SteveStreeting.com

We hear a lot about globalisation these days; how money, people and business move freely around the world (although that has had a few teeny problems of late) and how countries must therefore compete in that market for investment, and ultimately jobs and economic success in general. Much of this is true and common sense, however, I do object to the tone and emphasis that is used whenever this argument is made. There seems to be a preference of late for attracting external players to flirt with local economies for as long as possible before they get bored and move somewhere cheaper, rather than focussing on organic growth of businesses from within the existing local entrepreneurial base. You can do both of course, but in recent years I’ve observed that here and in some other places in the world, the balance is strongly in favour of the short-term plan of courting of large, external players, versus the long-term prospects of ‘growing your own’.

Of course, inward investment is a good thing, but too often this investment isn’t in new local businesses, it’s simply about grafting a globally mobile business to the local economy for a while, usually as a result of some kind of sweetener (a tax break, a public private investment, etc).  It’s a ‘quick fix’, injecting money into the economy quickly (perhaps most importantly, within the time frame of a politician’s tenure), but when viewed at a macro scale it’s also very much a temporary one which can be pulled out at almost any time.

Global companies don’t even hide their temporary commitment; in fact, quite the opposite – they are always exploiting this to lobby governments into making changes which favour them, the line is usually “You’re dependent on us now, so you’d better keep things attractive for us (subtext: at the expense of others if necessary), or we walk.”. You see this all the time – the shrinking of the UK games industry because the UK doesn’t  have tax breaks like Canada, and here in my local jurisdiction the introduction of a tax regime which shifts the tax burden to ordinary people and away from companies in order to appease the financial services industry. In the end, being so dependent on such fickle and demanding ‘friends’ is not the greatest of strategies. At times, it can almost be a protection racket – “Nice economy you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” (see this Monty Python sketch).

Every economy needs a bedrock of locally-driven, independent entrepreneurship, made up of of people who do business in that economy because they want to, or because it’s their home, not because someone bribed them to bring their money here and are constantly looking for the next sweetener. There are countless success stories of businesses that went global from a local, organic base, such as Ben and Jerry’s and Specsavers, and these companies have kept their attachment to their origins. Such businesses are ‘stickier’ and less fickle, and I’m willing to bet they require only a tiny fraction of the overall cost (once you count tax breaks, subsidies, and other policy changes / deals) to attract and retain than an equivalently sized global player. It takes more time to get there, but when it does, it’s far less likely to be going anywhere.

I’m not suggesting that we somehow cling on to protectionism, nor do I deny the benefits of globalisation. What I am saying is that in my experience, the balance of policy making is way off in favour of the global players at the expense of others. Maybe if politicians weren’t so easily impressed by financiers in expensive suits with their short-term promises of wealth injection, and learned instead to see the long-term sustainable potential in that garage-dwelling startup, they’d be better at not skewing the economic landscape towards the ‘floaters’ rather than the ‘stayers’.

It’s actually why I shake my head when I see people claiming that the UK needs tax breaks for games companies, to compete with Canada and other places. Personally, I think that even if you gave a tax break to the companies that are relocating away from the UK because of this, they’d just be asking for something else next year. Where does the bribery end? I think that games companies that only go where the tax breaks are, are probably not worth trying to hold on to. I sincerely hope that the talented people who are sadly left out of a job because of this are able to start up or join independent game businesses of their own, and dare I say are likely to be a damn sight more creative in that environment too. The UK games industry has lost much of its individuality in recent years, and who knows, this process might well regain some of that.

So I guess my main point is that bribing and paying protection money is not a sustainable way to run an economy. Sounds obvious really?

Well, you’ve got to accept that Pope Benedict XVI isn’t afraid to tell people what he thinks.

The recent furore about his comments that the church should be exempt from UK equality laws, because it would “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs” is pretty chilling. Cue a shot of loads of people on the street with banners saying that Catholics should have the ‘freedom’ to discriminate against gay and transgender individuals because of their beliefs. The message: that strongly-held beliefs should exempt you from having to adhere to the same rules of equality as everyone else, and to discriminate against anyone you like so long as you believe it’s right, or that a book (or rather,  your interpretation of it) tells you that it’s ok.

I’m amazed that some people can’t see the blatantly obvious flaw in this argument. If strongly held beliefs were a viable excuse for treating other people badly, then most of the atrocities in the last century could be excused too, if the people committing them truly believed their doctrine of choice advocated it. Where’s the line? I suspect the answer is ‘wherever the Pope wants it to be’.

A bigot in a fancy robe and quoting doctrine is still a bigot. There is never any excuse for treating your fellow human beings as anything other than equals, and if your religion tells you otherwise, you might want to update your thinking by, I don’t know, maybe a couple of thousand years or so. The rest of society’s moved on a tad in that time, such us not hacking each other apart with swords, or burning people at the stake for curing the local donkey. Being a decent human being to other people regardless of their race/sexual orientation etc kinda came out of that whole transition – you might want to give it a shot sometime.

I’ve watched with some entertainment the latest round of scraps across the pond about health care, which has now turned into a Brit-bashing exercise. Apparantly the NHS is ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Evil’ (allegedly that particular accusation was from the eminent scholar and international expert Sarah Palin) according to the American right-wing – which, when perceived from this side of the Atlantic constitutes most of the political spectrum compared to what is considered centrist here – all of which is news to most people in Britain, barring the usual suspects on the fringes of the Conservative party that their own leader would like to disown, but who always turn up on American TV because no-one listens to them over here.

I live in a Crown Dependency which unfortunately doesn’t benefit from the NHS, and frankly I’d love to have it over here, instead of paid-for primary care and state-run specialist care as we have (I’ve spent an awful lot of money on physios and doctors over the years). My parents moved back to the mainland a few years back and have had nothing but positive experiences with the NHS since; when we were visiting, my Mum was taken ill late at night and an NHS doctor was on the scene at her home within 45 minutes, all for no charge – something you would pay through the nose for here. It’s not perfect, but frankly IMO anyone who considers it optimal to have profit interests involved in the process of saving lives is either smoking something, or has a vested interest.

But, regardless of your point of view, it’s the blatant lies which are most amusing. My favourite is this quote from the editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, a national American financial newspaper:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,”

For goodness sakes, who writes this nonsense? Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life, and has hit back himself at this article explaining that he’s around today precisely because of the NHS, not despite it. Clearly facts are irrelevant when it comes to reinforcing your personal point of view. They’ve tried to take it back, but it just makes them look a little more stupid, especially casually tossing the word ‘Colony’ in there to somehow bolster the emotive side of the argument (taking speech tips from Mugabe now? not smart). Stephen Hawking was ‘a bad example’? In other words, they’re just making it up.

We all know that the economy is badly screwed. And this isn’t just some country-specific problem, it’s economic buggery on a global scale, thanks to the wonders of a joined-up international banking system run by people who thought they were a lot smarter than they actually were. “Gold rushes” always collapse eventually, it’s just that in this case the gold rush knew no national boundaries and when it ended, everyone is left with a hangover, even (or perhaps even especially) the people that didn’t benefit stratospherically from the good times.

It’s already getting ugly, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Like a lot of people, I’m outraged with those that drove this particular bubble to such a bursting point; I’ve always been sensible financially – I only buy things I know I can afford, I make sure I have appropriate plans in the event of bad times, etc, and now I’m paying for other people’s folly anyway. I refused to participate in the Internet bubble in the late 90′s too, knowing full well that it was built on hype and lies – and despite offers to get involved in the booming sector, it just felt wrong to start jumping into something I knew would fall apart at any minute as soon as people woke up and smelled the coffee. Basically, if I wouldn’t invest money in something, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand there and encourage others to do so, just because we might have a fun ride for a few months. It’s immoral. But, that’s exactly what the supposedly reputable banking sector has been doing for the past few years.

I was annoyed by the Intenet bubble too, that the sector I worked in was crippled for a while by people who didn’t (or refused to) acknowledge that what most of them were doing was total, unsustainable nonsense. The difference that time was that at least it was mostly confined to one sector, to the people that screwed up (although some of us also got dragged into it too). This time of course, everyone suffers.

But, the scale of the repercussions of the utter financial folly of the last few years may have one positive effect – to force people to consider the sustainability of what they do, and to hold others to account in the same way. Short-term thinking, get rich quick schemes, the dream of that ‘one big break’ – all these things are distractions, glittery diamonds dangled just out of your reach that more often than not simply lead you directly over a cliff. I personally think that if people put more thought into how they might positively contribute to the world around them in the long term (as well as making a living of course), and less about how they might be able to get on the cover of Forbes or Hello, or wangle the purchase of yet another unnecessary status symbol, they’d actually be much happier, and we’d all benefit.

The culture of worshipping celebrity, coveting great wealth, chasing the high life – it’s a mirage and entirely void of substance. The few that do make the transition to that kind of life (especially in the public eye) often turn into emotional train-wrecks along the way anyway, so quite why this is a laudable goal is beyond me. Better to aim for real, practical and substantial goals – such as a decent living,  being happy, and preferably doing something with your life that you can feel content with (or even proud of), in a way that doesn’t require that you put a monetary figure on it before you can justify the time you spent doing it.

Maybe facing the reality of the folly that caused this economic recession/depression will trigger some people to reassess their priorities a little. If not, then it’s all been for nothing, and the only legacy will be a small bunch of people having gotten rich on the back of crippling the rest of the world for years afterwards, and the whole thing will be repeated in a decade or so once everyone’s forgotten. I’d rather not think that’s the end result.

I generally don’t stay up late into the night to watch things live, such as Formula 1 or the Oscars. However, I did stay up until almost 3am this morning watching the US election results come in, only going to bed when Ohio declared for Obama, pretty much guaranteeing he was going to win (it’s a crucial swing state) – at the same time unofficial predictions were that Florida and New Mexico were going his way too, making it pretty much unassailable. Of course in the end, Obama won by 349 electoral college votes to McCain’s 162, which makes it officially a landslide.

I’m tired as hell, but happy. I wasn’t around when JFK was elected (or when he was assassinated), or when Dr King made his speech (or when he was assassinated too – let’s hope this isn’t a pattern), but I feel I have just witnessed an important moment in US history which ranks alongside, and perhaps even above those seminal moments.

I’ve never had any desire to live in America but just for this one moment, I envy those who do. There are tough times ahead for sure, but the majority who voted for this change deserve to enjoy this moment.

Please don’t inflict another 4 years of clueless right-wing government on yourselves and the rest of the world.

McCain might seem like a change from Bush, but have you noticed how much his previously independent rhethoric has changed since becoming the republican nominee? He’s towing the establishment line more and more, and becoming more of a negative compaigner by the day. And anyone who picks Sarah Palin as a running mate needs their head examined.

If the best line he has is to pull out the old “my opponent is a socialist” rhetoric then it shows the desperation in the republican camp. I know America is staunchly capitalist and more right-wing than Europe, even Britain, but if you hold the ‘American Dream’ as your benchmark, you need to recognise that a land of opportunity does not truly exist if the odds are already stacked in the favour of those belonging to favourable socio-ecomonic groups. If the lion’s share of opportunities are only accessible to those who start high enough up the ladder to afford a good education and standard of living from day 1, it’s not opportunity, it’s a class system by proxy – one only a fortunate few will break out of. McCain talks about wealth creation, but seems to ignore that the best way to create the most wealth is to give everyone the best chance of raising themselves up to a good standard of living, not just a select few, and that requires social investment – tax cuts for those who have already ‘made it’ do not create anywhere near as much wealth overall. But that’s not what people in the top 2% earnings threshold want to hear of course, which increasingly seems to be the group the republicans are representing.

It’s your choice, I hope for all our sakes you make it wisely.