturing employment reduced, manufacturing activity didn’t and it was capital which benefitted. So there is a tax dimension too.

I have seven grandchildren and I want them and their peers to have fulfilling lives.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

 This book is both disturbing and rewarding. Whilst Pullman emphasises that it is a story, it does follow, in a great many respects, the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels.

There is a jarring early on as the Annunciation is replaced by a rather equivocal scene with Mary and an angel in the guise of a young man. The result is twins and this provides the machinery of the plot. The elder, Jesus, is a good man who does not claim to be God. His younger and weaker twin brother, named Christ, has no such scruples. Jesus is passionate about calling all to repentance for the Kingdom of God is very close at hand. Christ is altogether more circumspect.

There is real pleasure in coming across stories from the Gospels told so refreshingly and well. That of the Prodigal Son would come first on my list. But there are then those stories, which although based on the Gospel account, deviate in some material way. This can both upset and let the hackles rise, until the note on the back cover is recalled: This is a Story. It is a story and, for a story to work, particular actions and motivations must be present. On a second reading and on reflection these deviations begin to shed light. Some are precious Gospel stories and so the deviations also jar deeply.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Phillippi is met by a furious denial by Jesus, but, in the context of this story, this is in character. The Feeding of the Five Thousand in this story is about sharing. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins is given an intriguingly different twist. With others the precious elements are missing. The journey to Emmaus has none of the burning in the disciples’ hearts as the scriptures are revealed; Jesus is not recognised as he breaks bread. There is no Last Supper and so no washing of Peter’s feet. The Eucharist is introduced after the resurrection and then misunderstood.

For all the jarring, I found myself drawn yet more closely to Jesus of Nazareth and his goodness and honesty. Pullman has created vivid depiction of the man, even if many Christians would dispute his theology.

JD Vance and the European leaders

Everyone, apart from Putin and Trump, is reeling from the comments the American Vice-President chose to make to the assembled European leaders. Much of what he said was right wing hubris designed to rile. 

I suggest there are three areas where serious attention is merited. 

The unheard. Over the past five years I have been studying the decline of British manufacturing and I know this decline is mirrored elsewhere. I have seen that by and large attempts at rebuilding employment have failed. These industrial towns were proud, prosperous places; they have been forgotten and it is hardly surprising that those living there are angry. They need to be heard.  

Immigration. War and climate change are displacing millions of people and hardly surprisingly some head for safer and more prosperous places. This cannot be ignored, but the answer is not fences and cruelty.   

Defence. America is fed up with defending Europe. Perhaps they are justified in saying Europe must step up to the mark.

All of this will hurt, but I suggest it can’t be ignored. 

The wealth divide, the damage it causes and how it came about

'The poor will always be with us.' So says Jesus in the new testament gospels. Whilst surely true, the gap between the rich and the poor just gets bigger. A couple of recent newspaper articles explore this.

Apart from basic fairness, wealth that is not spread about is bad for the economy. If wealth is spread, everyone has more and so can spend it on goods and services to the benefit of all. Wealth in the hands of the wealthy is often ‘invested’ in non productive assets like residential property often left unoccupied. Investment in farm land became unproductive when the price of land rose so far above its economic value. This happened because individuals and companies could rollover capital gains into assets that would also qualify for agricultural property relief for Inheritance Tax. In past generations wealth was invested in new industrial plant or the privately owned transport infrastructure : the railways and canals. This led to the multiplier effect much loved by teachers of economics in times of gone by.In the course of my lifetime, beginning when the Second World War was still fresh in people's minds, I have seen the gap first almost shrink in the fifties and sixties, but then open up and in recent years accelerate alarmingly.

In Britain there has always been a gap - the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. Land was key. With the growth of trade and then industrialisation different people grew rich. The traders, and this includes slave traders, and those who served them. Then the factory owners, the canal and railway entrepreneurs but especially the financiers, the bankers. All the time, those working in mills, factories and mines and the many thousands working from their dwellings became only slightly less poor when the economy boomed but destitute in slumps. The Factory Acts and the trades unions slowly improved conditions. Equally British manufacturing and trading companies enjoyed a strong market position really until the start of the First World War.

There were dark clouds on the horizon. In Germany, Krupp and other industrialists were creating a vast war machine. In the USA, the benefit of a large home market was reaping rewards in establishing an electrical industry which was all too happy to supply the former imperial power. Westinghouse set up in Manchester and British Thomson-Houston in Rugby.

In addition to the cost of many thousands of lives, the war drained the nation's coffers as it, and Empire nations, provided the astonishing quantity of arms and ammunition used on an industrial scale by the Allied nations. The same would have applied in Germany. Yet, the production of war materiel maintained employment in the waring nations and importantly for them in the USA.

In the UK, jobs had already been lost in textiles as the nation's near monopoly position slipped away. Similarly in the other old staples jobs were lost in iron and steel and shipbuilding as developing nations took up the baton. The USA already had a strong steel and shipbuilding industry which had prospered from the demands made on it during the war. Germany began to rebuild itself under the 3rd Reich. Jobs lost in the northern British towns, despite some government initiatives, were seldom replaced and these once prosperous urban areas became deserts of unemployment.

Newer industries prospered: motor vehicles, electronics, chemicals and consumer products. These industries also prospered in competitor nations. Britain had lost its lead.

The Wall Street crash triggering the Great Depression was devastating for workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Winners took advantage of their strength and position. Those who avoided the crash did well.

Preparations for a Second World War brought back employment to old and new industries alike. The aircraft industry, which had been in an hiatus after bursting onto the scene in the First World War, was busy again developing new aircraft.

When war came, once again the nation was busy, but once again the coffers were further drained. America provided arms and much more, at a price.

War left Britain exhausted yet it had to find the energy for an export drive in order to pay its way. Hard work created the nation that had never had it so good, but its wasn't everyone.

The fifites and sixties saw a move away from steam powered railways and the Clean Air Acts, both of which reduced the demand for coal. Mines shut with corresponding unemployment. The steel industry grew until the sixties, but then foreign competition triggered its decline. Shipbuilding suffered in much the same way. The aircraft industry, with the notable exception of Rolls-Royce, simply couldn't compete with the American giants. 

The indigenous motor industry gave way to foreign ownership. The TV and Radio industry followed suite. The coming of North Sea Oil raised the exchange rate making exports more expensive and imports cheaper; manufacturing declined. Jobs were lost with some replaced in the low pay service sector. Coalminers and steel workers had been the aristocracy in their communities, not so warehouse, call centre or delivery workers.

Computerisation hit middle management and clerical employment.

The Thatcher revolution was predicated on inequality with rewards for hard working and ability. The reality turned out to be rather different. The Financial sector became to be seen as the saviour of the economy. Banks grew alarmingly. Deregulation led to ever more risky products and reward that was disconnected from risk. Banks allowed people to borrow beyond their ability to repay and house prices rocketed. A small number of people became very rich. The argument was put forward that this wealth would trickle down.

In 2008 the banks crashed leaving savers with losses, businesses without borrowing facilities and bankers unscathed. A number of banks merged to become even bigger. The Bank of England pumped money into the economy under the label of 'quantitative easing'. This money found its way into yet higher property prices. Austerity that followed bled the public sector, losing jobs and depleting services.

The decision to leave the EU, in effect our large home market, cost a fall in growth which in turn has resulted in lost jobs or the lack of new jobs.

Covid came as very near the last straw.

The economy and indeed the fabric of the nation is now in desperate need for repair. A parallel comes to mind of that which faced the Attlee government in 1945. Yet, as then, there are grounds for hope. We are a talented nation. There are huge challenges, not least the appetite of the UK capital markets for investment. Will Hutton has much of interest to add in his book This Time No Mistakes.

The question remains of whether growing the economy can benefit all. Aditya Chakrabortty raises questions but offers no answers. This is a complex subject and so that is hardly surprising. just to add a further layer of complexity, here is a piece exploring an alternative world view.

Inheritance Tax and Farming

The whole farming and inheritance tax argument has become so political and emotional. 

I want to explore some of the issues.

Farmland has increased in value by a factor of 3 since 2000 so quite small farms could now attract the tax but the vast majority of the population couldn’t even begin to dream of having so much family wealth. 

This leads me to the statistic that is banded about that we are something like the sixth wealthiest country in the world. Looking at the make up of this wealth the majority is in land and so has no economic benefit, second come pension schemes the economic benefit of which depends on how they are invested and that is another current argument  

Farmers say they are asset rich and cash poor. However the economics of farming are severely under pressure. Costs have risen but prices haven’t. Surely the answer is to pay a realistic price for our food and this brings in the whole argument of ultra processed food and its cost advantage when so many families are in poverty. 

High profile people have put their money into farmland to secure both the current IHT relief and CGT rollover. This is offensive and is rightly the target of taxation. We live in a society where luxury flats are a short distance from food banks which is both unfair and sick at heart. 

In relation to IHT itself, it is a voluntary tax with lifetime gifts tax free after seven years. However, I recall complications with reservation of benefit which for a retired farmer living on the farm would be difficult. 

Something has to be done and the government is trying to do it. Of course those paying won’t be happy. 

 

130,000 visits to this blog of occasional writing.

I began this blog in 2008 whilst I was studying for my Professional Writing MA at Falmouth. 

To begin with it was book reviews and then I focused on the financial crisis working towards my MA project an unpublished novel called Broken Bonds. 

My time as CEO at Lincoln Cathedral brought me close to Magna Carta with the 800th celebrations  

The next phase of posts concerned my work with the Lincoln Drill Hall arts centre and the Lincoln Book Festival. I highlight the BBC Proms at the Drill Hall

The Brexit debate then grabbed my attention and political themes, not least the refugee crisis, followed interspersed with Shakespeare. 

I also write a blog on aspects of military history, the history of British Manufacturing and the man, my great great uncle,  who discovered Charlotte Brontë 

This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton

I have admired Will Hutton for many years and devoured his book, The State We Are In, and his writing in the Observer. His most recent book is This Time No Mistakes - how to remake Britain.

Following a helpful introduction, Hutton begins by exploring the economic story of the USA. He looks at the freewheeling entrepreneurs: JP Morgan in banking and Carnegie in steel and their push for monopoly. [the links are to posts I have written for my History of British Manufacturing.] The monopolies were countered by antitrust legislation. The otherwise free market system though had inbuilt instability and banks and businesses crashed all too often  After four decades of spectacular growth, the Wall Street crash and subsequent Great Depression demanded action which took the form of Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

This had three main strands: regulation, the provision of credit with protection and a massive investment in infrastructure with a focus on employing those otherwise out of work.  So we have the federal mortgage lenders, the SEC and a raft of social security legislation. It worked and formed the consensus of western economics for nearly half a century. Hutton acknowledges also the massive benefit to the US economy of production for WW2 of which I wrote in War on Wheels and Dunkirk to D Day.

The consensus began to crack in the seventies with the oil shocks and inflation.  Hutton suggests that it was raised interest rates to cool inflation that led to the strengthening dollar and the flight of US manufacturing overseas. In the UK, as I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines, it was North Sea oil that had a similar effect. Hutton suggests, in a later chapter, that UK interest rates raised for the same reason added to the strength of sterling.

The forces of the right, believing in the market and the small state, were ready in the wings and entered the scene with Ronald Reagan as the charismatic US face; much the same as Margaret Thatcher.

Neither Clinton nor Obama altered this new direction and left  a country of disgruntled former workers ready to embrace Trump's  brand of nationalism.

This very much sets the scene for the book.

Hutton then looks at the Tory years with particular focus on Thatcher and the way manufacturing was decimated. He explores the Brexit arguments and then the failed administrations of May, Johnson and Truss.

The next focus is on laissez faire and the way successive governments have embraced this doctrine combined with the straight-jacket of the small state.

In critiquing the doctrine he draws on the writing of Adam Smith, Chadwick and Engels, the action of Luddites, Tolpuddle martyrs and the Chartists, and finds practical examples of good practice in the Rochdale Cooperative and Robert Owen’s New Lanark. Interesting for me who has written on him he draws on John Ruskin's works on political economy in particular Unto his Last. Hutton of course writes on Marx and his critics.

1859 was a key date with the formation of the Liberal party. Hutton follows this by writing on influential thinkers: Green, Hobson, Hobhouse and their pupils Asquith and Keynes. 

Interestingly he quotes from Churchill's Poverty: the study of town life

“ A poverty-stricken working class could not possibly spend sufficiently to drive the economy forwards, while the aristocratic elite and upper-middle class were too small to compensate. Instead, they saved, with the savings’ surfeit flowing overseas to empire and the financing of other countries’ industries.” 

I have to observe that this is what we are witnessing in today's economy.

The growing union movement and the Liberal party found common cause and together selected Lib/Lab parliamentary candidates.

A somewhat belated fruition of this was the reforming Liberal Government of 1906-1911 and Lloyd George's budget.

I found it interesting that in 1918 when the franchise was enlarged to give the vote to some women, consideration was given but rejected for proportional representation, a topic to which Hutton returns a number of times in the book.

The interwar years contained the disastrous return to the Gold Standard and the hardship this caused. It contained too the ground breaking writing of Keynes whose influence Hutton warmly embraces. Sadly for Britain, governments did not share in the embrace but instead built tariff barriers around Imperial Preference which shielded Britain from healthy competition. The adherence to the small city remained key.

Moving to the post-war, Hutton rejoices in Beveridge and is admiring of Attlee and his government. He possibly offers warmer praise for Harold Macmillan and his Middle Way.

As a critique of post-war industry, Hutton offers this:

“ cosseted, dividend-hungry, rentier shareholders, aggressive shop stewards, disengaged finance and unenterprising managements looking for safety behind tariffs and cartels, rather than putting money into research and new products.” 

This is very much what I found in my research into British manufacturing since 1951 as expressed in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Looking at governments, he sees missed opportunities and barriers. For Wilson the barriers were the multiplicity of trades unions, but also a city wedded to laissez faire. Heath is criticised, but Hutton points out that he did want to remove barriers that reduce competition. The SDP and Blairism in practice are both filled with missed opportunities, although the Blair/Brown years did bring vital change, not least in the focus on early years in Sure Start.

Looking at a way forward Hutton would like to seeing a co-operation of New Liberal and Ethical Socialist. The fundamental shift through is from the emphasis on the 'I' to the 'We'. He draws on the thinking of the Fairness Foundation. 

There is much to be done. Hutton suggests that massive investment is needed to counter climate change, in infrastructure, skills, scientific research and levelling up. Increased borrowing would be possible if lenders could see that their money is being wisely spent. Increased taxation would be needed to service the debt. Our tax take is lower than many countries - but a poorly designed tax system needs attention. 

A sovereign wealth fund is needed. Hutton looks at how British funds and banks currently invest - most goes to real estate and overseas. This needs to be reversed.

Housing, education and health care are key issues where those already on the ladder not only have massive advantage but also live in silos removed from the rest of society.

None of this will just happen. A whole host of national and business governance issues need to be address in tandem. Hutton does not avoid the elephant in the room: we must build a vibrant relationship with the EU.

"The aim must be to create an environmentally sustainable, high-productivity Britain that is less unequal, fairer and economically dynamic, and which, while global in its reach, is firmly anchored in its own continent. That is what Britain must invest for – a ‘We Society’ around which the private and public sectors can coalesce."

Shakespeare and me

I am revisiting Shakespeare.

My first encounter with William Shakespeare was at my prep school, Davenies, in Beaconsfield. In the grounds there was a dell which formed the perfect open air theatre. The first performance I remember was Julius Caesar because my dad and I made a wooden sword for me to use. The second more memorable performance was Henry V where I played the Bishop of Ely. I remember that the Buckinghamshire Advertiser commented on my youth; I think I also played a younger part. The enduring memory is of my lines:

Awake remembrance of these valiant dead, and with your arms renew their feats. 

I took these lines as the text for a sermon on Remembrance Sunday many years later. I was for some years a Church of England Lay Reader.

Shakespeare passed me by at secondary school apart from a non speaking part as a slave in Troilus and Cressida

In my twenties I saw Romeo and Juliet at the Young Vic.

Some thirty years would pass before I studied humanities at Vaughan College of the University of Leicester.  On our Ruskin College residential weekend we encountered Titus Andronicus and the gruesome but brilliant Anthony Hopkins film. This led to the purchase of a couple of academic books on Shakespeare which I now discover I hardly read. More significantly I took the whole family to Stratford to see a brilliantly dark Midsummer Nights Dream.

From there it was Hamlet at the Old Vic with Sinead Cusack as Gertrude. I was entranced. 

Our move to Cornwall brought a wonderfully light Twelfth Night at the Hall for Cornwall and at the Minack an atmospheric Tempest. In the continuation of my humanities degree at Exeter, I studied a module on Shakespeare looking at Hamlet  

We now move to the RSC in London and first King Lear with Corin Redgrave as a Lear who made me feel the play was all about fathers and daughters. The RSC at the Barbican offered performances of Titus Andronicus , Macbeth and Measure for Measure.

This year my interest had deepened with a BBC Documentary William Shakespeare Rise of a Genius and three books of which I will write in subsequent posts: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench and James Shapiro's 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and The Year of Lear..

A lovely birthday present from my children, theatre tokens spent on a ticket for Richard III at the Globe. An all female cast, with the Globe’s artistic director as a truly evil Richard. As Judi Dench observed in her book on Shakespeare, it is women who stand up to Richard whilst all the men meekly follow his lead. I have been to the Globe before, I think to see The Merchant of Venice, some years ago  

Living in cloud cuckoo land

The UK has massive backlogs of repairs to hospitals, schools, courts and roads. Local authorities are collapsing. Armed forces can’t recruit not least because living accommodation is in desperate need of repair. Local authorities are having to cut vital but not legally required services, not least in community and youth services. We were woefully illprepared for Covid. Having cut all available corners from PPE stocks to care home resources. Add to this a cost of living crisis with food banks stretched to the limit. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was becoming just another medium sized nation dwarfed by the superpowers but with leaders of both political parties who could not shake off their sense of this being the mother country of an ‘Empire on which the sun never set’. This has meant that public expenditure has always been distracted by a defence commitment that was disproportionate.

Our public services are stretched beyond endurance, yet we are the sixth wealthiest country in the world and government is hinting of tax cuts! Here is a link to an article post budget which explores the detail. Brexit has critically damaged our economy  

We are living in cloud cuckoo land. 

Where has that money gone?

Part of the answer is the obscene gap between rich and not even poor but most people. The wealth of the rich is not employed productively but is invested in overpriced dwellings which aren’t even occupied. Austerity and an insane dash for growth through unfunded tax cuts have compounded the problem  

It seems that one result is that Labour has ditched much of its green investment plan. This investment is fundamental to both our green transition but also industrial renewal and making good our infrastructure.

If we don’t manufacture, what of services? Financial services don’t rate highly when British companies choose to list in New York

We need some honesty from our politicians.

The Brighton Pavilion a symbol of the glamour of Victoria’s reign now undergoing urgent repairs - perhaps a metaphor of these times.

110,000 visits to my blog

I began the blog in 2008 when I was studying for my MA in Professional Writing at University College Falmouth. 

At the start I wrote about some of the books I read. Of these Engelby by Sebastian Faulkes was particularly memorable. I looked at Teen Fiction but also dipped my toe into Shakespeare (1599 by James Shapiro) to gain a sense of 17th century England as the setting for an historical novel. 

In the end I settled in the banking crisis as the setting for my MA project with a title Broken Bonds about one of the creators of the financial instruments that led to the crash, and yes, his bond of marriage also broke. 

There is then a gap as I returned to full time employment as CEO at Lincoln Cathedral where I got to know Magna Carta for its 800th anniversary. This blog has some of my thoughts on the Great charter and its implications today.

After leaving my job at the cathedral I was fortunate enough to be appointed chair of the Lincoln Arts Trust which ran Lincoln Drill Hall. The blog has a number of post about this wonderful arts venue and its history. I was also appointed chair of the Lincoln Book Festival and wrote a number of pieces on this and other subjects both for the blog and the Lincolnshire Echo. 

In January 2016 I went to Lesvos with my wife and two other friends to work at the Moria refugee camp. The main writing on this was the Lesvos blog.

2016 was also the year of the EU referendum and I wrote a number of pieces in passionate support for remaining. At around the same time a number of us started CompassionateLincoln in support of refugees but also our local homeless.

2018 marked the centenary of the end of the Great War and a highlight for me was the visit of the Proms to the Drill Hall. We also held a commemoration of Lincoln in WW1.

I used the blog for my early thoughts on what became my two books on UK manufacturing.

The blog continues to be a place where I offer thoughts on a range of mainly political issues although a current project exploring Shakespeare may feature in due course. Earlier blog pieces on Macbeth and Titus Andronicus may be in point. 

Lincoln Drill Hall

We are all the beneficiaries of slavery

 We are all beneficiaries of the slave trade – like it or not. 

The work The Guardian is doing on the actions of its founders and the work commissioned by the King will enhance the historical record, but they are unlikely to change the broader picture identified by Eric Hobsbawm and others. 
Cheap cotton picked by slaves fired the industrial revolution. 
Everything else flowed from it. The need for machinery demanded coal and iron. These begat steam engines, the railways, factory system. The benefits were not, and are not, evenly shared. My friend’s grandmother, who worked in a cotton mill at the age of thirteen, and so many like her, suffered along with her brothers and sisters transported against their will from Africa. 
Yet industrialisation transformed our lives. Taking the example of cotton. Roger Osborne offers a  very telling statistic. ‘In 1790, 4% of the clothing in Europe was made of cotton; by 1890, it had grown to 73% and the population had roughly doubled to 400 million’. 
Industrialisation was not without its critics, not least John Ruskin. Its legacy though is a world of disparity in wealth both between and within nations, let alone the shadow of global warming. 
The evil of the slave trade lies there at the heart. Individuals and families may have been responsible, but they are dead. It is with each of us in the post-industrial western world  that discussion of reparations must start

The case for a universal basic income

 The stories emerging from the cost of living crisis make the case for a universal basic income overwhelming. 

A starting point is that, as a wealthy country, there is enough to go round. 

If we go back from there to how income has been distributed historically through the operation of the market we come to a wonder of how it ever worked at all. And of course it didn’t

Subsistence farming and labouring gave way to industry which paid the minimum needed to attract workers from the fields. It is of course more complicated  

Since the 2008 crash, the public sector has born the brunt and wages have been squeezed. Will Hutton suggests that 'the strikes are a baleful legacy of a 12-year obsession with tax cuts and a small state'. You can read more in the Observer of 18 December 2022. 

If we take nurses, historically they were women living as single people in the nurses home. Pay was set to be enough to attract women to follow their vocation. The vocation is still present but individual situations have changed. 

Now nurses may be single parents responsible for a family. Historically they may have been married women bringing a second income to a family. Now they may be the main breadwinner, female and male. If they are single and live in rented accommodation, rents have been driven up by the market. 

It is not the job that defines the income need; it is the particular situation of the individual or family unit. It makes no sense to build an employment model in the NHS based on the needs of single parents; equally it is ludicrous to assume that the income merely adds to the family cake. All this is quite separate from any discussion on the comparative worth of different jobs.

As I argued before, the Manufacturing sector provided jobs with pay sufficient for family needs. Most manufacturing jobs has been replaced by lower paid service sector jobs, often not full time. 

Basic pensions and benefits just about provided enough. The energy crisis has driven a coach and horses through that, but, all being well on a temporary basis. Help toward energy by definition leaves space for other help. If that help is not forthcoming, the heating has to be turned off. 

It should not be down to help.  

Employment and pay

 In 2022, we are facing an economy where there are many low paid jobs, too poorly paid to begin to support a family even if both partners are working.

This contrasts with the 1950s, for example, when employment in manufacturing was high, the mines were still functioning and the railways employed many people. The rates of pay, although not great, were just about sufficient.

In the years in between, manufacturing, mining and railway jobs have reduced dramatically. They have been replaced by jobs in the service industries which are often poorly paid, not full time and insecure.

It is fatuous for politicians to pretend that the old jobs will return. Manufacturing, although buoyant, is no longer a major employer. The mines have closed and, with net zero, will remain closed.

With largely a service based economy, what is the answer? We remain a wealthy nation; we need a mechanism by which that wealth can be shared. 

The image is of a climate change protest in Lincoln in 2019. The question on the placard is every bit as pertinent to this issue. 

Plastic - friend and foe

When polythene was invented by ICI scientists in the 1930s a big question was its possible use. This was not unlike the earlier invention of the typewriter, where people were highly sceptical about the likely level of demand. With polythene, the invention of  and urgent need to deploy radar came in the nick of time as miles of cable demanded lighter, more flexible insulation. Then came Perspex, perfect for the cockpits of aircraft. The rest, as they say is history. 

We still love plastic, Lego of all sizes but much else besides. We need to fall out of love, just as we are with coal and oil, from which, of course, it is made.

It is shocking that the top twenty manufacturers of polymers (from which plastic comes) are responsible for half of all single use plastic polluting our planet.

We all have to take responsibility but so too do the top manufacturers of single use plastic who have the financial muscle to make a difference.  

Will our behaviour change once it is over?

Before March 2020, the UK economy depended on our passion for spending, buying things and experiences. Could this change, and, if it does, what would be the impact?
Retail was suffering in any event, but will we have kicked our addiction? Zoe Wood asks someone good questions in her piece in the Guardian. 
There is then the evening economy. Can it possibly survive with social distancing? After all, what is the point of a young person going out if they can't be physically near to another? What is the point of spending money on fashionable clothes, if there is no one to see them?
I see it as a sort of money go round. We spend some of our money on essentials; the proportion with depend on income and dependents. The remainder, to the extent there is any, can be spent on things and experiences. Those who sell or provide these, then earn and so the money goes round again. It is an economy that consumes relatively little in the way of raw material; the thing that is bought is mainly added perceived value - so the fashion designer, the marketeer, the shop designer and fitter

The raw material may make up a small proportion of the item, but it is significant in two particular ways. How it is produced: so cotton, often seen as the good guy compared to artificial fibre, demands some 1800 gallons of water for just one pair of jeans, and in a world short of water this is unsustainable. The other part of production is labour, and there are endless accounts of workers being paid derisory wages and having appalling working conditions. 

Change may be happening. The leader in the Guardian of 8 May 2021 speaks of a move to enjoy second hand clothes. 

Britain's industrial revolution was built to a great extent on cotton; can second hand clothes be a part of a second revolution?

Festival of Britain

‘THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A NATION is presented for the first time in this Festival of Britain and millions of the British people will be the authors of it, displaying through every means by which Man expresses his nature how we have honoured our stewardship and used our talents. Conceived among the untidied ruins of war and fashioned through days of harsh economy, this Festival is a challenge to the sloughs of the present and a shaft of confidence cast forth against the future.’

So began the introduction to the Festival brochure.

The first record of the idea of a Festival of Britain is to be found in 1943, at the point of the Second World War when victory, although challenging, at last seemed possible. The Festival was to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition, and many had in mind a similar exhibition of the nation’s products. This made sense, for a good number of such exhibitions had followed that of 1851 and business liked them. 

The Festival, as its plans emerged under the directorship of journalist, Sir Gerald Barry, and chairmanship of Churchill’s right hand man, Lord Ismay, looked rather different. I quote from the first of three talks Sir Gerald gave to the Royal Society of Arts in 1952:

‘We were going to tell a story not industry by industry, still less firm by firm, but the consecutive story of the British people in the land they live in and by… each type of manufacture and each individual exhibit would occur in the setting appropriate to that part of the story in which it naturally fell e.g. steel knives and sinks in the home part of the story, steel machines in the industry part of the story, steel chassis in transport, and so on…each industrial exhibit will be chosen by the exhibition organisers themselves in consultation with manufacturers and trade associations.’ 

A stock list was compiled of some 20,000 items from 5,000 manufacturers, only half of which could be exhibited in the space available. Design was key, and was overseen by the still relatively new Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council). “The exhibits ranged from locomotives to lipsticks and in value many thousands of pounds to a few pennies.”

I have traced the exhibits that I have so far found to the origins of the relevant manufacturer, in some cases back to the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 

My great grandfather exhibited in 1851 and I begin my forthcoming book, How Britain Created the Manufacturing World, with a survey of the 1851 exhibition catalogue. 

How Britain Created the Manufacturing World

 I'm thrilled that Pen & Sword have confirmed their intention to publish my current work in progress, How Britain Created the Manufacturing World. Now published as How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World  

The peoples of the British Isles gave to the world the foundations on which modern manufacturing economies are built. This is quite an assertion, but history shows that, in the late eighteenth century, a remarkable combination of factors and circumstances combined to give birth to Britain as the first manufacturing nation. Further factors allowed it to remain top manufacturing dog well into the twentieth century, although other countries were busy playing catch up. Through two world wars and the surrounding years, British manufacturing remained strong, albeit whilst ceding the lead to the United States.

This book seeks to tell the remarkable story of British manufacturing, using the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a prism. Prince Albert and Sir Henry Cole had conceived an idea of bringing together exhibits from manufacturers across the world to show to its many millions of visitors the pre-eminence of the British. 1851 was not the start, but rather a pause for a bask in glory. 

I trace back from the exhibits in Hyde Park’s crystal palace to identify the factors that gave rise to this pre-eminence. I then follow developments up until the Festival of Britain exactly one century later. Steam power and communication by electric telegraph, both British inventions, predated the Exhibition. After it, came the sewing machine and bicycle, motor car and aeroplane, but also electrical power, radio and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries where Britain played a leading part. I conclude with the Festival of Britain in 1951 as an exhausted nation looked forward with hope  

There is now the sequel looking at British manufacturing since 1951. It is called Vehicles to Vaccines.