Chapter 36

Sidetrack (v) - Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed

Grab your passport!  We’re going on a journey.  It’s not a guarantee that they’ll let us in but we might be allowed a few hours to wander around and marvel at the towering skyscrapers, the imposing, solidly-Victorian stone buildings and the numerous narrow streets that hide a mix of medieval inns, modern sandwich bars and exclusive restaurants.  Most of the Costa-clutching inhabitants will ignore us, barely registering our presence as they briskly make their way from tube to office; smartly dressed clones in business suits, complemented with an obligatory scarf and shiny leather shoes or designer heels.  Young, confident, energetic aspirants, and old comfortable, ruddy-faced veterans, bound together on their joint mission to make money.  And they’re usually pretty good at their task; the numbers are staggering and belong to another land, somewhere that the rest of us can’t begin to comprehend.  Welcome to The Kingdom of Gold.

In 2020 the financial services sector contributed £165 billion to the UK economy, 9% of total economic output and almost enough to pay for the entire NHS annual budget.  Exports of UK financial services were worth £62 billion and, with imports only £16 billion, the surplus to the balance of trade was therefore a cool £46 billion.  Over 50% of this amount was generated in the few square miles of the Kingdom itself where half a million people labour away at desks, hidden behind multiple screens, or earnestly attend meetings in plush air-conditioned conference rooms.  And looking after them are another 100,000 workers; the sub-class who clean the offices, prepare and deliver the buffets, man the reception and lifts, and act as uniformed security.

The whole thing is a slick money-making machine that, when it’s running well and under control, makes a staggering profit.  In 2020, this was reported at £40 billion, so a very tidy return for all the handshakes, the wheeling and dealing and the keyboard and algorithmic activity.  And if they sometimes played on the fringes, tip-toeing around the regulatory legislation, well does that matter too much?  Surely it also follows that it’s reasonable for salaries to be stratospheric and bonuses mind-bogglingly generous?  After all, aren’t they the country’s best talent?  And anyway, just look at the risks they’re taking.  The consequences of any mistakes are huge so they must clearly be well-rewarded to compensate for the stress of knowing that their company, career and livelihood could be ruined almost overnight.

Hang on a minute. What consequences? Whose company and career? Whose livelihood?

Try telling that to the half a million who lost their jobs after the 2008 financial crisis or the 100,000 people whose homes were repossessed, or the rest of us who coughed up an extra £500 billion to prevent the Kingdom going bankrupt and a further massive injection to stop us plummeting into a recession, or the generations to come who have been saddled with the interest on the borrowing needed to keep the services we all rely on still running.   Where was the contrition to balance the arrogance and greed that had bought it all about?  Certainly not very prevalent in the Kingdom of Gold where the real hot topic was the legislative cap Gordon Brown was proposing on bonuses.

It didn’t used to be quite like that.  How had it become acceptable to gamble so recklessly with both our economy and the financial well-being of all the people who had entrusted their tiny slice of the cake to those they believed had the skills and integrity to do look after it and maybe even help it grow just a little?

A journey back a few decades in the Time Machine might shed some light.

Remember your first cheque book?  I didn’t open a bank account until I was seventeen; the signature I scrawled on the application form that day was the first time I’d ever written it and I’ve been stuck with it ever since.  The seventies were a decade when it was still clear, in the world of financial services at least, who did what and who could have what.  For the majority of us, the choices were clear.

The high street banks, who owned 33,000 branches across the UK in 1980, compared to just 8,000 in 2019, offered a current account to look after your day-to-day income and expenditure.  If you needed a bit more, then you’d have to arrange an overdraft or a loan, which probably meant the bank manager would want to see you prior to its approval.  If he wouldn’t play ball and you really needed that washing machine then you might be able to get a hire-purchase arrangement with the retailer but it would be much more expensive in the long run.  If you’d managed to acquire some savings, you had a limited choice: a deposit account at your bank or stick it in a building society, especially applicable if you had aspirations for a mortgage on a house at some point in the future. If you needed insurance, you went to an insurance company.  If you were lucky enough to have inherited a bit extra, or received a redundancy pay-off, then you’d be steered by your bank manager towards an investment bank who’d probably suggest something called a unit trust, the amateur’s route to owning a few stocks and shares.  And you didn’t need to worry about your pension.  The majority of employed would receive a company pension in addition to the basic state pension and it was all set up and managed for you by the pension company when you retired.

It wasn’t exciting.  It wasn’t quite as competitive as it might have been.  But it was simple, and, above all, it was stable.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, they were starting to play to a different set of rules and the big US banks, flush with cash looking for an opportunity, had their eyes on Europe.  Edward Heath opened the door in 1971, relaxing credit ceilings and exchange control restrictions, but it was in the Eighties under Maggie, that the game changed.  A champion of competition, she needed little encouragement from her backers in the Kingdom, her disciples in the Party, and her fan base in the Home Counties.  It wasn’t exactly a free-for-all but, within a few years, the financial service landscape had changed forever.  Banks could offer mortgages and insurance, building societies could go public and become banks.  In fact, any organisation with sufficient capital could become one (Virgin, Tesco..), and investment banks could create all sorts of enticing financial products to chase the money that privatisation windfalls was making available to some.

Great.  Nothing like choice and a free market to ensure we’re all getting the most out of the opportunities and surely we can trust these long-standing institutions or big name brands?  And isn’t there a regulatory body that will act as a safety-net?  Okay, so they only really rely on a voluntary code but our government and Bank of England will keep an eye on things.  Won’t they?

You’d think the rather large ripples created by endowment mortgage and payment protection miss-selling, or the way the long-established merchant bank, Barings, was brought to its knees by 28 year-old Nick Lesson, who lost $1.3 billion in a single day’s trading, might have prompted a tightening of the regulatory review process, but no, the regulators were being left behind, blundering like confused parents in the wake of their tech-savvy kids who’d just discovered porn or bitcoin on the internet.  The technological boom, heralded by the big-bang de-regulation in 1988, saw a proliferation in what was on offer and the speed with which it could all be transacted.  And why stop there?  Let’s introduce a few new words into the financial lexicon: ‘Derivatives, hedge funds, sub-prime, PEPs’, to name but a few.  And let’s fuel it all by making it easier for everyone to get credit and turn their debt into our bonuses.  On-line bank accounts, click-on-the-mouse overdrafts, extended mortgages, buy-now-pay-later deals, and store cards and credit cards everywhere.  And don’t worry too much about the financial ignorance of all these new customers; let’s just keep the money flowing so we can choose to spend this year’s bonus on a Porsche, Maserati or a villa in the Algarve.  A gravy train for all those on board with nobody manning the signal box to raise a warning to the government, businesses or savers.

No-one saw it coming, not even the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.  In my role as factory director I used to have a regular meeting with the regional Bank of England agent during which he’d quiz me on our expectations for future sales, investment, employment, wage rises and so on.  In return we’d receive the detailed BoE Quarterly Report with a detailed analysis of trends and forecasts.  I quite liked the guy and at the meeting in early September 2007, after he’d summarised the Bank’s latest view that things were fairly benign in the economy, he’d asked if we could host a ‘show the flag’ visit from the Deputy Governor, John Gieve, and a few of his entourage later in the autumn.  I passed the request up the line to the Head Office PR team, saying I’d get back to him.

Just a week later, there was a run on the Northern Rock bank as the perilous state of their balance sheet was revealed, the first time this had happened to a British bank in 140 years, and queues of worried savers formed outside branches.  The only options were for some other institution to buy the ailing bank but the offers were below even the reduced stock market value and, as the share price plummeted further, the government was forced to step in and guarantee their liquidity, effectively nationalising them at a cost of £1.2 billion to the tax payer.  (Four years later, as the dust settled, Richard Branson managed to persuade George Osborne it was a good deal to allow him to buy it back for £747 million.  Nice one, George).  Northern Rock wasn’t the only one over-exposed to bad debt.  Within weeks it was clear that the whole system was hopelessly over-leveraged and that banks the world over had allowed themselves to hold insufficient capital to cover increasingly risky loans.  Big American banks like UBS, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch announced massive losses from sub-prime mortgage investments which rapidly led to a lack of confidence across the sector and, in a last ditch defence of balance sheets riddled with toxic assets, the banks stopped lending to each other. The whole system, vital to keep economies in motion, was in serious danger of seizing up.

Anyone looking in from the outside would have been appalled at what had been going on.  Loans, risky or otherwise, were being bundled together into packages, maybe given a fancy new name,  then sold on for a suitable margin and used as collateral for further loans, to increasingly unregulated banks and other financial companies around the world.  And then the process would be repeated until it was impossible to know who owned what debt in a tangled, inter-linked world-wide-mess.  What was clear from later analysis was that over 50% of UK mortgages had been packaged up and sold on, even though the banks were still happily collecting the monthly payments and accounting for the income. 

Governments and shareholders across the world demanded to know the true state of the banks’ balance sheets and eventually the G7 group of leading economies, championed by Gordon Brown, reached a consensus that required the reluctant banks to disclose their position and a timeline to repair the situation.   It was uglier than anyone could have imagined.  Share prices plummeted as it became clear that almost all the big global banks had insufficient capital to cover their liabilities. Even if they issued new shares to raise more capital they would not have sufficient resources to lend to business and keep economies moving.  The threat of a global recession loomed large.

In the UK, the government was forced to pump £100 billion into the system to try and help liquidity but the banks were still reluctant to pass this fully on into new mortgages or business loans as was Brown, Darling and Ed Balls intention, preferring to focus on their own internal balance sheet recoveries.  But as the sheer scale of the bad debt problem became clearer, it was apparent that the banks were on a knife edge and a few toppled over the edge.  In September 2008, Lehman Brothers, a pillar of the US banking system, collapsed with $60 billion of losses and the ripples quickly turned into a storm surge.  The Fed, faced with a complete banking collapse, stepped in the same day with an astonishing $85 billion bailout for AIG.  Closer to home, the big UK banks were still struggling to face up to their predicament; the markets weren’t prepared to provide the capital necessary and the banks’ own reluctance to increase liquidity was paralysing the economy and writing millions of pounds off the value of UK businesses.

Our government stepped in again; the tax payer would supply the necessary capital, provided the banks resumed making loans and there were reforms to remuneration and much tighter regulation.  Effectively this would mean partial nationalisation of some of the biggest names in the business as the government were forced to take on RBS’s (Royal Bank of Scotland) £500 billion mess and constructed, with the help of the largely untainted Lloyds, a rescue plan for HBOS who were in the mire for a similar amount.  Barclays refused to be associated with a Labour government rescue plan and opted for a private equity solution; private equity, that is, if you believe selling £13 billion worth of shares to the Qatar and UAE State Sovereign Funds isn’t a smoke screen for ‘nationalisation’ by the Gulf States.  But these actions were only a temporary stop-gap.

It was a worrying few weeks.  Confidence in the sector across the world continued to ebb away and, as share prices plummeted further and liquidity showed no sign of improving, once again it was Brown, Ed Balls and Alistair Darling who were at the heart of co-ordinated remedial action, nagging Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi and the rest of the European players to take a common approach and encouraging the George Bush, outgoing US president, to take similar steps.

On the 8th October, just before the markets opened, the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, announced the rescue plan.  A government-led recapitalisation to buy up £50 billion of bank capital and equity plus £250 billion of loan guarantees and £200 billion of liquidity.  So just half a trillion of our money going to the banks then!  Germany, France and the USA followed with similar arrangements and almost immediately share prices bounced upwards as confidence showed signs of recovery.  Were the banks grateful?  Not that you’d know it, continuing to resist the strings that came with along with a public money bail out and, unbelievably, still arguing for the removal of the proposed cap on bonuses. ‘Our best people will leave if we can’t offer competitive packages.’  Presumably these ‘best people’ were the same crew that had engineered the crisis that now threatened a nose-dive in the economy.  Fortunately at least a few of the ‘best people’ did leave, though not of their own volition.  Shareholders forced out a number of CEOs including arch-villain, Sir Fred Goodwin, who had headed up an outrageously, unsecured, spending-spree at RBS and enjoyed a similarly outrageous underserved salary and benefits package.

Here’s the thing:  This crisis, originally viewed as a failure of financial systems and regulation, was also the consequence of the fallout from several decades of arrogance and greed.

Let me tell you something you might not know.  When the Bank of England chief economist, Andrew Haldene, reviewed the causes of the crisis, his report revealed that, if the major UK bank dividend payments had been reduced by just a third over the previous seven years, and they’d paid themselves just 10% less, then they would have consolidated their capital position by £70 billion.  These modest changes would have generated more than the tax-payer was forced to find for the capital part of the bail out.  Hardly surprisingly, his report never made the front pages in most of the papers and the new Tory government barely acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, whilst we had saved the banking system, too much damage had been done to avoid a crash in economies around the world.  The short-term liquidity drought, combined with the shock to business and consumer confidence, caused a rapid drop in demand and output. We plunged into a recession, faster and steeper than that which heralded the Great Depression of the 1930s.  It was a massive shame and derailed what had been an encouraging recent economic journey for the UK.

Throughout the previous decade under Brown’s and Ed Ball’s cautious rule of the Treasury, the country had experienced steady, unassuming, growth of around 2% GDP and avoided a repetition of the destabilising cycle of boom and bust associated with previous chancellors.  This had enabled the nation’s debts to be reduced and, over the last few years, allowed large increases in investment in schools, hospital, social services and the police.  At the start of 2008, the economy was continuing its gentle growth trend, with the GDP average increase sitting at 2.4%.  But the impact of the financial crisis meant that, like most other economies, we were about to fall deep into the recessionary hole.  Just one year later, GDP had plummeted to -4.4% and the doom mongers were predicting another Great Depression as unemployment started to climb and bankruptcies became more common.

To avoid a repeat of what had been nearly a decade of global depression needed radical and quick action across all developed nations.  Again it was Gordon Brown who pulled things together, a flurry of intensive lobbying culminating in a G20 conference in London in April 2009 which ultimately ensured a combined trillion dollar commitment to encourage trade rather than protectionism, stimulate economies, and provide extra support to developing nations.   Would it be enough?

At home this approach translated into a multi-billion stimulus package and a lowering of interest rates.  To Brown this was the obvious solution based on his strong belief in Keynesian economic theory.  In other words, if the economy is in the mire and there is a threat of mass unemployment, it is the role of government to generate demand and activity levels by spending money from the public purse by either dipping into the reserves or by borrowing.  Typically this would involve a mixture of investment in large infrastructure projects and extra support for those struggling with changed circumstances.  Once the economy recovered, and the growth catalysed by the infrastructure investment started to accelerate the resultant increased tax revenues would be used to pay off the debt.  Sounds sensible. 

Unfortunately, Brown had a problem: there was a general election only 12 months away and despite the speed with which he had reacted, his fiscal stimulus measures would not enable him to steer the ship back into calmer waters in time.  Tossed around battling the economic storm, he was vulnerable to attack as he fought his way towards harbour and he had enemies lurking everywhere.  After 12 years in power, there was a natural inclination amongst swing voters to see the incumbent government as being somewhat tired and ready for change; the mess over Iraq, the ongoing losses in Afghanistan and the dismay over MPs’ expense claims hadn’t helped.  Brown, not-naturally charismatic, struggled to explain to many of the electorate the key points about the crisis and the resultant threats and fixes.  Most voters opted to consider their position in the here and now rather than acknowledging the steadily improving trends of previous years.  It was no good trying to get them excited about the return of a positive GDP growth trend (back to 2.1% by Q1 2010) when unemployment, which always lags at least six months behind, was still rising.

His economic stimulus was portrayed by the Tories as blatant electioneering and the press barons were more than happy to peddle front-page headlines about Labour plunging the country into debt and not to be trusted with the economy, despite the pre-crash evidence to the contrary.  The big bankers were also out to reassert their power, still bristling at having their freedoms clipped the previous year.   Brown had also made a tactical error; to help fund his investments across the nation, he’d also raised the income tax rate to 50% for those on more than £150,000, which had inevitably upset a fair few people who carried a lot of clout.  Against a concerted onslaught, Brown lacked the media support and media image to mount any effective counter attack against his critics, of whom two of the biggest were David Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor.  These two had an alternative solution to a Brown’s fiscal stimulus.

Arguing that the secret to a healthy economy was a balancing of the books, they promised to reduce government debt, which would then allow a reduction in income tax, which would then ultimately encourage enterprise and output.  And, as demonstrated by Mrs Thatcher during the Eighties, this Monetarist solution also tends to work.  The problem is that it takes at least four or five years to really show any benefits and has no consideration for the damage to employment and services in the meantime.  Rather than use words like ‘cuts, damage, hardship and despair’ they offered something that sounded less emotive, something more prudent.  Austerity.

It mattered not that the German and French were pursuing the same stimulus route as Labour; it mattered not that these countries were running higher national debt ratios; it mattered not that, for most of the previous decade, the UK’s debt ratio had been reducing and, at the advent of the financial crisis, stood at 51% compared to 77% in the USA or 68% in Germany and was smaller than throughout most of the Thatcher period.  The Tories and their media mates decided to spin the story differently, promoting the message that Britain was suffering less from a global financial crisis that started on Wall Street than from a national debt crisis caused by Labour profligacy.  The headlines screamed, ‘We can’t spend what we haven’t got.  Reducing the deficit is necessary for sustained economic recovery.  Labour can’t be trusted, just look at the mess they’re leaving.’  None of this is factual or even true.  Five years later, when it was far too late to help Brown, the IMF concluded that we’d have been in a healthier economic and debt position in half the time it actually took if we’d stuck with the original stimulus strategy.  By then nobody cared, attention having turned to the Brexit referendum where the economic pros and cons were to be equally hotly disputed.

Labour were inevitably beaten but it took a coalition between the Tories and Lib Dems to give David Cameron the keys to Number 10.  In power now for the last 12 years, on only two occasions has the annual GDP growth % been above that consistently achieved by Labour during their last term, excepting just the 2009 catastrophe.  I’m not sure too many of us actually realise that but I think everyone must have twigged by now that the services we all rely on, from the NHS to the police, education to social care, have nowhere near recovered from the cuts that were imposed by the austerity programme.

The recession when it came bit hard; the factory experience was typical.  From an output of 800,000 dryers in 2008 we dropped to barely 600,000 and we needed over a 100 fewer people.  The proposed visit by the Bank of England deputy governor was scrubbed; not by the PR team at HQ, who still quite fancied the opportunity for some publicity, but by me and my boss Carlos who were trying to manage the consequences for the three UK factories of the Bank's failure to act as an early-warning system against economic shocks.  It might have been difficult for me and the management team to avoid using some suitable critical words and heaven knows what our union convener and his ‘surviving’ members would have said.  Across the country it was a similar story as unemployment rose by a million.

And something else you probably suspected but didn’t really want to know:  The Kingdom of Gold didn’t take long to rebuild its defences and look after its inhabitants.  Inevitably, the bonus cap was circumvented by just inflating the basic remuneration packages and, by 2017, rewards were taking the same proportion of profits as in the pre-crash bonanza.  And just to add the cherry on the top of their cake, one of Osborne’s first acts as Chancellor was to reduce the higher rate income tax down to 45%.  And how contrite do you think RBS were, despite the large public stake?  Not much.  From having 131 staff earning more than a million in 2009 they’d only managed to reduce it to 121 by 2017.

And despite the tightening of the regulations and rules in place to limit the amount of leverage to which they can expose their capital, there is a constant stream of new, so called, financial instruments designed to push the approval boundaries and tempt us to pay just a fraction more in charges for the promise of potential better performance.  What is the caveat?  ‘Prices can go up as well as down.’  You don’t say…but just for the record, the FTSE 100 rose 56% under Labour between 1997 and the start of the crash and by 32% if you consider their total time in office including the financial crisis, so an average of 2.5%pa.  Compare this with the last 12 years of Cameron, May and Johnson, who admittedly had a pandemic to deal with, and we’ve only managed 2% average FTSE growth and, perhaps of more concern, is that the last five years have been largely static.

I have a small insight into the wheeling and dealing, the affluence and extravagance of the Kingdom.  As a trustee of the company pension scheme since 2004, I’ve had nearly two decades of listening to fund managers, account executives and actuaries as they try to explain and justify the performance of the investments we’ve entrusted with them.  It’s not exactly an insignificant amount: around £500 million at the start of 2022 which needs to be both protected, and grow in value, as it represents the future pensions of over 4,500 current and former employees.  Usually two or three times a year, we’ll meet at the premises of one of the big financial players who have a stake in our fund.  From their air-conditioned, fully-equipped conference room with panoramic views down on Canary Wharf or the Kingdom, plied with an extravagant buffet and watered by the best Columbian coffee and ‘designer’ sparkling water, we are softened up for their excuses.  On the agenda, amongst all the routine administration items, will be a section on investment performance where we’ll attempt, with the help of our expert advisors, to understand how things have moved, up or down, and how our investments compare with their benchmarks, targets and competitors.  I’m sure the performance reports are deliberately designed to confuse anyone living outside the financial bubble, always following a similar template and invariably utilising an ever-changing lexicon of jargon.  Under-performance will be blamed on some event on the other side of the planet (bird flu in Mongolia, a container ship aground in the Suez Canal, etc) but rest assured the fund manager will be confident it is only a blip.  If the trend continues then a second wave of excuses will be wrapped up in positive spin as they’ll explain their rebalancing of the holdings as a decision to take advantage of a new market opportunity they’ve spotted elsewhere.  The whole presentation will be accompanied by a glossy meeting pack stuffed full of charts and bullet points and they might bring along a ‘very senior’ executive to demonstrate just how seriously they take our custom.  It’s a game we play along with, although they do realise that we’ll only put up with it for a while before we’ll take our business elsewhere. 

I invariably breathe a sigh of relief at the end of a long day as I hop on the Circle Line at Aldgate or Tower, leaving the Kingdom behind on my journey back to the Land of Reality.  Its clear there’s much to be proud of: the history, the contribution to the economy, the energy.  Maybe we’ve just got to accept that some things are too powerful to change.  Maybe all we can do is grumble about excessive rewards and profits and continue to point out that, for all their self-promotion as fast-thinking, highly-sought-after risk-takers, the only people actually taking the risk are us, as all their dodgy bets and sky-high salaries are ultimately guaranteed by the tax-payer.  Maybe all we can do is hope that the regulatory bodies stay on top of the game and curb the enthusiasm for anything too risky.  Maybe we might occasionally have a government which is prepared to set realistic levels of tax on financial corporate profits and personal remuneration rather than turn a blind eye and avoid upsetting those with influence.  Maybe it would be great if those who live so comfortably in such a rarified atmosphere actually showed some empathy with the millions of others living beyond their borders and think of other’s plight as they continue their mission to get their hands on our money and increase further our indebtedness to their institutions.

Arrogance, ignorance, greed.  

Wouldn’t it be good if that mantra was replaced by something like ‘humility and generosity’ but these aren’t traits necessarily encouraged by the rulers of the Kingdom

A Word on Advertising

Talking of getting hands on our money gives me an opportunity to briefly sound off about another bug-bear of mine. 

Since the beginning of history there have always been those who have the ability to sell us things we think we need.  Most of the time we’ve generally appreciated their role as shopkeepers and tradesman giving access to those items and services we can’t make, grow or find ourselves. Occasional charlatans would swindle the unlucky or gullible but usually people were limited by whatever spare cash or things they could barter were available.  For centuries, the only advertising that was involved in the process depended on which stall holder could shout loudest or how effective word of mouth amongst the town folk, or between villages, might be.  This tended to curtail the amount of damage that could be done; it wouldn’t be long before a dodgy dealer would be exposed and run out of town.  Right through until Victorian times and the advent of early journals, magazines and newspapers, most commercial enterprises could only promote their wares by painted signage above their shop.  And the other side of the equation, demand, was still largely controlled by the lack of credit for the masses.

However things were changing; from the turn of the 19th century, the rise of the middle-classes, the proliferation of printed media, and the accessibility of bank loans provided an opportunity for the rise of a new profession, one perfectly suited for a bunch of people with the right resources, talent and the mindset required to persuade us to part with our money for things we probably didn’t really need, or if we actually did have a requirement, then to obtain it from this source rather than that one.  Who knows when it started to be called ‘marketing’ but increasingly we were lured into their webs, encouraged along in the same direction by their partners in crime, the ad men.

There’s no need to go into the detail or recent history; there are now so many outlets available with which to capture our attention, and so many sources of credit to fund our desires, that it would appear a career in marketing would be easy choice to follow.  Somewhere along the way, we all seem to have lost our sense of balance, nudged over by a two-pronged attack from well-trained marketing and advertising executives.  Do you really need that extra pair of shoes, the latest I-phone, all those colour choices for painting the lounge? 

‘No I don’t,’ says our subconscious self.

‘Oh yes you do,’ responds our manipulated, brainwashed conscious self.

‘I can’t really afford it,’ says our sensible, cautious self.

‘Worry about it tomorrow,’ responds our irrational, reckless self.

‘What about the planet, the waste of resources, all those people who have nothing?’ thinks our guilty self.

‘Eh, well, I guess this one thing won’t make a difference,’ rationalises our greedy self.

Is there any way we can fight back and re-find a sense of perspective?

I’d at least make a start on my pet hate…..Billboards.  (I really have my grumpy old git hat on writing this section!)

Here’s my issue.  Who gave anyone my permission to stick a great big advert in my face as I’m driving down the road, walking through town or just generally out and about, minding my own business?

I accept that there are many situations where I’ve tacitly agreed to being bombarded with adverts.  If I make the choice to read a newspaper or magazine, I know it will contain adverts.  It’s the same with TV: some channels will contain adverts, others won’t, but it’s my choice whether I watch or not.  I know a trip to the cinema will include 15 minutes of adverts, and registering on a retailer’s website is guaranteed to result in a steady stream of promotional e-mails.  Again, my choice.  And it’s probably not unreasonable for shops and businesses to have signage in and around their premises.  They clearly need to alert potential customers to their location, products, services, brands, offers and so on.

Nobody, however, seems to have thought that plonking great big hoardings on the side of buildings in our towns and cities might not be to everyone’s taste.  For a start it does nothing for the aesthetics of an area; give me a decent mural or some challenging street-art any day over some tatty, faded, enormous posters.  Just think of the potential to brighten up our urban areas with displays that are good for the soul rather than images that may well further encourage envy and consumer desire.  And am I the only one who gets pissed-off on the motorways these days when an adjacent field with its grazing sheep, cows or horses has a decrepit old lorry parked up in full view with the facing side displaying some promotional banner for second-hand car sales, new housing estate, or rooms to rent. 

The problem is that it works.  It works for the local authorities and building owners who sell the space; it works for the billboard owners who rent the actual hoardings, and it works for the companies who actually advertise.  At £250 a fortnight for a standard 48-sheet display, it’s apparently a real bargain.  Drivers, passengers and pedestrians have no escape; apparently a billboard is capable of reaching 90% of a target audience, more than twice as effective as radio and four times better than printed media.  And I can believe it!  You can hardly help yourself from glancing to the side as the latest image for this or that catches your eye.  ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ says the Highway Code, a fact that seems to be conveniently forgotten by those with the power to curb the proliferation.  It seems obvious that an image of a glammed-up woman or the details of a forthcoming festival might generate more than just a momentary glance from me as I drive into an increasingly busy city centre.  The fact that this response might also be happening to all the other drivers in the vicinity has got to add some element of risk.  I wonder what the statistics say.  Maybe I should apply for a research grant to prove my point.

And what about the latest incarnation?  Have we been asked our views on the digital billboards that are now spreading across the nation.  A bit more pricey at £1400 a week for a prime spot but easy to update or share the costs with another advertiser by scrolling images.  Brighter, more in-your-face, and often frighteningly large, these new additions to our main roads and city centres are just impossible to ignore. 

‘Great!’ thinks the marketing team. 

‘Perfect!’ say the admen. 

‘Shit!’ says I.

Maybe I should give up and sell some advertising space on the side of the house or rig-up a neon display on the roof.

Just another step along the road to consumer Nirvana.  Or Nemesis.

Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed   -  Show of Hands 2009

All I wanted was a home and a roof over our heads

Somewhere we could call our own, feel safer in our beds

There was a storm of money raining down, it only touched the ground

With a loan I took I can't repay and the crock of gold you found

At every trough you stop to feed

With your arrogance, your ignorance and greed

I never was a cautious man, I spend more than I'm paid

But those with something put aside are the ones that you betrayed

With your bonuses and expenses you shovelled down your throats

Now you've bit the hand that fed you, Dear God, I hope you choke

At every trough you stop to feed

With your arrogance, your ignorance and greed

You're on your yacht, we're on our knees, for your arrogance, your ignorance and greed

Toxic springs you tapped and sold, poisoned every watering hole

Your probity, you exchanged for gold

Working man stands in line, the market sets his price

No feather bed, no golden egg, no one pays him twice

So where's your thrift, and your caution, your honest sound advice?

You know you dealt yourself a winning hand and loaded every dice

At every trough you stopped to feed

With your arrogance, your ignorance and greed

I pray one day we'll soon be free from your absolute indifference

Your avarice, incompetence

Your arrogance, your ignorance, your greed. 

Image removed: Bank of England and logo Northern Rock queues Wikipedia

Lehmann's front page of the Times (The Times)            Image removed: Fred Goodwin Insider.co.uk   

Heroes and villains – take your pick?  Images removed: Balls and Brown, Cameron and Osborne