Beer and Britannia - A Talk to the Mile End Group

I've been asked to publish the text of a sppech I gave to the Mile End Group Christmas Party on Monday 6th December. I am flattered and delighted to do so, even at the risk of blowing my cover. Here it is.

MEG Talk – December 6^th  - Champagne Charlie’s

I’d like to thank Jon for asking me to address you tonight, not least because it enables me to fulfil a long standing ambition to meet one of my heroes, Bill Keegan.

As an Economics student in the 1980’s Bill’s columns were my regular reading and his books still reside between JK Galbraith and EF Schumacher on my bookshelf today.  In those hostile days of Monetarism it was Bill who showed me that it was OK to come out of the closet, hold my head high and say “I am a Keynesian.”

As it’s the start of the festive season I thought I‘d give you a personal and topical view of why it is good to feel good about beer. However last week an announcement took place that has moved me to offer up a small prayer.

“Lord, We pray for the Cistercian monks of Orval, Westmalle, Westveleren, Rochefort and Chimay, as these, your loyal servants, who make some of the finest beers in the world,will be the principal losers when our government introduces its super-tax on beers over 7.5%. Lord, we wish to join in with the makers of cider in giving thanks that this new taxation does not apply to them thus rendering it completely bloody useless. Lord, We pray for the soul of whichever clueless berk thought up this imbecilic tax, and forgive them, Lord, for they knowest not what they do. Amen.”

Maintaining the religious theme for a moment; I am reminded of the comment by the great evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane, when asked whether anything could be concluded about the Creator from the study of creation. “An inordinate fondness for beetles” he is said to have replied. Well there may be an awful lot of beetles in the world. But there really is an awful lot of yeast in the world. One millilitre of fermenting wort contains some 40 million yeast cells, making yeast, not the dog, both man’s best friend, and the most successful organism that there has ever been or ever will be. Not for nothing did Benjamin Franklin say ‘Beer is God’s proof that he loves us.” My point being, that, whether you are atheist or creationist, it is pretty clear than mankind has evolved to drink or was intended to drink.

Let me elaborate, but first the disclaimer. Yes, overindulgence and dependence is tragic and damaging and affects others not just the alcoholic, and government should address this. I would argue, however, but not here and now, that they do NOT seriously address these issues and that the standard of debate today is considerably below the standard of debate on the matter of 150 years ago.

Most of us are not alcoholics, however. We are adults and there is one fact that is inevitably overlooked each time some Nutty Professor tells us that tells you that drinking alcohol is more dangerous than taking cocaine. Unlike drugs or tobacco, moderate alcohol consumption is good for you. Moderate drinkers outlive teetotallers.

A lot of people have heard about the cardio-vascular benefits of red wine, but few of you, in this wine snobbish nation that we undoubtedly are, will know that whatever goodies wine contains beer contains too and more besides. Ironically beer is actually a very female friendly drink. Compounds in hops are shown to offer protection against osteoporosis  - a condition that generally affects women more than men -  and cervical cancer - a condition that absolutely affects women more than men. The lupulin in hops has long been known to facilitate the flow of breast milk, and aside from being stuff full of vitamins beer is also the richest single dietary source of folic acid. In short ladies, should you wish to  get pregnant, drink lots of beer. You will find it effective in so many ways.

Not only is beer good for us, without it we would not be here.

Bier ist Brot, say the Bavarians. More accurately they should say Brot ist Bier, for there are some anthropologists who suggest that early and medieval ales were actually more nutritious than bread. Others, notably Solomon Katz, speculate that the desire to make beer was a major driver in the transition from hunter-gathering to sedentary agriculture.

Nomads  - Civilisation-Safe Water -  Romans Greeks - Greek Sylogism - Dilution of wine.

Beer is not a sin substance. Beer is central to our modern existence.

So it should come as no surprise to discover that when, for example,  in 1254 Henry III appointed Justices of the Peace to oversee the licensing of inns and alehouses, he was doing so, not to restrict or regulate the trade. He was doing so in order to guarantee supply. Sadly many justices over the centuries saw their job as prohibition not provision and history is full of periods – especially of Puritan ascendency – when suppression was their aim. However, there is a conflict here between the interests of government and the aims of its agents. In 1790 the revenue complained that over-zealous suppression by Puritan magistrates was harming the national income. Please bear in mind that this was a time the time the country was literally run by drunkards.

“Men of all ages drink abominably. Fox drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his superiors. Sheridan excessively and Grey more than any of them, but it is a much more gentlemanly way than our Scotch drunkards, and is always accompanied with lively, clever conversation on subjects of importance. Pitt I am told drinks as much as anybody.” (Sir Gilbert Elliot in Andre Simon  - Bottlescrew Days: Wine drinking in England in the 18thC

The level of Puritan zealotry was  cause for concern for the simple reason that the country’s finances were founded on drink. In 1738 income from brewing accounted for 25% of ALL tax  income. By 1878 it was even greater, a correspondent writing that:

“The total amount of capital invested in the liquor trades in the United Kingdom amounts to about one hundred and seventeen million pounds sterling. This sum is equal to more than half the total value of our exports, and is more than double the annual receipts of all the railways. About one-third of the whole National Revenue is drawn from this source.”

Yet, abuse by JPs reached such a high point at the start of the 19thC that one laissez-faire commentator concluded that ‘there must be a small massacre of magistrates, nothing else will do.’ As the century progressed and Temperance became THE leading political question of the century, magistrates became bolder. Temperance campaigners actively insinuated themselves onto licensing benches, and as brewers were quite properly barred from sitting, they had a free run to attempt to destroy the licensed trade. Once the political parties became clearly divided on the drink issue which they did after the draconian Aberdare Act of 1872 they nearly succeeded. This was the Act that was so hated that at the 1874 election Gladstone was famously “borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”.

In short the licensing system in this country was characterised by widespread abuse of power by the justices and magistrates from about five minutes after Henry III set it up until the post war system of brewster sessions sitting before stipendiary magistrates advised by professional licensing clerks. This was an unglamourous cog in the overall British administrative apparatus, but it turned silently, efficiently and cost effectively, having taken some 700 years to bring to perfection. Inexplicably  Tony Blair then abolished it and replaced it with the complete dog’s dinner that is local authority control. Yet the history of devolved licensing in the UK is one that is profoundly authoritarian.

Consider Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham .  In 1887 the Kendal division of the Westmorland Licensing Board suppressed the public house of a Miss Sharp on the grounds of superfluity. Miss Sharp sued the chairman of the licensing board, Mr Wakefield on the grounds that he was acting beyond his powers. The case rose through the courts to the House of Lords where the long suffering Miss Sharp lost her appeal. The results were immediate and reached their high point in the Birmingham Scheme. Set in train in 1897 it was intended to be a means of managing the transfer of licences from the city centre to the expanding suburbs. In fact it quickly became an experiment in urban eugenics.

“The scale generally accepted for the renewal of a publicans licence to a new site where there were no licensed premises before is three on licences; for an entirely new beer off licence, two on licences; for a new beer wine and spirit of licence, two and a half on licences . . . For alterations involving considerable extension as many as two licences have been surrendered. Generally it is one on licence or two off licences for a considerable extension of existing licensed premises.” From Oliver – Renaissance of the English Public House – Faber & Faber  - 1947

It relied upon the co-operation of the breweries - who had no choice - and therefore meant the peripheralisation of the landlord. The brewers combined to form a company which was entrusted with negotiating with the justices how licenses were to be surrendered. The company then organised the distribution of compensation to its constituent brewery members paid out of levied subscriptions. The compensation went, however, to the brewer, not to the licensee whose livelihood was ruined not by his own actions or the operation of the free market, but by the collusion of the brewers and justices whose actions were completely ultra vires. Between 1904 and 1914 1000 licences disappeared in Birmingham as a result of this flagrant abuse of power.

The Birmingham Scheme was the blueprint for the sinisterly named 1910 Licensing (Consolidation) Act, giving magistrates de jure the powers they had taken de facto. Licensing benches started interfering in private businesses in a way that would be intolerable in any other walk of life. An Act of 1904 had already established the principle of compensation for landlords whose licenses were suppressed or surrendered. The temperance lobby had opposed compensation, but once it had arrived they used it to salve their consciences. If they chose to destroy a man’s business, he was, was he not, in receipt of compensation? They were not troubled by the fact that the compensation fund was paid for by a levy on publicans. The publicans who businesses were being forcibly closed by justices operating to an openly temperance agenda must have felt that they were being lined up against the wall to be shot, but only after they had been made to pay for the bullets.

Time precludes me from going into detail about the culmination of the temperance campaign to make Britain dry, which saw Sunday closing in Wales and Scotland and the Constitutional Crisis of 1910-11 in which the licensing bill of 1908 was the preliminary skirmish, and which would, amongst other things reduced the number of pubs in England by 30% and have banned female employment in pubs. Imagine that. No barmaids in Britain, by Law.

In 2003 one million people marched through London to protest against the invasion of Iraq. In 1908 when the population of Britain was only 37 million 800,000 people rallied in Hyde Park to protest against the bill. Happily the lords shared the general public’s view that it was a thoroughly draconian piece of legislation. Lord Salisbury, not a noted pub goer, was unimpressed by the prohibitionists’ rhetoric that closing pubs reduced drunkenness. “He,” he said, “had a great many bedrooms, but he didn’t find that that led to him sleeping more.” The lords’ killed the bill. The nation rejoiced.

Well here we are in 2010 and plus ca change. Whatever the merits of the 2007 smoking ban the fact remains that this was a measure that was going to have adverse effects on thousands of pubs, clubs and bingo halls. Was there a quid pro quo from the government, something to cushion the blow? Was there hell. In the 2008 budget the government put up beer duty by an eye watering 18%. This is a double whammy as pubs pass the duty increase on, but supermarkets with their oligopoly powers often tell the producer that they have no intention of passing the duty rise on to consumers. Isn’t it supposed to be a consumer tax? 

So when pubs go to the wall at the rate of 35 a week as they were in 2009 that may be said to be suppression without compensation 100 years on. To my mind we are back in 1908 over again, but this time Hyde Park is empty.

I occasionally try to get Jon to rise to the bait by insisting that Boris Johnson is not a conservative, as his first act as Mayor of London was to ban drink on the tube and buses. Out, I put it to him, are Conservative ideals of individual freedom, with rights and responsibilities going hand in hand. In is the knee jerk, nannying, authoritarian, populist, prohibtionism that we might expect from a Blunkett or a Harman.

Consider the situation. You may travel by train from Euston to Watford, and purchase two cans of beer, sold to you by the train operating company. You can happily and legally consume one of them. Should you then return from Watford to Euston Square, this time using the Metropolitan Line, and attempt to consume the second can, you will be committing a criminal offence.   The law, like the Mayor, is absurd. The logic is profoundly absurd. Some people, as yet unspecificed, argues Boris, may drink irresponsibly on public transport. Therefore we shall take the freedom to drink on public transport away from everyone. Not a big deal you may argue, you may wish that he had banned the take away chicken dinner while he was at it. Change the topic, however, and the logic looks much more sinister. Those people over there may vote for the BNP. What shall we do about it? Shall we take the vote away from everyone? Far-fetched you may say, but only 100 years ago in Birmingham the authorities were doing just that.

It was the twentieth century essayist Hillaire Belloc who said, “When you have lost your inns, then drown your sorry selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” Well pubs are still shutting at around 29 a week at the moment. The government’s response in the name of curbing binge drinking and promoting responsible drinking is to discourage supervised drinking in pubs and promote unsupervised, invisible drinking in the home and the only club in their golf bag is tax, but the issue isn’t one of price. It’s one of culture.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be proud of our brewing heritage. After all London was the brewing capital of the world from the time of Henry VIII to the final quarter of the reign of Queen Victoria.

We are a nation of beer drinkers. In volume terms, 80% of all the alcoholic liquid drunk in the UK is still beer. Though if you were to open a Sunday supplement you could be forgiven for thinking that wine is the only drink worth drinking. It appears to be the only one worth writing about.

If wine making were hard, French peasants wouldn’t be able to do. Stamp on a grape and half the job is done. Making beer is much harder than or making wine or, for that matter, spirits. Yet in the 18thC theLondon brewers were the largest manufacturing concerns in the world. They were pioneers, not just in the adoption of technology, but developed many of the tools of modern capitalism from first principles, concepts like rates of return on capital were developed by the managers of establishments like Whitbread, whose brewery in Chiswell St was the third largest in the world, or Truman’s in Brick Lane whose brewery was the second largest in the world, or Barclay Perkins where Shakespeare’s Globe stands today whose brewery was the largest in the world. No small wonder that the owners of these firms paid Gainsborough and Romney to paint these men. They created much of the wealth needed to create an Empire.

I once went to the Drinktec Interbrau exhibition in Munich. A young German girl was working on a Japanese brewing stand which featured a green beer with Wasabi in it. What did it taste like I asked her. “I don’t know I haven’t tried it.” She replied. “Why not?” I asked. “ Because I am from Munich.”

If we British were like her and knew and were proud of our history and culture we would drink more responsibly because we would be able to make informed decisions rather than merely consuming the marketing surrounding products that have no intrinsic merit other than intoxication. Ultimately it is not about alcohol or how cheap it is per unit. It is about culture. If you don’t believe me, believe Kate Fox.

Fox argues that our beliefs about alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies, and divides countries with problematic and angst ridden attitudes to drink from more relaxed cultures where alcohol is a more ‘normal, integral, taken-for-granted, morally neutral part of everyday life. What defines them, she says, is not per capita consumption – the relaxed nations unsually have higher per capita consumption – but whether or not they have had a history of temperance campaigning. The angst ridden countries have. These conclusions, she goes to so say, is such a commonplace amongst her peers that she gets ‘weary’ of repeating them, however:

“Everyone is always really surprised – ‘Really? You mean there are cultures where people don’t believe that alcohol causes violence? How extraordinary?’ - and  politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It’s like trying to explain the causes of rain tp some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch doctors and rain makers. Yes, yes, they say, but of course the real reason it hasn’t rained is because the ancestors are angry because the shaman did not perform the rain-dance or goat-sacrifice at the correct time and someone allowed uncircumcised boys or menstruating women to touch the sacred skulls. Everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that drinking alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and start bashing each others heads in.” Kate Fox – Watching the English – Hodder - 2004

I quoted Hiliare Belloc a moment ago I will leave you with a quote from the eighteenth century essayist Sydney Smith who said, “What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia.”

If we were to decide that being proud of our heritage rather than ashamed, that, and not idiotic tax increases heaped upon failed tax increases, would be a step in the right direction.

Merry Christmas one and all.

Blanking Banking

In an engagingly frank piece on the Evening Standard Comment page of September 16^th, City Editor Chris Blackhurst noted that ‘the bankers are still in situ . . . doing what they were doing before the downturn hit and behaving exactly as they did before.’ He goes on. ‘The authorities are pretty powerless to do anything about it,’ and ‘they [the bankers] can move forward in the knowledge that they’re seen as too important to fail.’

Now apart from Brian Sewell and the killer Sudoku, Mr Blackhurst is about the only thing worth reading in the poor old ES, but even so the correct response to this revelation is, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’

There may be a parallel universe where the regulatory authorities have done what is necessary to prevent a rerun of 2008, but its consideration is more for the pages of New Scientist than the poor old ES. In the generally rather wonderful universe that we must inhabit no change was precisely all the change that most of us expected. Hence the anger about which Mr Blackhurst based his article.

Bankers are still terrifically Thatcherite. By which I mean that like Mrs. T – or the Evil Snow Queen, as I prefer to call her – they profess to champion the ideals of the ‘market’, but, when push comes to shove would rather not trust to it (as that nice Mr Cable said in his conference speech on Septmber 22nd). Take bankers' salaries for instance. We are told they must be stratospheric otherwise the best will go elsewhere. OK then, let us just apply the laws of the market. Increase the supply of the best and the demands driving excessive payments will fall.

One way you could do this is to scrap tuition fees for degree courses that turn out people that tend to end up in banking. These people would leave university less debt burdenend, consequently their initial needed salaries would be lower and their increased numbers would also exert a deflationary effect.

Of course this raises the question of whether the British education system is capable of turning out sufficient quantities of the best, the sheer over-representation of non-doms in the banking sector suggests that the market in bankers is suffering some profound structural weaknesses. However, in theory there is no reason why this country should not be able to train sufficient numbers of people to work in  the banking sector, after all many of the people I share public transport with daily already have a significant pre-qualification for a career in banking; viz an obvious and complete absence of any moral compass.

Lockerbie II

Having said that I am not a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist I do suggest to you the following hypotheses. On 3rd July 1988 the American warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airbus flight IR655 carrying 290 people. Because this atrocity was committed by the Americans, and different rules apply to Americans than for the other humans on the planet, no action was taken, no court martial held, no reparation made. Indeed on its return to San Diego the ship was given a rapturous welcome.


There was a crime and so, some people, as yet unidentified, decided that there should be a punishment, and, being of the eye-for-an-eye persuasion the punishment needed to take the form of a downed passenger airliner.

The world’s intelligence services knew this, and they are just the sort of people who run scenarios using game theory and what follows is a perfect piece of game theory.

Your job is to stop people blowing up aeroplanes. You know there are people out there who are determined to blow up an aeroplane. You know the logic of the situation and you know they do too, because it was neatly summed up by the Provisional IRA after their attempt on the life of Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984. “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time.”

If someone tries to do something determinedly there is a high probability that the will eventually succeed. A plane will blow up. However, there is also a high probability that having achieved their objective they will stop. That will make your life much easier. Better for both parties therefore if a plane goes down.

If you receive intelligence that a bomb is on a plane, therefore, do you take the bomb off the plane or do you take key people off the plane, knowing that you might not have that opportunity another time, but that there might not be another time if you leave the bomb alone.

I strongly suspect that Pan AM flight 103 was meant to go down. It was just meant to go down over the North Atlantic where there would be nothing to pick up and hand over to forensic scientists. It wasn’t meant to go down over the quiet border town of Lockerbie.

Lockerbie I

Yesterday was the anniversary of the release of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbasset Ali Al- Megrahi and a lot of people – American Sentaors in particular - are getting very worked up about it. Mr Megrahi, it will be remembered, was convicted, on the basis of no firm evidence, of blowing up Pan AM flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie in 1988, and was released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds because medical evidence indicated that he had no more than three months to live. The fact that he is alive and well 12 months later is not, apparently, in the strange, professedly Christian world that is the USA, grounds for rejoicing, but cause for ire, wrath and much wailing by people who think that his failure to die is the ultimate bad manners.


I care as little for Mr Megrahi as I do for American Senators, but I do have a passing interest in the Lockerbie bombing. I was, in a previous existence, an explosives engineer, and for a few short and fraught years edited the UK explosives industry’s trade journal. This role put me in contact with all sorts of interesting people whose jobs you have never heard of, but who, if you ever stop to think about it, must exist. Most interesting of all perhaps were the forensic scientists who went through the Lockerbie debris in an effort to piece together the evidence necessary to work out who did it.

Now, I am no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and while I have frequently been abducted by aliens, it has always been after eight pints, so I have tended to regard it entirely my own fault. However, I have always regarded the idea of the Libyans being responsible for Lockerbie as making no sense. I am not alone. This evidence for this view was laid out meticulously by the late Paul Foot of Private Eye, whom I briefly had the privilege to meet.

Paul Foot had not started digging when I was munching on vol au vents at the explosives industry seminar also attended by members of the Lockerbie explosives forensics team. Imagine my joy, therefore, when I discovered that they didn’t think the Libyans did it either.

The reasons for their doubt are technical and complex, but in short boil down to considerations about the size of the bomb. It was, in fact, the smallest amount of explosive capable of bringing a plane that size down. In order to work it had to be located very close to the skin of the aircraft and not go bang in the middle of a container full of clothes, in which case it is possible that no one would have known it had gone off until the baggage carousel. The thinking was that the Libyans simply lacked the intelligence resources necessary to calculate the bomb size and engineer its correct placement.

So next time the newspapers are banging on about Megrahi not doing the decent thing and turning his toes up you may prefer to wonder why they are not doing their job and trying to find who did kill 270 people over Lockerbie, or why the Libyans were put in the frame when a large part of the British security establishment doesn’t believe it was them at all.

It's Dumb To Be Rude

A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening of the new Slavery galleries at the National Maritime Museum. It was not long after I had returned from a holiday in Florence, which had of course, taken in the Uffizi. The Uffizzi is packed full of goodies but they are rather spoilt by the appalling level of curation that runs throughout the museum that renders most of the works anonymous and therefore frustrating. Many pictures even appear to have had their labels removed. Perhaps the curators imagine themselves living in a kind of Dan Brown world where every visitor is a kind of forensic art historian. Perhaps, more likely, they know that even if they took all the paintings off the wall and secretly flogged them off to dodgy Russians, crowds of the badly dressed would still come in to gawp at the place where space where the Leonardo used to hang. Consequently they realise that they don’t have to try very hard. So they don’t.


I mention this as at the Slavery gallery opening I was introduced to a professor from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Spotting in him someone who could confirm or confound my suspicions of Florentine curatorial standards, I attempted to engage him in discussion. “Don’t talk to me about Italian curation” was his riposte. I took as an indication that he rather shared my own views. This made his reluctance to sally forth on what was clearly a bête noire of his, tantalisingly disappointing.

I was reminded of this incident when I had the misfortune to visit the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday. Museum curators are a little like orchestral conductors. It is very easy to misunderstand what they do. After all any decent orchestra can play the piece through without an egotistical metronome windmilling in front of them. Similarly in an art gallery you go to see the painting not the wall, surely?

Rude Britannia will make you appreciate that a great paintings don’t of themselves make a good exhibition, just as a conductor will decide whether good music gets a great performance. Rude Britannia does this by being appallingly curated.

It is haphazard, random, unstructured, and uninformative. It is not, in the main, rude, nor is rudeness a theme. Indeed there appears to be no theme. True its stated theme is British comic art from 1600 to the present, yet the first four exhibits – on the ones next to the bit on the wall saying ‘British’ - are Dutch. An entire room is given over to Gillray’s Worship of Bacchus, which is a piece of deeply serious moralising and in no way comic. Why is it there? Presumably it was available, and Gillray was a comic artist, wasn’t he? The rest of the exhibition is just as intellectually vacuous. Another room is ‘guest curated’ by Harry Hill. Why?

The Tate curates amazing exhibitions when it chooses; Whistler and Monet, Turner and the Masters and Millais to name but a few recent highlights. Yet seems even the Tate falls victim to the modern misconception that to be popular one must be undemanding. Pursuing this fallacy only ever initiates a self-fulfilling downward spiral. This is why it is worth getting worked up about. Not because it has put on a bad show, but because it legitimises the same attitude elsewhere, and when that attitude becomes orthodox everywhere then our culture and society are impoverished by low expectations feeding into lower provision of information, and in certain areas this is worrying. If you don’t believe me look at the, mediocre and formulaic mish-mash of ill-informed speculation and selected-from-stock platitudes that are nightly served up on the BBC and ITV at 10.00 by people who have the brazen cheek to describe this unwatchable garbage as NEWS!

The Apprentice? Not Hired

My father is an expert at outings. Not for us the day out at Legoland or Thorpe Park. When my father organised a day out it would be to somewhere much more exciting, like the Royal Mail’s underground railway, Whitefriars glass blowers, or the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Today’s panegyric is inspired by a trip he and I once took to the Englefield pewter works in the East End.


Englefield is now defunct and I forget exactly which year we made the trip. However, it can only have been a few years before the demise of the Bethnal Green institution that had been a major presence on Cheshire Street since 1700. It had by then fallen into the ownership of the Malaysian firm Royal Selangor and the concern was clearly doomed, but it was a fascinating visit nonetheless. The men there were craftsmen who had taken the best part of their lifetimes to acquire their skills and the chief of them was the ‘father of the shop;’ a true master craftsman.

He was way past retirement age, though he looked like he had no plans to give up his life’s work, but, in the absence of a pulsating aura, jar of ambrosia, winged helmet, or other outwardly visible signs of immortality, I asked him what would happen when he did retire. “This place will close.” He replied. Naturally I asked him why. “Because there is no one else to take over.” Could not, I remonstrated, one of the other craftsmen take over? “Yes, but who would take over from them. Each task has a man that does it, and there are no apprentices.” Why, I crashed on, were there no apprentices. “Because the young men of the East End do not want to work here. They would prefer to sell mobile phones.”

Work and education in Britain are scarred by our culture’s wider obsession with class. Just as we are fixated with the idea that more and more people should go to university, regardless of whether university is good for them, or they are good for university, we are equally blind to the other side of the coin. People who would be better off not going to university should do the things that better suit them, which would be good for them and good for everyone else too.

I once asked my father what was meant by the professions. A professional, he opined, was someone who would give you advice that was not necessarily in their own best interests; the surgeon who tells you not to go under the knife, the solicitor who warns you that you will lose your suit. I have always treasured this definition for the joyous reason that it means that journalists, bankers and estate agents are not members of the ‘professions’, whatever they may like to think.

Anyway, the point being that professional employment in England enjoys higher status than vocational, or artisanal activity, despite the fact that many people in vocational occupations earn considerably more than many people regarded as being in professional occupations. Put another way, activities regarded as being more like the ‘professions’ stand higher than those that resemble them less. Engineering is perhaps a fine example. In Germany an engineer is regarded as a high status individual. In the UK he or she is not, with the result that the term is often applied to a man with a spanner or a screwdriver, who in no way is in possession of anything approaching an engineering qualification than a spanner or a screwdriver. The man who comes to install your telephone is, by no stretch of the imagination an engineer.

Brewing provides another example. In Germany brewing is recognised as a skilful activity and is awarded high status as a result. In a German town the brewer shares the status of the doctor, or the mayor. In England it is seen as a technical activity and therefore of lower status. It is rare, therefore, in the UK for a qualified brewer to be on the board of directors of a brewing firm. Incredibly, then, the vast majority of beer drunk in Britain today is made by companies run by people who know almost nothing about the products they make. A fact one’s sense of taste daily confirms. This theme I shall return to on other days.

Another pet theme of mine is that manufacturing creates wealth, but that services merely move it around. Making items out of pewter creates wealth. Making mobile phones creates wealth. Selling mobile phones does not. Mobile phones are more twenty-first century than pewter tankards and we should not continue to make pewter tankards merely because we have been making them since 1700. However, if we are going to abandon manufacture in pewter and at the same time decide that we are not going to manufacture mobile phones, then we had better have a very good idea of how we are going to earn our place in the world, because the old mantra of the Thatcherites that ‘services’ would take over from manufacturing has been exposed, if anyone missed the 2008 banking crash, as the big lie of the ‘greed is good’ generation.

Englefields didn’t close because its products were no longer suited to the times. Sales in 1987, for example, were 120% up on 1986. It closed because even in a depressed area of London where jobs were scarce, potential apprentices saw unskilled sales roles that involved wearing a suit as higher status than learning an ancient craft. Our nation’s peculiar class system predates London ‘s pewter industry, but perversely we have consigned the one – which was profitable – to the dustbin of history, whilst the other – which makes our country less profitable – continues to pervert and distort our employment markets and education system to the detriment of us all.

Got An 'A' - Just Can't Spell It

As Private Eye demonstrates ad nauseum journalists have shorter memories than just about anyone. We are in exam result time, so it is traditional at this time of year for papers to write stories about how the exam results are better than ever, accompanied – in the Daily Telegraph at least – by pictures that suggest that only women take A levels. Politicians then proclaim that these results do not mean that exams are easier, but, au contraire, that pupils are working harder and teaching standards are higher.


In a little over two months these same newspapers will then write slightly smaller stories on the inside pages this time – and this is also now traditional- that university lecturers are having to give remedial spelling lessons to the latest undergraduate intake.

No one ever seems to question how it is possible that the same the people, who in June wrote the best exam papers the country has ever seen, are, by October, barely literate.

This paradox has intrigued me for several years now. Every academic I come across I ask to explain it to me. Many, like my friend the recently retired, eminent art historian, explain it in terms of ‘grade inflation’ which has been going on unaddressed for years such and that the absurdities that must arise from not attending to it are now manifest for all to see. Another friend of mine, a highly respected professor of astrophysics, has a different view. “The best,” he says, “are as good as they have ever been. The rest are hopeless.”

This is a much more fascinating take. On one level is it is a comment on the obvious outcome of the contemptible, but largely unchallenged Blairite belief that being seen to be educating people is the same as educating them. On other levels it raises a whole host of questions, not the least of which is why are educating people anyway. On the level of the individual it is a stupid question (but not an unconentious one as we shall explore another time) but, at population level it really isn’t. Let us consider Dr Malthus.

For example in an industrial world of gradually increasing productivity it takes fewer people to achieve the same amount of work. This is fine when the population is increasing at a rate that creates demand for more people to do these tasks for the increased population - food manufacture for example. It is not fine in a technological world of huge productivity increases whereby one electronic innovation can supply the several and various needs of everyone. One is faced with the possibility that there are just more people than there are tasks to do. Let’s not call this unemployment, which a term used to describe generally short term imbalances in the supply and demand for labour. This is materially different.

In the 1990’s I had a spectacularly unsuccessful dotcom business with a friend. One year we were offered a marketing undergraduate from the University of North London as summer placement. We gave her a project and the poor girl sat quietly behind her PC for three days before we realised that she had done nothing whatever. She had not understood the brief and was not capable of understanding the brief. She was totally out of her depth and terrified that we would realise. How she thought that a complete lack of output was not a bit of a clue I do not know.

The sad fact was that she was not undergraduate material, but, under a university funding system that rewarded numbers, it had suited someone to tell her she was. I have nothing but contempt for the low life admissions tutor employed by the third rate excuse for an educational establishment that is the University of North London. They were playing with the girl’s whole life for nothing more than their own short term funding convenience. It makes me angry still to think about it. In fact at the time it made me so angry that I wrote to the Guardian’s education correspondent to vent my fury. Melanie Phillips, for it was, she wrote back to sympathise. That was, of course, in the days before she became the swivel-eyed loony’s swivel-eyed loony.

Who Would Be Young?

A friend, not born in that year, as it happens, recently remarked that the best year ever to have been born was 1946. You missed the war, but you got rock and roll; you got the pill but you missed AIDS. You got more than sex and drugs and rock and roll, though. You got everything. You got the earth and everything on it, all its bounty ‘yea, unto the seventh generation.’

Compare the Baby Boomer generation with the post Generation X’ers; those born in the 90s. Their prospects of ever getting on the unfortunately named ‘housing ladder’ seem vanishingly remote, which is particularly tough in a society that has abandoned manufacturing and increasingly returned to an Ancien Regime form of ‘rentier’ economy.

Increasing numbers are finding, after being told that this is all that matters, that there are simply not enough university places for them to get into, and if they do they will be saddled with debt for years thereafter, which will make it harder for them to save the deposit on a house, and therefore acquire the only entry ticket to full membership of society that seems to matter these days. I haven’t even mentioned the prospects of the underclass.

On top of it all this is the generation, educated, in this country a least, in a society largely shaped by the assumption of the primacy of what are quaintly – though wrongly - called free market values (a theme this blog shall return to frequently). This generation, more than any other, has been brought up in a world of conscience free consumerism, where it isn’t necessary to know if milk comes from a cow, or that once upon a time when things went wrong it was often actually possible to repair them. This is going to make it especially tough for them once they are confronted with the big truth – the party’s over.

In Galapagos Kurt Vonnegut foretold of a future in which a final generation of the young turned their backs on the remainder of society as people who had failed them. Their Nihilism defined them. I see them all around.

For Against

A friend recently called me a pedant my post on the ‘Protest the Pope’ Facebook page. I had pointed out that by adopting the American habit of dropping the preposition it was unclear whether they were planning to protest FOR the Pope or AGAINST him.


Naturally I thanked her for her compliment, after all a pedant is merely someone who wants you to be right. I then set out to further irritate her by reminding her that my pedantry is born, not from an anal desire to pick up on people’s shortcomings, but a dislike of distraction.

What counts as good English, or bad, is highly subjective, but the purpose of language is communication. If the language distracts from the message being conveyed it is being used poorly.

If the language jars, and snaps your attention away from the sense of what is being said to the words being uttered then that is akin to spotting a blemish on an otherwise admirable object. It is like reading a metered poem where the line than does not scan damages the whole stanza.

Some people are going to protest against the Pope’s visit to Britain. I won’t be going to join them, not because I don’t share their loathing of this Nazi misogynist, but because I will be standing across the street with my own protest banner. It says “Protect The Preposition”.