Each can, and does, often claim both moral and practical ascendency; but, since the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, there is little doubt that the ideology of ‘markets’ has penetrated and infected both, and the aggressive ‘marketisation’ of education policy has become, in Britain and the USA at least, the prime instrument of attack on the culture of the more inclusive, ‘open society’. Across all age groups and educational sectors, from nursery to post-graduate maturity and research, our long-held ideals of education are under withering attack. High-quality analysis – by philosopher Michael J.Sandel for the USA (‘What Money Can’t Buy’); and Cambridge academic Stefan Collini (‘Speaking of Universities’) in the UK, are among those exposing the fraud; though, by no means yet, fully winning the intellectual and policy battles.

Where are the hands that made the wheel
That turned the lathe that shaped the steel,
And helped a thriving nation feel
  Proud of the House that Jack built?

Where are the arms that fished the sea,
That built the ships and kept us free,
And made the future seem to be
  There in the House that Jack built?

Where are the minds that once contrived
The spinning- wheel, the jet, the drive,
Made it feel good to be alive,
  And live in the House that Jack built?

The Bottom Line 1985

Measured by the unstoppable progression of a self-styled ‘wheeler-dealer’ of uncertain morals from Trump Tower to White House, little of substance seems to have changed for the better. His already empowered ‘market’ co-religionists had already brought our Western banks and economies to the verge of ruin in 2008, and little of substance has changed – nor will, if relegated to the already brain-dead and outdated Trumpian-cum-Maybotic prescriptions…

For he, and his conventional neo-lib commentariat, have totally missed the substance of the clear-eyed Michael Sandel diagnostics in ‘What Money Can’t Buy – the Moral Limits of Markets.’ 2012… In a devastatingly simple, but penetrating, sentence (p 10) he sets out the crucial error and the necessary path to its correction…

As a result, without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society…

He sees the increasing use of ‘markets’ to allocate what used to be seen as ‘social goods’ – health, education, public safety – to an extent unknown a few decades ago – as a prime source of the growing inequalities in our societies. Hence the underfunding of health and skewed access to quality education are perceived as intolerable distortions of social justice and opportunity.

Where are the hearts that used to care
For sick, or old or in despair.
And say there’s room for you in there,
  Safe in the house that Jack built?

Where are the girls and where the boys,
With buoyant step and easy poise,
Our promise of all future joys,
  Here in the House that Jack built?

Ibid.

Meanwhile, the anniversary of the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris was bringing back to mind the parlous position of the UK’s own universities, now under intense ‘marketisation’ pressures a la U.S.A. and with old freedoms, independence and research integrity swept aside. Luckily, we have the massively informed and clear-eyed Stefan Collini to expose the realities of a governmental sabotage of a priceless national asset (see ‘Speaking of Universities‘ Verso 2017).

Meanwhile, the recurringly baleful influence of the Business School phenomenon has again muddied the field, with a renegade business professor of 20 year’s experience asserting their ‘intellectual fraudulence’ and ‘culture of short-termism and greed’; and proposing the bull-dozing of all 13,000 of them worldwide!

We will be working on the thesis that Collini is the better guide and there will be much more on his penetrating analysis…

Here are the arms, the minds, the hearts,
The kids, the hands, the brains, the parts,
The skills, the hopes, the needs, the arts,
  Still in the House that Jack built.

Where are the wise, the leaders who
Will call for what they crave to do,
To build the house and build it true.
  Just as that other Jack built

© Ralph Windle – ‘The Bottom Line‘ 1985

God! I will pack, order my plane,
And get me to England once again.

For England’s the one land I know
Where Moscow parvenus may go,
Make Kensington by ten to three,
And know there’s caviar still for tea.

From “Profiles of Our Business Greats”
© Bertie Ramsbottom 2012

In the wake of the assumed Putin/Moscow agency in the attempted killing of the Skripals in Salisbury, Simon Jenkins (The Guardian, 16 March 2018) raised the chilling question “Do we really want war with Russia?” He suggests that the prospect has certainly taken British minds off Brexit; given Theresa May a boost, and helped the defence lobby in its perpetual campaign for more money.

There can be no condoning Russia’s obscene methods of settling its political and private feuds; but the indiscriminate official UK welcome since the 1990s to many of its tainted mafiosi, often grown fat on the misappropriation of Russian public assets post Yeltsin, has been sugared with the prospect of laissez-faire banking, money-laundering, and a privileged High Life beyond most UK citizens. For all its loud certitudes of righteousness, hypocrisy remains a key element in the West’s armoury and the hallmark of the UK’s disintegrating administration.

By private jet to Luton town,
We oligarchs are raining down,
Sikorski rotors ranging free
To whisk us on to Battersea.
And thence by liveried chauffeur
To One Hyde Park or Berkeley Square.

Or other bijou pieds-a-terre,
Courtesy of Candy Bros, and where
Your media, oil or metals Czar,
Who’s dreamed his Xanadu from afar,
May each his pleasure – dome decree.
Unhassled by the FSB.

Ibid

The sad fact is that a more pernicious self-harming of Western ideals of freedom and democracy is being engineered by our own, stridently noisy, Anglo-US regimes than by any threats from a weakened and embattled Putin.

With an acknowledged serial liar, racist and sexual predator occupying a disintegrating White House; and a Downing Street in turmoil, desperate for any jingoistic diversion from its deep, post-Brexit, sectarian traumas; the need for wise leadership is being swamped by the easier cold-war rhetoric of conflict and political expediency. A greater wisdom and the higher ideals of the reviled European idea is still, for many, a residue of hope; – but therefore venomously savaged by Mrs May’s old-school retainers and the insurgent controllers of her fate.

This scenario, for all its tragic implications, has been usurped to give virtually non-stop voice to our own would-be Trumpian figure, Boris Johnson. He is clearly aping a more Churchillian posture, to enhance his assumed political credentials; but remains naked of gravitas and conviction. Each swallowed syllable reactivates our questions about how such a mean competence came to be entrusted with our foreign relations in a complex and dangerous world.

Nor, we discover, is he himself without contact with this overly rich, London society of Émigré Russians, having confessed in a recent BBC interview to having enriched Tory party funds by £160,000 by playing tennis with the wife of a Putin former deputy finance minister. Noblesse Oblige!

To Knightsbridge and to Belgrave Square
We come, the exiled billionaires,
Who’ve swapped our hammers and our sickles
For Harrods, Heals and Harvey Nichols;
Let loose our friendly business drones
On Stamford Bridge and Waterstones.

Ibid

Into these barren wastes of cynicism and decay of empathetic wisdom in the Anglo/US West, the ‘March for Our Lives’ rally of the young surging out from Florida to the wider world this weekend comes as an exhilarating rejection of this nihilistic “Politics of Doom.”

Metaphor is the long-term inducer of human change, and what these Florida young have seen first-hand as the murderous inducements of the private gun, evokes and implicitly questions the wider social erosions of our long ages of recourse to war which our supposed wiser mentors and elders have wished, and are still wishing, on our shared worlds.

Here is some real cause for rejoicing and return to the child-like clarity of the truer philosophers’ perception of what it is that most erodes our humanity. ‘March for Our Lives‘ is a wake-up call beyond its years which puts the cold-war sound-bites of our hawkish officialdom to shame!

Say, where’s such Beauty yet to find?
Such certainty, such quiet mind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? oh! Yet
Stands Big Ben’s clock at ten to three?
And is there caviar still for tea?

From ‘Profiles of Our Business Greats’
© Ralph Windle 2012

Grateful acknowledgements to Rupert Brooke ‘Grantchester’ 1912

He was clearly a considerable pain to his long-suffering consort, the goddess Hera. And if he already begins to shape towards the uncanny prototype of a rather more contemporary tyrant figure, then this brief excursion into the shades of a distant past may be making its point. Step forward President Donald Trump, our very own upstart Hurler of Tweets and the Gratuitous Gibe.

It is, however, the particular theme of sexism and women’s empowerment which mainly fronts the current narrative. In the long, slow, painful march towards equality for women, the dominance of men in the making of society’s presiding myths has been a surprising absentee from the literature and history books (largely written, of course, by men!). Women have not yet fully shaken free from the shackles of male myth, but the recent celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Vote marks both the evolving triumph of their struggle and their insistence on a truer, less biased, reading of history.

Board Rooms were a kind of den
Wholly redolent of men,
Which women mainly got to see
When bringing in the lunch or tea;
Then one or two, whom I applaud,
Did bring a Lady on the Board,
Sometimes out of great acumen,
Or as their ‘statutory woman’;

Though – to their chauvinistic hacks –
Their ‘bomb-shell’ or their ‘battle-axe’.

From ‘Lady on the Board’
© Ralph Windle 1982

The mythology begins its version of this story when the human world was a men-only, woman-free zone; though, centuries apart, the Zeus-Olympus and Trump White House were already astonishingly similar in their degrees of uneasy relationships, deepening disaffections and maverick behaviours.

It was the predominant policies of austerity (it may surprise you to hear) ordained by Zeus for men, which triggered a major, though illicit, act of sympathetic kindness towards mortals by a lesser member of the Olympic hierarchy, the Titan Prometheus. He it was who released the secret of Fire to deprived mankind; for which he suffered grotesque physical punishment and ejection from the Olympic hierarchy.

And, as his crowning act of retribution, Zeus ordained the creation of the very first woman – Pandora – intended as a positive curse on mankind; shaped from the earth and condemned to carry with her the eponymous Box whose contents she was forbidden ever to open, see and possess. Not – as you may agree – the happiest of introductions of ‘woman’ to this version of the creation saga. Yet two unintended consequences followed, as is their wont, signifying Pandora’s undervalued potentials as symbol of her sex.

First she ignored the incipient male myth of a trivialising female curiosity by opening the box, and thus pointing up the fledgling qualities of forensic interest and enquiry which were to blossom into many a woman laureate of the sciences and arts; and, through longer time, progressively flouted the myriad imposed stereotypes of role and potential, dreamed up and imposed in the exclusive, introverted schools, and clubby enclaves of a male-dominated society.

The ‘bomb-shell’ image was a figure,
Like Marilyn Monroe’s, but bigger –
Elegant, but only just,
Clad about the thighs and bust;
And offering, like Eliot’s miss,
Some promise of pneumatic bliss.
Though, contrary to male assumption
That pretty blondes have little gumption,
This modern version boasts degrees,
Like MBAs and PhDs,
And an intellect as real
As her physical appeal.

Ibid.

Given the still un-ended process of attrition by which some of Pandora’s successors have eventually forced their way in to the boardroom; and the more massive significance of our recent celebration of 100 years of votes for women; it’s a good time to remember that, in areas of critical social relationships, both culture and law need to be in line for sustainable change to occur. And, as I have argued, ‘myth’ has been a powerful political tool in shaping society, Zeus to Trump, not least in male/female relationships, where the male voice has continued mainly to prevail.

The ‘ battle-axe’ implied a style
More dependent on her guile,
Since her feministic facets
Were seen as insubstantial assets.
Eschewing every pleasure known,
To which the weaker men were prone,
She maddeningly seemed to know
Everyone’s portfolio;
And, where information’s power,
Accumulate it hour by hour,
Until, by process of attrition,
She hand-bagged all the opposition.

Ibid

Since, as I argued above, both the ‘cultural’ and ‘legislative’ dimensions need to be in line for sustainable social change of significance to ensue, the accidental contiguity of the Women’s Suffrage centenary and the inundation of Harvey Weinstein sex-pest revelations has super-charged women’s reactions world-wide in unprecedented ways; turning the spontaneous #MeToo and #TimesUp identities into potentially powerful movements of highly motivated women, energised for individual and collective action.

It’s vital that the cultural and political elements of these gains continue to march in step; and the cultural dimension will require no less than a society-wide correction in the balance of the social contract between male and female.

As I have argued, this will require some re-writing, or at least better awareness, of a history and social mythology largely written, or manipulated to a male view, by men. I agree with Sarah Churchill (‘Sign of the Times’, The Guardian, 17 Feb 2018) that ‘story-telling‘ played a major role, particularly through dominant 20th century male writers – Updike, Mailer, Roth and many others – in establishing the ‘male entitlement to be the centre of the story, male voices to dominate…and for a woman to be dismissed’ (or ‘Gaslighted’ as the process became known, after the 1938 play in which the phrase first appeared) as ‘a perfect little silly‘.

These ancient overtones of sex
Will not prevent what happens next,
When every Boardroom stands ajar
To women as they really are-
Good or bad just like the others
Of their gentlemanly brothers;
Revealing – and it really hurts –
The irrelevancy of their skirts !

From ‘ Lady on the Board ‘
© Ralph Windle 1982

This pioneering piece from my Financial Times/ Bertie Ramsbottom series was immediately adopted by The Society of Women in Management and has been reproduced many times in UK and US publications.

In an unconscious acknowledgement of its monumental impotence, the presiding World Economic Forum has chosen as the convocation’s theme for this year the mission of “creating a shared future in a fractured world” which might suggest a poor return, so far, from its long years of alpine ‘apres-ski’. Might it share some complicity in the ‘fracturing’ it laments?

Pray spare us Lord, if yet you can,
These yearly plagues of ‘Davos Man’;
Such ceaseless helicoptering in,
Of Makers of this Mess we’re in;
Replete with copious tears of sorrow
That, for the mass, it’s ‘jam tomorrow’;
While, for the well-heeled of our earth, it
Must be “since we know they’re worth it”!

Whose ‘World’ is it this rich man’s quorum
Labelled ‘WORLD’ Economic Forum?

From ‘Davos Time-Again?’
© Ralph Windle 2018

As ever, there will be a relative paucity of women among the abundancy of super-rich men, with our own serially over-paid Martin Sorrell no doubt keeping his inflated end up in the hospitality cocktail bars – though this year he may well feel slightly pauperish in the presence, not only of the world’s 2nd (Bill Gates – $92bn) and 4th (Mark Zuckerberg – $77bn) richest men; but also that pre-eminent (though as yet unaudited) Midas extraordinaire and self-affirmed Genius, President Donald Trump. It is said that Mrs May, as fervent though temporary custodian of the other half of the ‘special relationship’ will be briefly there to greet her wheeler-dealer friend.

On the bitter realities of the Davos thematic ‘fractured world’ it seems unlikely that the defeated US presidential candidate and Independent senator for Vermont, Bernie Sanders, will have been invited to the shenanigans; though he happens to have contributed a recent succinct analysis of the ‘fracture’, pin-pointing some irrefutable truths which would no doubt have registered as fake news in the presidential ear. (Guardian 15 January). Their authenticity is beyond question. He writes:

Difficult as it is to comprehend, the fact is that the six richest people on Earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of world’s population – 3.7 billion people. Further, the top 1% have more money than the bottom 99%…nearly one in seven people struggle to survive on less than $1.25 (90p) a day and some 29,000 children die daily from entirely preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia…”

It will be good to have the Davos prescriptions for ‘creating a shared future’ in this most definitely ‘fractured world’, but I and many others are not holding our breaths.

Grant, if you will, these lesser-fry
Who pay the bills to question why?
To have in mind when next they’re voting,
This nauseous cosying and doting;
Where spineless politicians greet
Their self-styled corporate elite;
Pre-groomed for peak-time camera focus,
On clouds of PR hocus-pocus.

Ibid

The Midas myth – by which the King of Ancient Phrygia was granted the god-given boon of having everything he touched turn to gold – serves as an early parable of the contemporary neoliberal church, in its elevation of money to the prime measure of worth and choice. Davos is an unconscious altar to its decadent myth, and remains arrogantly ignorant of Midas’ eventual fate, when all his riches turned to ash, bringing the threat of starvation and the gilding of a much-loved daughter. He successfully petitioned Dionysus to let him abrogate this curse. We should pray that there is some copy of Greek myths and history on the Davos bookshelves as our contemporary worshippers of money and markets approach their inevitable come-uppance – but I doubt it !

Above all, may it be Thy wish
To raise, above their gibberish,
Those richer voices, hushed of late,
Who’d like their World back, and its fate;
So all our kids may go to bed
Well – fed with, ringing in their head,
Stories of how a Wise God winked,
Pronouncing Davos Man extinct!

From ‘Davos Time-Again?’
© Ralph Windle 2018

Taking horses to the water
   Gives no guarantee they’ll drink;
Equine modes of misbehaviour
   May be wiser than we think.
Take the white-hot revolutions
   Humans seem to hanker for;
‘Chips with everything,’ for instance,
   Just to change the metaphor.
Micro-chips were what the future
   Most of all depended on;
Unimagined dawns were breaking
   In the Vales of Silicon.
Every future was a function
   Of the messages we cram,
As with saints upon a needle,
   On to each successive Ram….

From ‘Let Them Eat Chips’
The Bottom Line.
Bertie Ramsbottom
© Ralph Windle 1985.

‘Change’ and ‘innovation’ are words of incontrovertible virtue in the business hymnal; and, at what the commentators now call ‘the cutting edge’ of managerial thinking, can be stretched to include not only products and technologies but also the shapes and structures of organisations.

Which is maybe why John Harris was getting excited in the Guardian recently (“The chameleons of new age capitalism own the future”, 8 December 2017) about the book “Capitalism Without Capital” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake .The book has many interesting things to say, but the title misleads.

The shift in the balance between ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ assets, and their internal distributions in economies such as the USA and UK, is – as Harris concedes – the mere sharpening of a process started long ago in the Seventies; and the human skill sets needed to drive this supposed revolution (“product management, business development, design engineering, marketing, etc”) are precisely as they were – for myself and many others – working in the hybrid multinationals of the 1970! The fetish for branding and building market place identities were focussed precisely on creating a sustainable positive balance between the tangible and intangible assets involved. Whether both species of assets were held within or between enterprises was, and remains, a function of overall corporate strategy, developing and changing through time as market conditions demanded. In this respect at least, things remain much as they always were, and Capitalism Without Capital seems a curiously unconvincing and irrelevant promise.

More importantly, however, the Harris commentary takes the opportunity to remind us of a much more relevant but forgotten truth – albeit from the now unfashionable pens of Marx and Engels.

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones… all that is solid melts into air…”.

I applaud Harris’s conclusion that… “the Marx/Engels vision of our ceaselessly changing economies and societies seems just as pertinent now as it did 169 years ago”. The persistent relegation of the ‘people’ factor to the after-thoughts of the latest corporate fad or structural ‘innovation’ has done little to cure this long-term blight on the real producers of wealth in our societies.

Eat the chips, spew out the people,
   That’s the economic law,
Feed ‘em integrated circuits,
   Stop ‘em asking what it’s for!
All aboard the next invention!
   Mount the magic Kangaroo!
One more mighty leap for science
   Up the unemployment queue!

Even at the fount of knowledge,
   Wise men have been known to pause,
Breathalyse their technoholics,
   Till they emulate the horse.

Ibid

So our more urgent problems remain the off-shoring and financial down-grading of manufacturing; and, whatever our asset structures, the dire consequences of our persistently undermined corporate tax regimes; alongside the now-known, socially unsustainable, inequalities of income and opportunity.

Where are these on our all-absorbing Brexit agendas? Better not to hold the breath! But as we stumble into a new year, and maybe nearer to an election which could, at last, give the needed coup de grace to the austerity nightmare, let’s stay cheerfully confident that we are capable of much better things… and think what joy there would be at a likely Trump implosion!

All we have to fear is fear itself – as someone once said!

“Please, where can I get a copy of ‘Chips With Everything‘ read by Bertie Ramsbottom on the BBC’s ‘In Business’ Programme. It was delicious!”
B.N. Gauntlet

The Times they are a-Changing
   But not the old taboos
On asking where they’re going,
   Or what it’s for, and whose?

From “We Won’t Know Where We’re Going Till We’re There”
Bertie Ramsbottom © Ralph Windle 1994

Still, I suppose I was pleased, as well as surprised, to be asked by Mark Tully – long term BBC broadcaster and its India Bureau chief; but, by that time, presenter of its ‘Something Understood’ Radio and World Service series – to include a reading of it in his October 9, 2011 broadcast.

Since my piece rehearses a whole sequence of supposed steps-to-success systematically churned out (and at breath-taking cost) by the coteries of ‘consultants’, ‘experts’, ‘innovators’ and Alan Sugar wannabees who infest the business scene – I was initially a little taken aback that the Mark Tully series was so unambiguously religious in tone; and this particular programme would go out under the title “Walking Backwards to God”!

I could, however, (I told myself) share an agnostic’s empathy with the words of Cardinal Newman, chosen by Tully to set the tone for the collection of readings, poetry and music to follow.

“We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures – we walk to heaven backwards!”

And I was much reassured to be in the company of readings from poets James Fenton and Robbie Burns; and music from Frank Loesser, Shirley Maclaine and The Choir of Kings College, Cambridge.

My poem goes on:-

We’ve been M.B.O.’d and Down-Sized,
   We’ve been T.Q.M.’d, Divested;
Process-Cost- Re-Engineered,
   Restructured, Dis-invested.
Kept up with all the ‘ologies’.
   Each ‘Go-for-Change‘ idea:
Read every trendy guru’s book
   And Business Panacea;
Consorted with Consultants,
   Bought their ‘this should fix it‘ isms,
Gone round and round the circuits
   Of computing cataclysms.

The Times they are a-Changing,
   But not the old taboos
On asking where they’re going,
   And who will get to choose.

(ibid)

And, listening to the programme going out live on the airwaves, I was again reminded of something which has been a constant sensation from my earliest experience of this globalising corporate scene – its progressive adoption of a quasi-religious, ideological ‘belief’ model to evangelise its highly questionable theology of ‘free markets’, as these have become the dominant Icons of the Neoliberal Faith – not only in economic, but also in political and social policy decisions.

This belief system, having spread its ‘Free Market’ orthodoxies from the USA, via the UK to much of the Western World since 1989, was until recently assumed to be the likely all-conquering Credo for conversion of the rest of an aspirant world; though, following the resurgence of Thirties-style financial crises, unscheduled heresies began to reappear. Michael Sandel had called the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 “a heady time of market faith and deregulation – the Era of Market Triumphalism… but today that faith may be in doubt”.

It would be premature to count on it yet! For well over a century, the Free Market Church, learning from its more durable mediaeval predecessors, has buttressed itself with the underpinnings of inequality, progressive penetration of political processes and policy formation; and the massive expansion of its evangelical priesthood – by the globalising spread of its ‘Business School’ seminaries, operating largely outside the control of national educational policies and salary constraints. The mutual interpenetrations of corporate and politico/governmental elites – the so-called Revolving Door – remains the most cogent threat to open democracies and the urgent need to tackle the corrosive impacts of widening inequalities of income, opportunity and social fairness in our societies.

The message is, just move it round
   Like Alice’s Mad Hatter,
Back or forward, where it’s bound,
   Is quite another matter.
Shake it up and slim it down
   Is mainly what enthuses;
Don’t spoil the fun by asking which
   People are the losers.

So keep the gimmicks coming, Lord,
   To keep us all from needing
Such obsolescent, antique things
   As caring, thinking, leading.

(ibid)

(On the analogy of the sage who asked ‘why should the devil have all the best tunes?‘ you will have noticed that Bertie Ramsbottom’s secularity doesn’t preclude the judicious use of prayer!)

Quotes taken from ‘We Won’t Know Where We’re Going Till We’re There’ – Bertie Ramsbottom © Ralph Windle 1994


‘The Poetry of Business Life’, an Anthology, Ralph Windle, Canto VIII, Technology and Change. pub. Berrett-Koehler USA

It seems that Virtue has, of late,
Not seven deadly sins but eight
To vanquish and eliminate
   To drink of Heaven’s nectar;
The most pernicious on the list,
Our leaders fervently insist,
Is one most moralists had missed –
   The evil Public Sector!

Yet none, more wickedly than this,
Drags Virtue to the great abyss,
And poisons with its Vampire kiss,
   Our economic vitals;
Nor prompts the Righteous and the Wise
To exorcise the Evil Eyes,
With fervent cries of ‘Privatise’
   To bolster their requitals.

Public Privateers
Bertie Ramsbottom 1985

In ‘Markets and the Wrath of God‘ (Feb 2017) I made the cardinal error of wondering whether the West’s long series of money / market / economic disasters – such as the still-reverberating 2007/8 financial meltdown – might have their roots in what wiser commentators, like Michael Sandel and David Marquand, had noted as the inexorable erosion of our so-called ‘market economies’ into all-through ‘market societies’?

This is the point where ‘market values’ have crowded out most ‘non-market’ values (in health, education, shelter, opportunity, equality, et al) so that the relationships critical to a well-functioning society are allowed to wither; everything has a price tag, of course, by which it’s assumed ‘value’ is best determined.

So it would suggest a mind-boggling insensitivity to the realities of the Brexit, austerity, health-care, inequality, housing, homelessness and other horrors she and her government have visited on us in the UK, that she should have chosen this moment for a eulogistic paean of praise for her version of the FREE MARKET… “the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created”! Public Service cuts, especially in schools and health service investments, were a festering presence in her recently botched election campaign; but it is undoubtedly the inescapable return to public ownership and control of pivotal, low-performing activities such as energy, rail, water and the disintegrating Royal Mail – for which voters now hope – which most spooks the devotees of Mrs May’s Theocracy of the Free-Market . For Public Ownership and Enterprise were, from the start, the carefully scripted Satans of the original Margaret Thatcher morality play-script to which she aspires.

Such fervent, self-fulfilling views,
Of heads they win and tails we lose,
Were calculated to confuse
   The morally deficient;
Who, in their innocence, request
Why can’t we Public keep the best
And hand the Market all the rest,
   To make them more efficient?

Yet gods, the Market Priesthood says,
Move thus in their mysterious ways,
And privatising that which pays
   Is in the Holy Verses;
While that which must run at a loss
The Central Office omphalos
Decrees its devotees should toss
   To the public purses.

Ibid

The hyperbole of the May thesis of the Free Market “as the greatest agent of collective human progress ever invented” comes, of course, heavily circumscribed with the need for appropriate regulation…

“In essence, it is very simple” (the May sermon to the Bank of England continued)… “It consists of an open market place, in which everyone is free to participate, regulated under the rule of law, with personal freedoms, equality and human rights democratically guaranteed, and an accountable government, progressively taxing the economic activity which the market generates, to fund high-quality public services which are freely available to all citizens, according to need…”

Outside the cloistered calm of the Bank’s precincts is a preponderance of UK citizens who might find it difficult to recognise much of the facile May identikit of their current society, – perhaps including some puzzlement about participation, equality, guaranteed rights, progressive taxation, high quality freely available public services etc, etc…

In fact, of course, the false promise comes directly from the wider, pan-global bible of the neo-liberal fundamentalist creed which supposedly supplies the western, predominantly US, model by which ‘liberalising’ industrial capitalism was to evangelise its credo to the wider world.

In this context, the Mrs May ‘magic of the Free Market’ message seems sadly gauche and mis-timed. In their recent book ‘The Fourth Revolution’, two well-known editors of the free-market Economist magazine (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge) joined wiser commentators agreeing “So far, the 21st Century has been a rotten one for the western model” – a significant volte-face for such long-term enthusiasts for the unfettered market.

The formidable commentator Pankaj Mishra suggests that the evidence now points to the century-old assumptions of the eventual world-wide adoption of the Western style free-market route to statehood are disintegrating.

Has the May market epiphany come sadly too late for her canonisation?

And so, to meet the Holy Writ,
We saw the branch on which we sit,
Or amputate the better bits
   With sacrificial axes;
Fulfilling, as the priest intones,
The message written in the stones –
That all the public ever owns
   Are burdens on the taxes.

From ‘Public Privateers’
Ralph Windle / Bertie Ramsbottom 1985

‘Usury’ is tersely defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest”; but, as David Hawkes reminds us in a book review (‘Culture of Debt‘ TLS, July 2017) the word, with its pedigree going back through biblical to classical (Aristotle, Leviticus, Mohammad, Buddha, Aquinas and others) times, has been progressively edited out of mainstream economic discussion in favour of the blander ‘credit’, ‘debt‘, ‘interest’ and other terms less prone to any subliminal risks of an inconvenient ethical connotation.

The need to suppress the ethical component in mainstream economic ideology is, of course, no accident. As Hawkes suggests, the concept of usury was fundamental to the social, cultural and ethical evaluation of every previous historic era before the banishment of ‘ethics’ to the field of metaphysics at the time of the ‘Enlightenment’. Luckily, we have the countervailing testimony of our Shakespeares, Dickens ,Dostoevskys and others; and the incomparably rich, accumulated legacies of our shared social histories.

The UK’s own vertiginously steep descent into US style fetishising of ‘money’ and ‘markets’ was flamboyantly signalled by Mrs Thatcher’s so-called ‘Big Bang’ de-regulation of the old institutions of the financial City of London in October 1986, when the London Stock Exchange shut down its ‘Open Outcry’ dealing room and switched on its computer screens. The smaller, more prestigious City firms were quickly ingested by US investment banks and old European rivals. At the time, the BBC’s ‘Money Box’ programme asked me to try to capture the vortex of jostling greed released by this revolution.

Down in the City something’s stirring,
Most unlikely partners pairing,
Jobbers, brokers, bankers sharing
  In the rapture of romance;
Clearers, merchants and insurers
Raise their passionate bravuras,
While the Stock Exchange procurers
  Lead the orgiastic dance.

Lambs are lying down with lions,
Propagating monstrous scions,
Cartelised by mis-alliance,
  While the City Watch-Dog beams;
Now’s the merry month for mating,
Season for de-regulating,
Bids and mergers consummating
  Fantasies beyond our dreams.

‘Passion in the City’
Ralph Windle 1986

The continued financialisation of every aspect of our societies has infected our individual psyches as well as the many collective aspects of our cultures ; where everything has a price, so soon may we. The moral dimension of our individual and collective economic choices remains central to the way we live our lives and relate to one another. ’Economics’ needs to face up to Michael Sandel’s chilling question – Do we want a society where everything is up for sale ? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy ? (‘The Moral Limits of Markets’ Penguin 2013)

We have much distance still to go. The necessary reinvention of a ‘moral economy’ demands more urgency than we have shown since- and in spite of – the palpable inadequacies of the institutional response to the 2008 ‘banking crisis’. It’s a shameful fact that it has taken almost nine years – to June 2017 – for the first 3 top Barclays bankers to be called before a court; and who yet believes they and their uncountable accomplices world-wide will get their appropriate come-uppance?

So shame on us as well as them for our slow response to their insidious languages of mortgage default, leverage, securitised risk, collateralised obligations, swap options and sundry other esoteric sleights of monetary legerdemain; designed to camouflage a narrow, illiberal concept of an ‘economics’ shorn of all the fuller personal, cultural and aesthetic necessities of our shared social lives.

‘Economics’ without this moral dimension was the bane of many generations of our ancestors and progenitors; but also implied in the very Greek word from which it derives; and ‘usury’ became the centuries-old term invented to guarantee that this social, as well as monetary, dimension might surface in any well-functioning political, social and cultural dialogue. Whatever name we give it, the moral dimension of our individual and collective economic histories means there must be no giving up on the long road back to an ethical ‘economics’.

Institutions, hell-for-leather,
Leaping into bed together,
Posting banns to tie the tether,
  Bigamy no bar to sex;
City men in stripey trousers,
Hung about the Discount Houses,
Propositioning for spouses,
  Brandishing their furtive cheques

In among the heavy breathing,
Frenzied foreign limbs were heaving,
Adding to the shapeless, seething
  Paroxysm of their greed;
Lovely orgy! Such a pity!
In their fun they raped the City,
Carved her into not-a-pretty
  Parody of what we need!

(ibid)

We should add that two of the three books also boast the words “bull-shit” in their titles; and that all three authors are journalists (Evan Davis – Newsnight; James Ball – Buzzfeed; Matthew d’Ancona – The Guardian; and therefore maybe share an insider’s knowledge of what “bull-shit” is); as well as an awareness of what they term “Post-Truth” – and its familiar synonym “Fake News” – two very ‘in vogue’ buzz-words. Certainly the genre has been much inflated by the arrival of the Trump dynasty in the US and the truth-deniers of the hard Brexit tendency in the UK.

Since wishes, as the young are taught,
Are truly fathers to the thought;
And thinking, for the business-man,
For sparing usage when he can;
We blamed our dismal market rating
On too much ratiocinating.
Henceforth we would value higher
The calls of Corporate Desire,
And decimate the competition
By force of Positive Volition.

‘The Power of Positive Blinking’
from The Bottom Line 1985
Bertie Ramsbottom

I‘ve no wish to dampen the fervour of the jostling journalists, however, and a story is a story, even though “Post Truth“ and “Fake News“ are really as old as the hills; and precede their current arch-practitioners, such as President Trump, Rupert Murdoch and countless other neo-liberal social fraudsters, by many generations. It’s just that the short-termism of historic connection and awareness has, for too long, been going the way of economic policy–making, so that the deliberate falsification of language, which is the hall-mark of neo-liberal social control, continually updates its deceits and wrong-foots the commentators. Post-Truths and False-News remain lies, however euphemised. The more communicative term for the wider creative process by which ideas are manipulated through language distortion was bequeathed us years ago by Francis Wheen, in his brilliant 2004 “How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World” (Harper Perennial).

It skewered the longer, American-originated, tradition of Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” – a philosophy so scandalously ‘faux’ it came out in the totally inappropriate depths of the 1936 Depression; a genre later to be elevated (from 1982) to the more sustained ‘business school’ sycophantic milieu, still with us, with its pseudo-messianic titles such as “In Search of Excellence” (co-authored by an aspiring young McKinsey consultant, Tom Peters, and selling over 5 million copies at a time of surging unemployment in the USA, to its author’s considerable enrichment).

Academic commentators
Rushed to validate the status
Of Management by Wish- Kinetics
As superseding cybernetics;
While every Business School was billing
Programmes in Collective Willing,
Claiming Shinto and Islamic
Sources for the Wish-Dynamic.

(ibid)

From that time to now, as Wheen mischievously explains, “the market for platitudes (and embroidered ‘post-truths’) has become so crowded that ever more exotic approaches have been required to feed the eyes and minds of airport browsers…” He cites the success of Wess Roberts PhD, whose 1991 “The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” graced the bookshelves of US middle managers nation-wide. The myriad subsequent rehearsals for today’s more pervasive Trumpisms or liberties-with-truth have included, along the way, “Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive“; “Confucius in the Boardroom“; “If Aristotle Ran General Motors“; “Elisabeth 1 CEO“; and the sickening moralising of that supreme guru of mysticism and money-making Deepak Chopra.

Too many generations of business school students and (aware and unaware) disciples of the neo-liberal faith, have been nurtured on this socially–regressive twiddle-twaddle. Unlearning it will be a major task for our more genuine, main-stream school and university traditions. Given the new hope born of our recent election, is this the time to call our spade a spade again?

And scarcely had we made a mention
Of our corporate intention,
Than press and television news
Pestered us for interviews;
And the brokers ran amock
Marking up the company stock.
Government made haste to hire
The Head of Corporate Desire
From the McWhimsey Corporation,
To brief the Wish-Tank on Inflation.

There is a move afoot we hear
To vote us Business of the Year.

Bertie Ramsbottom 1985 (aka Ralph Windle)
‘The Power of Positive Blinking’

Domine illuminatio mea,
Look favourably on this our prayer.
Let these poor souls, in statu pupillari,
Become not too inquisitive nor starry-
Eyed, nor radical nor witty,
But let them lust for riches in the City;
Wherewith, by covenant or charter,
They may endow their grateful Alma Mater.

From Dreaming Spires PLC, A Millennium Prayer
– Bertie Ramsbottom 2001.

Not everyone has been similarly delighted. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, protested – with many others – “higher education is worth paying for and we remain committed to campaigning for greater public investment… the sector needs stability and that comes via secure public funding, not variable streams. Universities mainly benefitting from the larger donations are the wealthier ones, so the system entrenches inequality”.

Temper their yearnings to be wise
With visionary calls to Enterprise;
And exorcise all ghosts of shame or sin
At ventures of this dubious kind we’re in.
A thousand years on, we commit to Thee
The relaunched Oxford Inc and PLC.

(ibid)

The imminence of an election and the conservative government’s long addiction to austerity financing of universities and their students, should put the issue even higher on the political agenda. For any fuller dependency on ‘philanthropy‘, as a substitute for sustained public investment in critical areas of public need, raises sensitive issues of both politics and morality – already more visibly contentious and threatening in the longer established US culture of intensely politicised, quid-pro-quo ‘philanthropy’.

For, though through its long history, philanthropy has seemed the more benign face of wealth, its reward has never been less than social or moral ‘influence’ for the giver, even when little more was wanted or sought. Now however, with the massive rise in the income and wealth inequalities across so many of our societies, and its obscene concentration in the top percentile of our own and the US, the means for enhanced ‘charitable’ giving certainly exists – but its character and socio-political impacts seem no longer neutral nor unambiguously benign.

The impulse towards generosity and giving is, of course, a welcome social trait in our communities; though, paradoxically, relatively strongest among the lower to middle earners – the poppy-wearers, Red Cross and animal charity givers and volunteers – who fall well outside the more flamboyant parameters of ‘philanthropy’. For that, we mainly have in our collective memories the likes of the Fords, Rockefellers, Rowntrees, Cadburys and others – from a jumbled rich-list of assorted robber-barons and the high-minded. But today’s ‘philanthropy’ propels us into some new, expanding and deeply disconcerting territory.

For the key emerging correlates of today’s higher-profile philanthropy have become: widening economic and social inequalities; lower relative taxation of higher-wealth individuals and corporations; progressive shrinkage of necessary public services and investment; and consequent undermining of what gives state and community their meaning and necessary cohesion.

So, may Academe, old fruitless passions spent,
Embrace this New, Improved Enlightenment;
And may these new-found Customers for Knowledge
Get richer quicker for their Dear Old College.

A Millennium Prayer 2001.

And, as ever, the clearest current indicators of the new philanthropy’s direction of travel emanate from the USA, where it is not unconnected with the recent arrival of a super-rich property tycoon in the President’s chair, flanked by a cabinet of well-endowed aspirants to the Forbes Rich List.

Over the past fifteen years, the number of ‘philanthropic’ foundations in the USA with a billion dollars or more in assets, is estimated to have doubled to more than eighty – helped by the liberal tax reductions allowed under US law for ‘charitable giving’. These tax write-offs, however, mean that each year an estimated further $40 billion is diverted from the public treasuries via such ‘charitable’ largesse. (‘Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent’ Michael Massing. New York Review. 2015).

Simultaneously, these latterday ‘philanthro-capitalists’ (as some now call them) – progressively characterised by mega-rich hedge-fund managers, private equity tycoons and hi-tech billionaires – tend towards more intrusive involvement and strategic direction of their beholden benefactions. David Callahan, founder and editor of the Inside Philanthropy website writes: “Philanthropy is having as much political influence as campaign contributions but getting nothing like the attention. The imbalance is stunning”.

In an era when, as moral philosopher Michael Sandel has explained, money and the market have become the key social drivers, it is hardly surprising that philanthropy, in this more aggressive form, has been pushing its tentacles into more proactive political and ideological fields from which its excessive riches derive. The more benign ‘philanthropic foundation’ space is being increasingly colonised by richly financed ‘advocacy groups’, pseudo ‘research foundations’ and, most significantly, ‘think tanks’ – dedicated to validating the happy formula they have discovered for perpetuating the good life we have so selflessly granted them.

Their incidence is most noticeable under the current governing philosophies of the UK and USA; for it is there that the inexorable cycle of obscene inequalities of wealth, catalysed by an unbelievably benign triple bonanza of ‘friendly’ tax regimes on mega incomes, escalating assets and subsequent charitable ‘giving’ – maybe best highlights the inherent paradox of a new ‘philanthropy’ which returns more to the ‘giver’ than the receiver; and threatens open democracy on the way.

The Guardian, 21 April 2011

Dear Ralph,

Thank you for your splendid poem ‘Dreaming Spires PLC’ . I particularly liked the latin!

Best Regards,
Simon Jenkins