Rory Sutherland gets lots of laughs and some puzzled faces at South Bank University – and makes one extraordinarily important point
Last Tuesday I went down the Elephant and Castle to hear Rory Sutherland speak, because he always makes me think and always makes me laugh.
Rory loves to talk and communicates his pleasure well, but it was quite a while before he began to discuss the title that had attracted me there – ”How to Restore Trust in Banking – Without Anyone Getting Killed”.
He didn’t say much about it at all, actually, but what he did say was very important.
Most of the audience were students, including a row of schoolchildren sitting in front of me. Since I guarantee not one in twenty of the lot ever read books, and certainly not the kind Rory mentioned in his talk, I suspect pretty much all his references went sailing about two yards above their heads.
Rory talked about trust.
He noted – as many others have – that no banker has gone to jail; the top bananas all still draw obscenely large wages. And he said that if people are not punished for doing the wrong thing, why should you trust them to do the right one?
This to me reaches to the very heart of what is wrong with things today.
On the day I saw Rory I read in The Evening Standard that G4S, one of the firms to which the government has palmed off the difficult jobs of running many things, had to hand back £24.1 million they had ripped us off for in exchange for not tagging prisoners properly. Another firm is about to be hit for the same incompetence or shiftiness.
On the same page was a picture of the former G4S boss Nick Buckles grinning like a hyena. And so he should. He got a pension of £16 million when he left after screwing up the Olympics security. He should have been in the doghouse, but he was rewarded.
Why do these things happen? Because politicians – especially Slimeball Blair – were persuaded by Margaret Thatcher that things are better run by private enterprise. This is true. What sane person would want to return to the unheated miseries of British Rail? Or waiting for months to get a phone installed?
But there is a missing corollary. If you want to deal with private enterprise you must understand private enterprise, and particularly financial negotiation. Politicians do not understand it and are too damned busy shooting their mouths off to find out. They are all now what we call “professional” politicians – which means good for nothing else.
Civil servants don’t need to study negotiation because they understand it all too well. They know that if a firm gets an easy ride today they probably have an easy job a few years down the line.
Cameron sits there and thinks all he has to do is say something must be done and it will be. The real world does not work that way. If you run a business you have to scrutinise what happens, not just assume it will. You have to watch what you pay and make sure you get what you paid for.
And if some bastard screws you, you screw them or sue them. If they have £16 million in the bank, you get as much of it out of them as you can – and more to teach them a lesson.
If politicians want to be more popular they must stop trying to gag the press – because nothing will stop stuff getting out online – and start doing popular things. Like sticking rogues in jail.
Hi Drayton,
What you say about Cameron saying it shall be and thinking it shall now be so, and the real world not working that way is correct. I remember in 2000 when the”Thirteen Days” movie came out, a friend who I took to see it exclaimed afterwards, “Talk about cajoling! I had thought if the President said something, it was done!” And this was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The real world does indeed exist “out there”, and we must get out from behind our desks and into it to make changes.
When it comes to government, or so-called “leadership” for that matter, inertia is still the most powerful force in the universe. Be brave and you can get hacked down by the crowd. I’m not sure what the answer is. If our leaders are bad, we are surely not going to improve. But our populations are ill-read, uninformed and rarely know the difference between this policy or that. And until that changes, I think we’re really stuck.
The point about populations is especially interesting. Yet when we look back to the 18th century and beyond, when the mass of people were far less well-educated, politicians seem to have been vaguely aware that they had to keep an eye on things. Many tended to have large estates, and knew from personal experience that you had to. What’s more in the case of most constituencies the only people who could vote were those with money and something to protect. An interesting fact.