Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (19 page)

“Why not?” I asked.

“Got no manners these days.”

I could understand Byrne and the inspector’s point of view. Why shield the young from the harsh realities of the world? Better to get them used to the grim truths of victory and defeat, or acceptance and rejection, at a young age. Let them develop the calluses on their little souls which will protect them from life’s abrasions. Then they will approach adulthood hardened and invulnerable. It worked for Sparta.

I put this to Miss Marple. “Quite so. But I wonder what you think Mr Byrne’s garden is like, dear.”

“His garden?”

“A mess, I shouldn’t wonder. Unless he’s guilty of the same weak-mindedness of which he accuses others.”

“How does that follow?”

Miss Marple put down her knitting. “Well, he wouldn’t see the point in keeping it tidy or pleasant, would he? He would have no appetite for the Sisyphean task of nurture, cultivation, weeding, watering, mowing, replanting. He’d see them as a denial of nature’s realities. If something cannot grow and prosper amid such wildness, then it must rightly perish. He must perceive a truer beauty in all-conquering bramble and convolvulus, or count himself a hypocrite.”

“But, Miss Marple, he
is
a hypocrite!” I exclaimed. “By his own admission. He confessed that he’d keep his own son in the team, whether or not he was good enough. ‘The only reason I am coaching is for him to be able to play,’ he said.”

“And you think that makes him a hypocrite?”

“Of course.”

“Because he protects his own son?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I’m only an old lady but it seems to me that you could just as easily argue that, by his own reasoning, he is sacrificing his son for the greater good. Denying his child the vital hardening effect of a merciless under-10 footballing environment purely in order to expose the others to the sort of unashamed nepotism they’ll have to confront in later life.”

“So he’s an unfit parent?”

“Quite possibly but, by his own standards, an exemplary coach. No, it is to his garden you must look to prove him hypocritical. And to his outrageous association of communism with knitting, for which I find it impossible to forgive the man.”

“But what I don’t understand, Miss Marple, is how any of this helps with the mystery of politics.”

“Oh yes, of course – I’m so sorry, you must think me terribly opaque. Well, what was said, after he was dismissed?”

Steve Fowler, a spokesman for the club, had said: “This is a friendly village football club that just wants to get as many children playing football as possible, and make sure they have fun doing it.”

“There speaks a gardener,” said Miss Marple.

I was just about to call a nurse when I thought I’d ask one last time for Miss Marple to explain.

“Yes, I may be using too many metaphors – they’ve got me on new tablets,” she confided. “But what I’m trying to say is that all politics is contained within this. It’s like the child in the third world that you sponsor in order to give charitable donations a comprehensible human scale. Well, in a similar way, this football club gives the conflict between the left and right wing a comprehensible human scale.

“Do you believe that the world is cruel and unchangeable and that we must defer to and prepare for that, as Byrne does? Or do you think, like Mr Fowler, that we can remake the world as we would like it to be – that everyone can play football together? That’s the only real question, dear. When you have answered it, you will have solved the mystery.”

Credit, collateral, equity, market confidence, economic growth, sovereign debt – these are all weird, intangible concepts that we've become obsessed with. There have genuinely been days when I've gone online and looked up the price of the euro, or the rise and fall of the FTSE, just in the hope of calming myself down about the possibility of global financial collapse. It doesn't always work. These are statistics I don't understand and can't affect, but have nevertheless come to care about and follow obsessively, like a gloomy but weirdly addictive soap opera in a foreign language.

In a time of want, we all become interested in where the remaining money is going, and who's doing well amid the ruins. This wealth-fixated chapter explores anger at a highly paid teacher, the justification for stratospherically paid executives, how a little cash goes a long way in politics, a plutocrat banker's embarrassment at conspicuous consumption, and some unhealthy ideas for having fun on a budget. Save thinking about those less fortune than yourself for Christmas. The rest of the year is devoted to the livid contemplation of the arseholes who've got the cream (to quote the caption from an anal sex video screengrab).

Not everyone is screwed by the credit crunch. Every cloud has a silver lining, every repossession requires the employment of several bailiffs, suicide attempts keep nurses in work and on each pile of rotting, bloated corpses is a swarm of plump rats.

Or, to put it another way: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” Well, as any drinks manufacturer will tell you, you don't need lemons to make lemonade. Neither do you need meat to make a doner-kebab-flavour Pot Noodle. Apparently this new addition to the Pot Noodle range is practically vegan.

Excellent! At last, vegans are being extended the same opportunities to get hooked on cheap junk food as the rest of society. But lemon-free lemonade and meat-flavoured starchy string are exactly the sort of products that are selling at the moment. Everyone is blowing what little spare money they have on crap treats. McDonald's sales are rising; Pontins is expanding; people are looking for the sensation of wasting money, on a budget.

Why piss away a fiver on a latte and an almond croissant when you'll get a similar buzz from a can of Tizer and a battered sausage and have change from two quid? Plus the taste of your treat is nostalgically reawakened every time you burp for the next 36 hours.

Budget foods are flying off supermarket shelves (that's genetically modified chicken for you), bookmakers are prospering – presumably because lots of unemployed bankers are trying to keep their hands in – and the number of people doing the pools has risen for the first time since the launch of the National Lottery, for which ticket sales have also increased. So we can expect brand new opera houses and art galleries to spring up everywhere, which is nice because they'll be somewhere for all the homeless to sleep.

There are green shoots all over the place, though most of them are green because they died so long ago they've gone mouldy. So, in that spirit of optimism, here are some of the businesses that have managed to buck the downward trend.

With factories closing, hundreds of disused sites need guarding around the clock. But while all this property is falling into disuse, thousands are being made homeless. “We just took those two wrongs and made a right!” says Homeless Security's managing director. “The simple fact is that if there's already a gang of homeless sleeping in a disused factory, another gang isn't going to move in. So, on behalf of the administrators called in to wind up failed companies, we source a bunch of relatively tidy tramps to keep the place occupied. They're as dependable as guard dogs and cheaper, since the cider we pay them with costs less than Pedigree Chum.”

“If I had to sum up my product in five words,” says their chief executive who doesn't, “it would be ‘Brandy Alexander in a can'. It's sophisticated, it's sugary and, if you use reconstituted pig lard instead of dairy fat, it's incredibly cheap to make. We're living through difficult times – people are hungry, stressed, they want to forget. Drinking five or six Ice Cold Alexes on the trot may not be what a doctor would advise, but my God it gets you through the day.” And investors all want a piece of it. An investment analyst explains why: “Everybody knows that alcoholism is a problem, everybody knows that obesity is a problem, but this company is unique in having fully monetised both phenomena. I suppose everyone else must have been too fat or drunk to think of it.”

Formerly the BBC complaints department, this was outsourced and is now a thriving independent company. They're proud of what they've achieved: “The whole complaints procedure needed streamlining. The rigmarole of getting feedback, reading it,
evaluating its content and then responding was ridiculous in this day and age. Clearly we needed to get from tabloid-induced complaint frenzy to abject backtracking apology in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. That's what the licence-fee payer has a right to expect.

“We're building great relationships with our media partners, whereby newspaper editors can let us know in advance what they're going to tell people to be appalled by, with an estimate of the number of complaints that will generate, and then we just email the appropriate WESWEE [media slang for a ‘We're Sorry We Even Exist' statement] to the DG's BlackBerry.”

The collapse in TV and newspaper advertising has created a boom in the public-safety-campaign industry. “Suddenly all this advertising space is going cheap, and we've secured the government contract to provide the content,” explains their head creative, who, pre-crunch, pulled down a six-figure salary inventing the names of friendly bacteria. “The days of ‘Look out for motorcyclists when turning right' are behind us. It's got to be edgy, sexy: ‘Taking drugs is like six different versions of you pissing each other off'; ‘A stroke is a fire in your brain'; or ‘If you break the speed limit you will hallucinate dead ginger children.' This is the Green Cross Code for the
Skins
generation. At the moment, we're working on an anti-gambling campaign which implies that it turns your head into a roulette wheel, meaning that, given time, your brain stem snaps. It uses a lot of CGI. We also do photos of corpses for fag packets.”

Founded five months ago, the company already has four small factories turning domestic cats, which people can no longer afford to keep, into hot-dog sausages. “Animal rights loonies have
claimed that we put the cats into the grinder live. I utterly reject that allegation – they're given a lethal flavourising injection first,” asserts their head of PR. “I just love the irony. People talk about ‘eating a dog' when in fact it's cat!”

And looking to the future? “We're hoping to throw some gerbils and goldfish into the mix – as soon as we can get the calibration right on the mincer. The last thing anyone wants is a whole eye coming through.”

“Don't mention the crunch!” hissed the manic hotelier behind the backs of the party of diners from Goldman Sachs. “I mentioned it just now but I think I got away with it!”

That's the sort of thing senior bank employees might have to endure in the coming decades. Top bankers are the new Germans. And the sooner we get to the point where we're making jokes about the outrages committed in their name, the better. We haven't got there yet.

There's a fascinating podcast from the US public radio show
This American Life
about the causes of the credit crunch. It points out that what everyone in the banking sector always says about the financial crisis is that no one saw it coming. As Ira Glass, the host of the programme, puts it: “The recent collapse of the financial system has been described as a 100-year flood, a perfect storm, a force of nature. And it is so frustrating to hear it described that way – as something that happened to Wall Street instead of something that Wall Street brought on itself.”

The show then tells the story of a hedge fund called Magnetar whose business plan is as villainous as its name. The people who ran it realised that the US property bubble was going to burst and found a way both of inflating it further and betting that it would pop. Consequently, they made a fortune when it did.
They were aided and abetted by various bankers who, while nominally employed to represent the best interests of customers and shareholders, were actually rewarded for the number of deals they struck rather than their ultimate soundness.

It's a lamentable tale of the sort that the US Senate grilled Goldman Sachs executives about. I think most of us suspected that this kind of thing was going on, but hearing the details is riveting and maddening. Whether or not these business practices were strictly legal, wrong has been done here. Bankers personally took home vast sums of money – sums they still have – exacerbating a problem that has cost the world's taxpayers trillions to try to fix.

That money has effectively been stolen from us by people who, if Goldman Sachs and Magnetar are anything to go by, show very few signs of being sorry. It is, of course, fruitless to expect corporations to be moral – they are dumbly, amorally acquisitive – but the people who work for them are morally culpable. In these cases, they weren't even working in the interests of the banks that employed them, but stacking up bonuses for themselves by selling dodgy financial instruments while concealing from their customers that operators like Magnetar had induced the creation of these instruments purely to bet on their eventual worthlessness.

We're all living with the consequences of these actions – that's why bankers are like the Germans 60 years ago: they are collectively blamed for bringing disaster on the world. The analogy, like all historical analogies, is imperfect – the financial crisis has not had a comparable human cost to the two world wars – but it works in several ways. Like the Germans, not all the bankers knew what was going on. Others opposed it or went along with it grudgingly because they were in an environment where they felt they had no alternative. But others were the bad guys. They did terrible things – things that have hurt millions of people – for personal gain.

Europe's recovery after the second world war – its ability to forgive and rebuild the country that had done so much harm – relied on the fact that the vast majority of Germans were genuinely contrite. The American taxpayer poured money into West Germany to put it on its feet, just as taxpayers have done with the banking sector. It was the right thing to do in both cases, but only in the former was it received with the heartfelt apologies and thanks necessary to offset future resentment.

It's vitally important that the banking sector fully acknowledges its wrongdoing. It's not enough for it to say: “Sorry we didn't see the crash coming, but no one did.” That's not a real apology and it's a lie; some people did see it coming, but used that knowledge to worsen and profit from it. The fact that the banking profession was so ethically detached from the rest of society that this behaviour seemed reasonable needs to be addressed, because the creation of a culture in which evil acts appear normal is what happened under the Nazis.

I don't hate capitalism – it broadly works. But it only works, and society only functions, because humans are basically moral creatures. When we do wrong, we believe in remorse and forgiveness – in that order. Our politicians have failed to extract this remorse from bankers because they've been too busy blaming each other for the handling of the crisis. But that's like Chamberlain squabbling with Halifax over who was more responsible for the second world war; at worst, the politicians are accessories.

Unless the bankers are penitent, the German parallels are uncomfortably closer to 1919 than 1945. Like the financial crisis, the first world war didn't have clearcut goodies and baddies. All the countries involved must take some of the blame for the wholesale slaughter, just as feckless borrowers and shortsighted finance ministers contributed to the crunch. But Germany wanted that war and conspired to ignite it, just as Magnetar did
the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It was more Germany's fault than any other country's.

In the muddle and fudge of Versailles, the victorious allies forgot to win that argument. And tragically, as a result of an armistice being declared rather than the war fought to an unconditional surrender, many Germans were left with the illusion – one that Hitler exploited – that they hadn't been defeated in the war but betrayed from within. This wasn't true. The German army was thoroughly beaten.

We mustn't let the bailout of the banks be the equivalent of that armistice. The fact that banks still exist, bankers must realise, is despite rather than because of their actions. They failed utterly – morally and economically – and their continued employment is by our collective grace. Its continuance should be conditional on their taking the blame for what they did. Otherwise, the economic recovery could be as uncertain and transitory as the inter-war peace.

“Who's the richest person in the world?” That's a question I often asked as a small child. Do children ask that because so many of the stories they get read involve gold? Maybe it's peculiar to my generation, which was learning its times tables as Thatcher came to power. Or maybe I was an unusually mercenary little shit. I don't think so, though. In the good times, we admire people with money; in the bad, we resent them, but they're always interesting.

I wanted the richest person in the world to be the Queen. It suited my juvenile sense of fairytale hierarchy. To a child's mind, a world where a nerdy American in a jumper and glasses or a podgy Saudi in a sheet can outspend the posh lady in the big gold coach wearing the big gold hat is a world gone mad.