Credit crunch? Non!

Amidst the current financial turmoil, there is one major economy that seems to be emerging relatively unscathed – France, according to this report by the BBC.

It points out that France is a fiscally conservative nation – the French simply take fewer financial risks, their banks invest more cautiously, and personal credit is much more tightly controlled.  Home ownership is lower than in the Anglo-Saxon economies, and home-buyers tend to be older.  They certainly need a much bigger deposit.  All this means that it’s very difficult for French individuals to spend money they don’t have.

Growth, of course, is relatively slow in France and individuals are feeling the impact of rising prices – especially of food and oil – as much as anyone else.  And France can hardly be completely isolated from events in the rest of the world. But, watching the world financial system crash and burn, the French might be forgiven the feeling that they know something that the rest of the world appears to have forgotten.

Our friends in the city: why the Tories have nothing to say

It has been fascinating over the last few weeks to watch the whole edifice of market capitalism unravelling.  There is of course a huge inevitability about it all – an entire system of world finance built on gambling and greed disintegrating.  Others have written far more eloquently than I could about the spectacle, although the sight of the advocates of the market with their hands out to the state has certainly indicated the shameless greed and hypocrisy of these people. 

I’m more interested now in picking up on some of the issues in domestic British politics.

Hedge funds and Tory funds

Not the least entertaining spectacle of the last few weeks has been the desperate attempt by the Conservative Party in the UK to avoid criticising the out-of-control financial institutions at the heart of the current crash.   One by one, Tory leaders have said that we shouldn’t criticise the bankers.  David Cameron says it won’t save a single job.  Boris Johnson says we must protect the reputation of the City of London. Only now, with evidence of the backlash in the United States against the banking community, is George Osborne apparently willing to state that the banking community should take its share of the responsibility.

Here’s the reason why.  A piece in the Times shows that hedge fund managers deeply involved in short-selling (i.e. gambling with your pension) are among the Tory Party’s largest donors, with regular personal access to David Cameron.   Are these people really going to let a future Tory government undertake the sort of large scale regulation of the financial markets that the current situation requires?  In whose interests will a Tory Government act?

It’s typical.  The most important issue of the day, and not only do Cameron’s Tories have nothing to say; it just another occasion when the snouts are in the trough. 

The fact remains: the people who are responsible for this mess – the financiers who developed ever more dodgy financial instruments, the hedge funds who have used short selling to speculate against the banks, are at the heart of the Conservative Party – and, to quite a considerable extent, are its wallet.  Whatever rhetoric emerges from the Conservative Party conference, this is the background reality.

Gordon Brown’s educational recipe: more school sport

Following on from Britain’s record-breaking Olympic performance, Gordon Brown has issued a call to bring back competitive sports in schools. Some will be surprised to learn that it has ever been away; but then one feels that this is just one more example of New Labour’s easy acceptance of the tabloid view of the world.

Whatever the cause, the substance is clear. Thousands more sports teachers are to be trained. More money for school sports. The time spent on sport in schools to be expanded from two to five hours a week. The result, according to Brown: better opportunities for sport, fewer smokers, less obesity (not that any of this is really about competitive sport – but again one has to respect the tabloid myth).

Sport and ideology

What fascinates me about this is the stark contrast with other areas where – rather more objectively – our school system isn’t really delivering. I’m thinking in particular of music, and of Britain’s atrocious track record in learning languages.  So why sport? 

At one level, the cynic might suggest that the combination of easy populism and the public school ethic is uniquely attractive to New Labour – and, on top of that, there is Brown’s rather desperate attempt to forge a British identity.

But there’s more to it than that, I think.  The salient feature of New Labour’s approach to education seems to me to be its economism.  Where once Labour politicians talked about the development of the individual – Ellen Wilkinson, Labour’s first education secretary, talked of her aspiration to a “Third Programme society”, in which the cultural riches that had been the preserve of a privileged minority, would be available to all – now the rhetoric is all of economic competitiveness, of developing skills.  One can easily see New Labour’s approach to schools as being places where children sit in uniform behind desks, being prepared for a lifetime of sitting in uniform behind desks, obedient and well-drilled.

And the language of sport is strikingly similar to that of free market capitalism.  Indeed, many of the more desperate cliches of the workplace – “picking up the ball and running with it”, to take one – are lifted directly from sport.  The discipline, the rule systems and the urge to victory are all there; it’s also a very masculine, testosterone-fuelled vision of the world, and I think that is all of a piece with what New Labour has come to stand for. More school sport, the Olympics in London – it all fits very well with an agenda, conscious or not, of turning us all into disciplined and focussed consumers and workers.