Playing the violin in Whitehall

This is Lily Schlaen of Orquesta Sin Fronteras, playing opposite the entrance to Downing Street yesterday afternoon, in aid of Kashmiri human rights groups.

Lily is a force of nature and her new orchestra, based in Teddington and including musicians from every nation and range of abilities - including disabilities - is an inspiration.  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Orquesta-Sin-Fronteras/114135311943534

She is also my violin teacher.

It was fascinating watching the concert yesterday, with all the political apparachiks dashing by without ties (the civil servants in Victoria Street all have ties).  Most people are too busy to listen, but somehow bringing culture into the traffic and rush is always civilising.

Why Cameron's speech was important

There was something rather strange about David Cameron's leader's speech yesterday, and I have been trying to put my finger on it.  It was partly the slightly strained delivery, partly the muted response from the audience.  It was partly peculiar because he was talking about the involvement of ordinary people to an audience which, arguably, rarely meets them. 

But I've slept on the question and I think I have the answer, and this explains why the enthusiasm might not have been there for the Conservatives who were actually listened.  The reason was that Cameron was giving a Liberal speech and not a Conservative one.

Yes, of course there were things in there which would only be in a Conservative speech (encouraging marriage for example).  There are endless sentences you could take out of context which are obviously Conservative.  But overall, with the repetition of 'fairness' and the pupil premium and so much else, the context was Liberal.  No wonder the audience was not quite sure about it.

Perhaps most Liberal, actually, were the implications for the Big Society and the Kennedy-esque request for help.  We Lib Dems might not have put it quite like that, but if I had been writing that speech for a Liberal prime minister, that is what I would have said too.  The old days when politicians claimed the exclusive right to deliver everything to a grateful and passive society are over.  They can't do it alone any more, if indeed they ever could.

That is Liberalism. 

What interests me about it is why.  Nobody forced Cameron to make a Liberal speech.  There was no pressure to do so.  It wasn't as if Clegg had made a Conservative speech at his conference (though perhaps some people might say he did).  Of course we are yet to face the cuts avalanche, and things may look different then - it clearly is not yet a Liberal government, after all.  But something is going on, and I hardly dare articulate what I think it is.

The moment of lost economic innocence

When did the age of piracy shift over to the age of the financial buccaneers, the moment of lost economic innocence when the financial services industry first began the slow shift into the corruption that now engulfs it? I did a short lecture on Thursday night saying that this was the moment of destruction, by earthquake, of the pirate port of Port Royal, Jamaica.


The evening was partly to publicise my book Eminent Corporations, together with my co-authors at the National Maritime Museum, which is an attempt to inject a bit of history into the business of corporate brands. But the argument stands on its own.

The lecture is here – let me know what you think!

Why I wasn't at the Labour conference

I've only once been to a Labour conference before, and was taken aback by all the sharp-suited young men stalking down the street, three abreast, talking confidentially.  To be fair, there were quite a lot of sharp-suited young men at the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool, but they looked marginally more human.

I was going to go to Manchester this week.  I wish I had in some ways.  My sense that behind Ed Miliband is this archetypal family tragedy, the destruction of his older brother's political career, has only grown during the week - and I feel increasingly that it is going to define Ed's leadership.

I was supposed to go on Monday to speak at a fringe meeting.  I only discovered a week before that the meeting was in the secure zone and I would need a pass.  I phoned the Labour Party and was told that, as an individual at that stage, they would charge me £425 a day.  Worse, they couldn't guarantee to let me in, and - although they might blame the police for that - they would not guarantee to give me my money back if they didn't let me in.

I expect the Lib Dem conference also puts non-members through this kind of thing too, but the experience was so reminiscent of New Labour's approach to call centres and people-processing - the inflexible regulations, the obscure rules that only benefit the organisation - that I decided not to go. 

I am self-employed and would never have dreamed of spending £425 on my own account, but I probably could have persuaded the organisation I was representing to cover the bill if I had argued hard enough.  But the thought of subsidising the Labour Party to the tune of £425 was too much.  I preferred to stay at home.  Was I wrong?

Why Ed Miliband is no threat - and why he is

The rather raucous article by Matthew d’Ancona in the Evening Standard, comparing Ed Miliband to Neil Kinnock, is quite right – but not in the way it was intended. Ed M is going to have to spend a great deal of time distancing himself from the Left and is doomed to spend the rest of his leadership desperately holding the reins as Right and Left fight it out.

That much is good for the Lib Dems. Most of the cleverest Labour Party members I know backed David Miliband, but my sense is that leading Lib Dems feared Ed more. Why? Because he is a thinker, a great collector of ideas, and he is already fishing in the same pool as most thinking Liberals.

So he poses a major challenge to the Lib Dems, whether we like it or not. We have to articulate the future better, more excitingly and more distinctively, in territory that is so obviously Liberal that Ed can’t drag his party after him. He may be a Neil Kinnock, but the danger is that he will also be a Jo Grimond.

Oh yes, and come to hear me at the Eminent Corporations lecture at the National Maritime Museum on 30 Sept at 7pm: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/events/eminent-corporations

Why we need a bit of corporate history

The late, great entrepreneur Anita Roddick used to describe the corporate bosses dominate our lives as “dinosaurs in pinstripes’.

She coined the phrase accepting her first business award. There was a sharp intake of breath and suddenly there was Robert Maxwell, of all people, storming out in protest.

She developed the idea later. The corporations were entities, with all the rights of human beings, but which could show no emotions apart from greed and fear. They were able to make a hefty meal of their own tails.

It was an idea that was taken up shortly afterwards by the new economics pioneer David Korten, when he called his book When Corporations Ruled the World.

One of the least human aspects of these corporate monsters is their complete lack of history. You and I have histories, or at least narratives we use to make sense of the things that have happened to us.

Not so the corporations. There are obscure tomes of corporate history which only academics read, and there are cursory notes – written by marketing departments – that appear on websites. Otherwise that’s it.

We live in an age where the PLC is almost the proudest institution on earth. But actually, seen through an historical perspective, they are flimsy, fragile, insubstantial things, which flower briefly and then disintegrate into their constituent bits – a few brands there, a vice-president here, an office block again there. More like multinational mayflies than megacorps.

Yet because there are no histories of these corporations, no back stories, no roots – we let them control our lives with stories about them conjured out of the air by whatever director of marketing they last employed.

That is why my colleague Andrew Simms and I set out to do something about it. It occurred to us that what the big brands needed was a dose of what Lytton Strachey did for his Eminent Victorians – an experimental new kind of mini-biography.

Like the Victorian giants, we have an absolute avalanche of information about the corporations that dominate our lives – rather as Strachey and his Edwardian friends did about the giants of the Victorian age – but very little actual knowledge.

The antidote to this is our new book Eminent Corporations, published this week by Constable & Robinson. There are eight stories in it – from the deep past (the East India Company), through to the tragic failures of big visions (M&S and Cadburys), and to outrageous chutzpah (BP).  There are a couple of moral crusades which became multinational monsters of greed (Barclays). Even the BBC has a place.

Once you put flesh on these flimsy things, and find the humanity behind their stories – find there were in fact stories there in the first place which explains a little of who and what they are – then everything seems different.

My name is Ozymandius plc. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.

Buy the book at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eminent-Corporations-Great-British-Brands/dp/1849010498
 
Come to the Eminent Corporations lecture at the National Maritime Museum on 30 Sept at 7pm: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/events/eminent-corporations

Why the CBI got it so wrong on Cable's speech

The reaction by the CBI to Vince Cable’s speech was absolutely extraordinary, and a symptom of the problem we face.

To give him credit, it may be that Richard Lambert never actually read what Vince said when he made his remarks. If he had, he would have realised that the Business Secretary was absolutely pro-enterprise, pro-competition and pro-business.

But he wasn’t pro-monopoly, or pro-corruption. What is extraordinary is that Lambert and the CBI reach for their dictionary of insults, not because Cable attacked business but because he attacked the abuses of big, monopolistic business.

Why is it that the CBI has become an apologist for big business abuse, at the expense of small business? In that peculiar contradiction you will find the answer to so many questions about our recent history – why the banks were allowed to crash, why the big banks withdrew from the real economy, why we get so little choice about where and how we shop.

It also opens up a new political space, and I hope Vince will do more to fill it: pro-business, pro-enterprise, but not pro-monopoly and not pro-corporate abuse.