Scotland
in the
heat
John Cameron
I thought it hilarious when Goldman’s global boss Lloyd Blankfein, in the midst of the carnage, claimed bankers were simply performing ‘God’s work’. It really does capture their sense of entitlement and helps to explain how the bonus culture took such hold of their industry. And despite attempts to curb the excess, bankers around the world have continued to defend their perceived right to absurdly high pay.
Yet though banking has been around for centuries, it is only in the past few decades that it has become such a hugely lucrative job. The wave of financial-sector deregulation was the main driving force – allied with new technology that allowed trading around the clock in all corners of the globe.
Bankers pounced on these new opportunities and during the Gordon Brown era new jobs appeared in highly complex fields which baffled the regulators. These innovative activities gave the whole financial sector super-normal profits which enabled staff to claim simply mind-bending rewards.
The problem with this scenario is that super-pay led to super-confidence and excessive risk-taking with consequences which are only too obvious.
Politicians hoped that banker rewards would revert to normal when Brown’s boom turned to bust but that is not happening. The problem is that much of the financial industry continues to prosper and investment banks have proved to be surprisingly resilient.
In the past year they have been bulking up their bond trading desks to cater to the huge amounts of government debt sloshing around. Yet any rational person can see that much of the mystique associated with working in the markets is a self-serving nonsense.
The red-braces brigade may feel they are worth what they are paid, but for every one of them there are several others who could do the job just as well.
One reason they get away with it is that the market for the most lucrative part – the bonus – is not open to the same degree of competition as regular salary. Bankers only compete with their colleagues for a bonus from a pre-allocated pool and outsiders who would do the same job for less do not get a look in.
After the financial carnage, insane banker performance-bonuses should have become a thing of the past but do not hold your breath.
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The day I became
a rock on a
Union Street pavement
Bruce Gardner
There is a tide in the affairs of men (mainly old men) in which, in a last-ditch attempt to save our precious, youthful ideals from ending unfulfilled, we try to stop the world.
It is perhaps more marked in the baby-boomer generation than in others, for we are the generation that was born, screaming, into the electoral wards of post-war social change with our terrible twin: idealism. We are the children of the welfare state and educational opportunity, who saw a great expansion of traditional social expectations during the 1960s. We gaped at those rock-and-rollers and folk-singers who cheekily took over popular culture in a way unthinkable to previous generations. For older folk, it must have seemed as if court jesters had taken over the throne while, for us young idealists, the future seemed bright: the empire fell and politics shifted left.
To illustrate change from personal experience, let me cite contrasting events from my youth. The first is being strapped with a leather belt for forgetting to bring my hymn-book to my secondary school morning assembly. Behind the assembly hall’s velvet curtain, I winced at the repeated strokes of a malignant, eagle-eyed teacher. On the other side of the curtain, 600 adolescent males, encouraged by the sound of thrashing and muffled yelps of pain, enthusiastically chorused ‘All things bright and beautiful’.
It was not that my punisher or even my school had any great devotion to Christianity: religion was just the velvet glove over the iron fist of authority, used to dominate a compliant population. Conformity was a convenient tool for controlling our behaviour. This hypocritical idol was toppled by a social revolution and brought crashing down. The fact that institutional Christianity was so willingly abused was a historic crime, still unforgiven by many, who sentenced the religion to be ostracised.
The second event from my youth took place in Union Street, Aberdeen, on the city’s mile-long, main thoroughfare, in 1964. I owned a transistor radio, a chunky, early version of modern pocket radios. It sat in my inside jacket pocket, with a thin wire that ran up my shoulder to an ear-plug. On this occasion, I listened to pop music on a school day, just strolling along the busy street at lunchtime. Crowds swirled past me and I flowed along with them. That was what you had to do then. To stand still was called ‘loitering’ and, if a policeman took an ill will at you, all he had to do was to describe you standing there as ‘loitering with intent’ and you crossed a line from being a mere social irritation to a criminal. This is not imaginary: youth in my city were routinely moved on and dared not complain.
During this particular lunchtime, however, I heard a new song by a new American folk singer called Bob Dylan and its lyrics halted me abruptly. ‘The times, they are a-changing’ just summed up all that I sensed was happening around me but had not managed to express – the decaying, dead hand of unquestioned authority, the fear of many parents to sniff the winds of change. Everything. I stood there, loitering with intent amid the ceaseless crowds.
When I stopped, I became immediately conscious of peril, for, as the crowds passed, several people looked disapprovingly at this youth, stolid as an inconvenient rock on the pavement.
Our institutions – though hindered by the dragging anchors of the class system and degraded by the new, substitute orthodoxy of materialism –
are capable of social change, even if by degrees.
The eyes seemed to question my stance and the familiar urge to move on was pressing. Yet I stayed fixed, for Dylan’s vivid song was rocking my world with a crystallising awareness that the bad old days were finished.
It did not matter what control freaks said or did. So I stayed, defiantly static, believing the truth of the sung prophecy, which predicted the end of crowds that dared not stop and think. To me, it was the end of craven days – moved on or thrashed by powers with feet of moral clay.
For all that initial exhilaration, the social revolution we boomers yearned for did not dawn in fullness. So, towards the end of our idealistic lives, the bastions of privilege we expected to see swept away are still there, modified but unbowed. Westminster politicians are often still being cloned from the incestuous top drawer. Private Eye referred to this in its Golden Jubilee issue, as a wry comment on the effectiveness of its satire.
When it started, in 1961, it was faced with an Old Etonian prime minister and a cabinet of well-heeled cronies. In 2011, the situation was…unchanged. During that half-century, also, many of our revolutionary musical heroes, those rock and folk giants who wanted to be more popular than God, have either swirled down the toilet pan of history in an ironic, aristocratic cliché of drugs, violence and excess, or look as wizened as their elderly fans. It could easily sound as if nothing had been achieved.
The temptation for an old boomer and disappointed idealist is to become a cynic. To cynics, not only does one swallow of good news not make a summer, but each passing crow of tragedy heralds a grouchy Gotterdammerung of well-deserved doom. Such a pessimistic outlook is not only counter-productive, it denies the real social changes of last century. We are no longer scared of our own shadows, nor as paralysed by bogus authority, as we once were. In addition, from a historical perspective, despite recent economic set-backs, some social mobility is evident.
My great-grandfather turned out shuttles in a mill in Lanarkshire; my grandfather became a printer to trade and my father a precision engineer; I went to university, became a teacher, then a cleric, while my children have all had some form of higher education and wish the same for their own children. Educationally and economically, each generation travelled its own distance, without despising its humble origins.
Social mobility is happening and if we decry that, we only serve the interests of those who want to keep the status quo.
Two historic legacies of the 60s remain very bright for me. First, there is the real freedom, bestowed on me by Dylan’s song, of not having to follow the crowd but look for change. Our institutions – though hindered by the dragging anchors of the class system and degraded by the new, substitute orthodoxy of materialism – are capable of social change, even if by degrees. This need not make us complacent: evil must be resisted. Yet, it does recommend persistent optimism, even in the face of tragedy.
The final legacy of the 60s, for me, is a sense of wonder at life itself, a pure, tensile hope, woven through all my imperfectly-realised ideals, which is incapable of being controlled or crushed by even the most ingenious of manipulators. The light of life is inextinguishable, illuminating the truth that shadows will not have dominion over it.
Facing reality, then, I look back in appreciation, without anger, and forward in faith.
Bruce Gardner is a writer and commentator
