I'M GOING TO BECOME NASTY

Consider the respective benefits of managing with stick or carrot. Personally I’ve always had a pocketful of carrots in the unshakeable belief that the nicer we are to each other the better the results. But I’m not any longer sure that this is right.

We’ve exhausted our patience, our management skills and bank balance on our extensive house refurbishment. Seventeen different people have marched through our house, drunk our coffee, used our loos and exercised our respective people skills. When one of them said to me “you know you’re the nicest people I’ve worked for” I knew something was going horribly wrong. Now it’s a common refrain and we are left waiting (nicely) whilst the unreasonable bastards who scream and shout get instant attention from these characters.

My self-doubt increased on June 23rd when I realised that civilised debate with Brexit people was a waste of time.  Being nice was a mission too far when they told me that they didn’t want straight bananas, unelected bureaucrats (what? Like our own civil servants, police, judiciary), bad treatment of animals, Polish builders and so on and that they wanted a return to our “yeoman values”, control of our destiny and poverty (yes that’s really a price worth paying).

June 23rd was for about half the country our 9/11. That Thursday our world changed. And the EU-Leavers took our country away and they stole my sense of humour. Because where we are and where we’re going isn’t funny.

How bad is it?

A friend told me he rooted for Iceland in the European Cup - “I hate old England’s vulgar nationalism”.

To misquote Dr Johnson but probably more to the current point:
“Patriotism is the last refuge of …”the ignorant.

The last time I felt this bereft was when my mother died. It’s created a real sense of permanent loss. And as the “I told you so’s” pile up I feel worse not vindicated. On Saturday, for instance, the pound overtook the Argentinian Peso as the weakest leading global currency.

The division between leavers and remainers is acute and I believe permanent. It appears nearly all the people I know think like me. The very few leavers I know have values and attitudes to capital punishment, homosexuality and life in general that are not what I can live with. (What would Roy Jenkins our most radical liberal 20th century spirit think of all this?)

I feel ashamed, belittled and angry. And I want to find my real home again. Fortunately Brighton was strongly pro-remain but my gut says I must find solace in London or Scotland. Richard French, a friend, believes there should be a new country called “Scot-Lon” and to hell with the rest.

But here’s a thought. By 2020 over 1½ million of those people who voted Brexit will have died to be replaced by a more pro-EU group aged 18+.

So we have to wait for this madness to pass and just be nastier in this post-nice world.

WHAT WENT WRONG WHILST I WAS AWAY?

We’ve just spent a fortnight in Venice - again. That city’s life started with people fleeing attacks from Germanic and Hun hordes. These refugees from places like Treviso and Padua scrambled to relative safety (but with very wet feet) into the marshes in the Venetian lagoons.  No horses would come there to pursue them. They were wet but protected by swamps. Wet, on their own  and with only the future to think about.

They built upwards by learning to drive piles of wood down and creating platforms on top of them. A city grew from trial, error and persistence. Any management consultant would have told them they were completely crazy. “It won’t work, there’ll be floods, disasters, go to dry land”…and back to the Huns?
In 570 AD Venice didn’t exist yet just 600 years later it was the biggest and most powerful city in the world. Necessity drove imagination, energy and success.

Management consultants (them again) have propounded the effectiveness of creating crises to enliven and motivate management teams - a kind of “jump-start” theory.

Well, coming back from the balmy calm of the one-time Venetian master state I encountered the current Scottish referendum ‘crisis’ with a degree of amazement.
“I go away for a week or three and you wasted, simply wasted 20% lead points. You all need a damn good shaking.”

The realities, as most of us, the experts and most businesses know them, is that independence is not a good idea judged from an economic perspective. The head is shaking (‘No. It’s a very bad idea’) … but the heart is thumping away (‘Yes. Yes…. just imagine how wonderful freedom could be.’) It’s extraordinarily naïve of us to discover this late in the game that ‘YES’ is a more powerful, motivating and exciting word than ‘NO’.

So what’s happened in this fortnight of apparent madness? Quite simply rather than ravening hordes of spear-wielding barbarians it’s been the grey suited, male Westminster crowd of dull, old fashioned and self-interested, elite politicians who’ve driven away the more adventurously, positive yes-minded and discontented Scots rather like those Venetians years ago.

Maybe it’s too much Prosecco, maybe it’s too much holiday , maybe it’s the rebel inside me that’s got provoked but I’m beginning to see the “yes” votes point of view quite vividly. If you have to choose between Ed, Nick and Dave or mad Alex and if you’re into a bit of excitement, well, you know where to go.

Scotland, if you do take this brave (reckless even) step to be alone, you can survive, indeed you will thrive if you take the Venetian route of building new foundations and pretty well starting from scratch.  My guess is the chill of the ballot booth will calm the urge for risk and there’ll be a “no” vote but we shall see.
But I think Roy Jenkins got it right years ago in 1959. Try this:

Colourfulthinkers.com

LET YOUR PEOPLE GO

Independence is in the air, you can smell the whiff of recession and of rebirth from Padua to Perth. There’s a restless mood of change. Crimea which represents just 5% of the Ukraine has gone home to mother Russia. Scotland is putting its gouty toe into the water of independence and dreaming of “Braveheart” and of Mel Gibson roaring “freedom”.

Just recently I’ve started taking the SNP quite seriously. This is partly because of the lacklustre campaign by the “No” team.  Although to be fair they do have a problem or two. The Tories amongst them know that independence for Scotland means virtually the end of the Socialist party so a large part of their minds would love it to happen. And a whole bunch of ‘schadenfreuders’ in England have a playground attitude of “let them go and see what happens…they’ll be sorry.”
It gets worse…the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Newcastle said compellingly this week that a “yes” vote would be fantastic for them with a migration of business from Scotland south.

But it isn’t any of that that interests me so much as a sense of curiosity as to whether the Scots as a whole, regardless of economic issues, would actually be happier being independent. Too small to survive I hear. Hmm. They’d be bigger than Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Luxembourg who are respectively number 1, 8, 5 and 10 in the “Happiest Nation Index” (the UK, by the way, is 16th).

And who ambitious wants either the been-there-seen-that status quo or the sense of being a small fish in a rather large and unfriendly pond?

Wouldn’t Wales and  Cornwall prefer to be independent – actually come to that wouldn’t London prefer it too – an independent London would be like Singapore only much, much more powerful? The biggest, richest glittery city in the world.

And I see now that Venice is at it, running a poll of ½ million people in the Veneto region of Italy,  voting to secede from the corruption of Rome and the hopeless poverty of the south of the country.

Then there’s Catalonia, Brittany and so it goes on. So it’s better to be independent and it’s better to be small is it? This seems to be the mood. Small is beautiful. Welcome back the apostle of the doctrine…

And that’s why there were 300,000 start-ups in the UK last year and already this year a further 120,000.

As regards size, business units of around 150 seem to be the perfect size. A size where there’s spirit, obsession and energy. This is where creativity seems to peak. Forget about scaling a business; a lot of business thinkers are beginning to wonder if big and bureaucratic isn’t just beastly and unwieldy.

Imagine countries with a population of 5m. and businesses of 150 employees? Maybe this really is the future rather than corporations of thousands or Shanghai’s of 20 million.

This …. and, of course, that bit of freedom.

THE POISON OF XENOPHOBIA

No, this is not an attack on UKIP, who will carry on muttering their stuff regardless of me and be very happy, on their own, in a pub with locked doors.

No, it’s a reflection on the dangers I see in isolationism and resistance to change.  It seems entirely possible that we could soon have a resignation and a divorce pretty well all at once with Britain saying goodbye to Europe and Scotland saying goodbye to Britain.

All done and dusted, we’d be proudly on our own.

But why stop there? Let’s ditch everything apart from London and the South East. We’re roughly 40 % of the UK and twice as rich as the rest. A £1.5 trillion gated community of an economy and no need to worry about Labour or Liberals anymore or those strange Northern accents or greyhounds or pies or the Co-op. Burn the cloth cap and build another runway or two at Heathrow and who needs HS2? We’ll spend it on skyscrapers instead.

Increasingly we’ll retreat indoors behind our PCs and read about the Bulgarian invasion of Scotland and laugh drily.  But weren’t we born to huddle together, laugh, drink and tell stories?  Weren’t we born to exchange views and change minds?  Aren’t we hard wired to work together?

I was asked today if I thought travelling broadened the mind. Not exactly, I reflected, it’s bigger than that. It explodes boundaries. Go to China or India and you see unimaginable scale, poverty, wealth, growth and a sheer sense of wonder and discovery in their eyes and through your own. These are places that are devouring a diet of change. They have infinite  horizons just as extraordinary and wide as Columbus saw.
Caitlin Moran lamented her London being stolen by a new rich foreign cadre who’ve taken it over. Yet I rejoice to hear people describe Mile End as trendy and smart. I’m amazed (happily) that Park Royal is cool – a sort of South Ealing without the ponce and that Clapham is the Chelsea of today.

Because there is only one poison more toxic than that of hating abroad and that’s the small ‘c’,  conservative resistance to change and hostility to ambition.

You know, the view that we can’t afford to do whatever it takes to get to the next level when all the evidence of history has consistently shown ambition, investment, drive and change has, nearly always, led to a better life. Isn’t that the lesson of the Olympics?

I realise how much I like being part of Scotland and how refreshing, foibles and all (and we’re good ones to talk) Europe is (from Greece to Sweden) and how good it is being a European citizen…..because here’s where I live.

Maybe we’ve got bored or gone mad but as Tom Peters once put it “you can’t shrink into greatness”.

Here’s hoping lots of people hear that.

I THINK I'LL START SMOKING AGAIN

When I heard Andrew Lansley saying he wanted to see the end of cigarettes altogether in the UK,           I had this strange urge to light up and start swearing (which, no doubt, he also wants to ban together with satire – and if you don’t like satire stop reading this now.)

The trend to engineering what we can do and can’t do is misguided. We’ll get fat, smoke, drink too much and die or we’ll just die. But in the end we’ve got to stop banning stuff like advertising, cigarettes and drugs because we (in authority) know better. I keep on saying that the old command and control model is dead. No-one listens. I think we should make not listening illegal.

When smoking was rationalised

We have a bunch of underemployed MPs all looking for good causes to espouse. At least “Ban the Bomb” was a big idea whereas “Ban the Fag” or “Ban the Bevvy” seems a bit pathetic. And “Ban the Belly Laugh” is worse. Check out the response to the current satirical front cover of the Economist in Scotland. Swift would not do well in modern Britain.

The spirit of satire is alive and well

It was after the riots last year that I heard someone on Saturday Live on Radio 4 say he blamed advertising for the riots (ban all advertising) because – and his voice lowered conspiratorially – “we know those advertisers’ little tricks don’t we?” As someone who spent a bit of my career in advertising…er no…what are they? …wish I’d known.

There’s a whole constituency of do-gooders out there determined to ban anything that people like which isn’t wholly good for them. Let’s go for butter and Barbie, let’s go for Nike and nicotine, let’s go for gambling and Glenfiddich.

I could foresee, were I not an incorrigible optimist about the good sense of most people, a world in 2020 where Tom Watson was Prime Minister, where we had no free press, no advertising, no butchers, no pubs, no cigarettes (smoking even in private carries a three year prison term), no brothels, no toy shops, no loud music, no fast cars and no fast food.

Rory Sutherland columnist and ad man told the story of Attaturk who wanted to modernise Turkey by stopping women from wearing the veil. Realising a ban was a bad idea he tried another way. He made it mandatory for prostitutes to wear the veil.

Silk Cut anyone?  Cheers.

 Alcoholic and racist – double top!