Sunday 9 July 2017

Quaking No More

I suppose it is not a coincidence that when an idea begins to beset you, you see echoes of it everywhere you look. Certainly, following my repeated epiphanies about modern life and the importance of kindness as a major element in everything that is done in a society, I seem to see reflections of this preoccupation wherever I look.

For instance, I picked up the 20 April, 2017 London Review of Books yesterday and began to read an article in it, written by James Meek. I thought the article was going to be about Poland. It was, in a way, but it was more about Europe - and more still about the way business is done these days across the globe.

In the article, Meek examines the decision by Cadbury's to send all the jobs in Somerdale - a town just east of Bristol that was set up by the company for its employees in 1923 - to Poland. To explore this subject, Meek has to go back to the past and explain how things were done in earlier days.

He begins, in fact, with the original decision to move to Somerdale, which was made almost one hundred years ago. Like the Cadbury company's other famous move, to Bournville, and Joseph Rowntree's production shift from York to Haxby, the move to Somerdale was not a matter of

"mere efficiency and tech upgrades ... The Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families were successful capitalist industrialists, but they were also Quakers, bound to care for the welfare of their employees. In the high Victorian age it was still possible to see a potential harmony between Quaker ideals of simplicity, temperance, pacifism and charity and the handsome profits made by Quaker companies like Barclay's and Lloyd's banks ... for decades the Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families seemed to achieve a particularly successful synthesis of profitable capitalism and private, paternalistic welfare. At Haxby Road, Bournville and later Somerdale, there was subsidised housing, healthcare and sports facilities ... The Quaker chocolate magnates wanted their factories to be handsome as well as functional. They wanted them to be surrounded by green spaces. They cared how their works appeared to God, their workers, their peers and their neighbours. Their ideology of practical, aesthetic social justice, formed at the confluence of fundamentalist Protestantism, capitalism, socialism and the Victorian fascination with an idealised medieval England, was both contradictory and, to many contemporaries, inspiring."

Sadly, Meek goes on to say that not only did prosperity encourage Cadbury's Quaker leaders to abandon some of their observances, leading in the end to the flotation of Cadbury-Fry on the stock market in 1962, which resulted in the business no longer being a Quaker venture, but also that, in a peculiar way, the enterprise's moral elements contained the seeds of their own destruction - or at least the moral elements were first admired and then separated from their religious underpinnings and taken up by politicians, leading to a depersonalisation, once individual conscience was no longer involved:

"As much as worldly success, however it was the success of their ideals that sped the decline of the crusading wing of Quaker capitalism. Many of the liberal and socialist ideas the Rowntrees, Cadburys and Fry campaigned for, and tried to implement on a small scale, were taken up by the unions, by the Labour movement, and eventually implemented by the state. This was good and necessary, but had its downside. The counterpart to the great privatisation of the British economy of the past forty years is the great nationalisation of culture that occurred much earlier, when swathes of life that had been covered patchily, erratically, unfairly and archaically by religion, private employers, local custom, charities, local committees of worthies and the unreliable benevolence of the rich - education, healthcare, pensions, safety at work, women and children's rights - began to be provided universally by government. It was a triumph. But it also marked a critical stage in the depersonalisation of institutional culture. It made it easier for companies whose owners have no interest in the cultural weight of the enterprises they control - who see such ideas as history, place, community, aesthetics and paternalism and outmoded obstacles to efficiency - to act as if they operate in a space outside culture, even as their decisions radically transform it."

Meek goes on to outline how Cadbury's is now run with an eye on absolutely nothing but profit and the aim of increasing that further and further. He mentions a non-executive director who left Cadbury with £40 million in pay, pension and cashed in shares, after the company was swallowed up by a multinational, and he describes how the decision to move the Somerdale operation was taken when "the board was coming under fierce pressure from Cadbury's big shareholders, particularly the hedge fund partner Nelson Peltz and his Qatar sovereign wealth fund investors, to deliver fatter returns on their investment". He goes into far more detail than I will here (the article is worth reading for that added detail, if you have the time) and admits that:

"in this case, the EU had let the people of Keynsham [the town closest to Somerdale] down badly. 'How many billion pounds did it cost us?' Radford [the Unite union representative at Somerdale] asked of the new factory in Skarbimierz [the place in Poland it was shifted to], 'Because it's in the middle of nowhere. They had to do all the roads, all the infrastructure, and that was all paid for through our donations.' ... In the end, by one route or another, much of the money came from the EU, and although the biggest share would have come from Germany, as the EU's biggest net donor, the next largest would have come from Britain ... not only did the EU pay for much of the infrastructure that enabled Cadbury to shut down its English factory and move it to Poland; it signed off on a massive financial inducement for Cadbury to go.'"

Meek himself would have liked the Remain vote to win in the EU referendum but recognises that these kinds of transactions give the EU a very bad name.

I don't want to get into that argument right now. My current preoccupation is with improving the way humans behave towards each other more generally. In that context, what strikes me most about Meek's story is the desire for profit at any cost, with no thought for moral or social consequences, and the role in events of shadowy figures divorced entirely from the people their decisions affect - hedge fund partners, wealth fund investors. The passage that resonates above all, the one that contains the kernel of where we have gone wrong, I think, is this one:

"It [where "it" is the shift of a sense of duty and moral responsibility for the care of workers from individual businesses and business people to the impersonal entity that is government] made it easier for companies whose owners have no interest in the cultural weight of the enterprises they control - who see such ideas as history, place, community, aesthetics and paternalism as outmoded obstacles to efficiency - to act as if they operate in a space outside culture, even as their decisions radically transform it."

It seems to me that we very, very urgently need a worldwide movement that mirrors the erstwhile "crusading wing of Quaker capitalism" and a reintroduction (or, in most cases, just an introduction) of the attitude of that group's members among business leaders everywhere:

"They cared how their works appeared to God, their workers, their peers and their neighbours. Their ideology of practical, aesthetic social justice, formed at the confluence of fundamentalist Protestantism, capitalism, socialism and the Victorian fascination with an idealised medieval England, was both contradictory and, to many contemporaries, inspiring."

The fascination with an idealised medieval England could probably be left out of the recipe, but in other respects I think we could do worse. It is absolutely wrong that the lives of many blameless people in Britain have been profoundly altered - and not for the better - by a combination of a "lumbering supranational bureaucracy" and the greed of wealthy investors in Qatar. Unless there is a radical change in perspective and philosophy, so that wealth is not admired or regarded as a mark of success unless it is accompanied by a strong and incontestable commitment social justice, European civilisation - or whatever tattered remnants remain of it - is doomed.

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