Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  There is confusion, too, with the rather different idea that private businesses can improve their stability and morale by selling shares to their own employees. In their flotations, TSB, British Telecom and British Gas have all given preference to their own staff. This sort of scheme is puffed as ‘co-ownership,’ the paternalist way to take the sting out of genuinely radical ideas for workers’ control of industry. The figures, however, show that although employees share schemes have risen from about 30 to over 1,000 since 1979, the concept of ‘co-ownership’ is usually hot air.

  British Aerospace, for example, sold three million shares to its workers. This sounds good, until you discover that this is just 1.3 per cent of the total shareholding. As Michael Smith remarked in the Guardian, if all these worker-shareholders decided to sell their stock on the same day, ‘it is doubtful whether it would even register on the Stock Exchange.’

  This brings me to a more general point. A lot of sanctimonious guff is still customary at board meetings about ‘our duty to our shareholders.’ In fact, the individual shareholder is the lowest form of life, as far as the City of London is concerned. Those who keep long-term investments, as opposed to rapidly cashing-in on a good speculation, are mostly passive, infinitely manipulable creatures who seldom turn up to meetings and are quite irritated to be consulted about anything.

  They are the earthworms in the garden of private enterprise. They are useful, they appear to consume whatever lowly diet they prefer, but the cabbages and roses go to the gardeners. And if, by chance, a worm turns (as some did when TSB went public, or when Guinness took over Distillers the other day), they are crushed by the overwhelming power of the great institutional shareholders, the big finance houses, banks and pension schemes which own over 70 per cent of traded shares and almost invariably vote with the board of any company. So much for the myth that the ‘little shareholder’ – and 99.7 per cent of Britoil’s shareholders are individuals – control the enterprises in which they invest.

  ‘Privatisation’ of this kind, in short, changes little in the structure of the economy, in the real distribution of wealth and power, or in the tensions between social classes. The one real fact here is that a huge number of surprised but grateful people have been invited to make a quick killing. The result is much as it would have been if Mrs Thatcher and her Ministers had ridden through the land scattering golden guineas to the mob. A gratitude is felt, which fades as the guineas are spent – or are found to be made of zinc under the gilt.

  That’s all. And yet everyone raves on as if a new age had dawned. People who point out – rightly – that Labour’s nationalisations did not transfer power to the people, or even to their employees, seem to think that they can effect that transfer by dishing out share certificates. The SDP, for instance, wants to ‘privatise’ State industries by handing out free shares in them to the populace. This is a dream world.

  As usual in Britain, there is Druidic nostalgia around. Bring back the Age of Gold, in which every yeoman was a merchant venturer. Let me end with a caution. Not long ago, we privatised the British State – through the franchise flotations which began with the Reform Act of 1832. Now we all have our share certificate, allowing us to vote. And do we, even now, really own or control that State?

  [1986

  The Case for a Bill of Rights

  This Friday, Sir Edward Gardner will try to persuade the House of Commons to pass a Bill of Rights. The tide is awesome and evocative. It is supposed to recall the 1689 Bill of Rights which – in turn – is supposed to have set the seal on the Glorious Revolution of 1688. What is this project, and does it matter, and do we need it?

  It isn’t really like the old 1689 Bill at all. The English like to think of the first Bill of Rights as a noble manifesto laying down the principles of constitutional government and individual liberty. This is because the English prefer not to incur the bother of reading it. Actually, that document is a down-to-earth political paper, saying nothing much about inherent and indefeasible this or that but a great deal about the rotten things that Kings have been doing which they must now stop doing.

  Sir Edward’s Bill, in contrast, does specify general human rights: freedom of association and expression, the right to privacy and a fair trial, and so forth. It consists of the European Convention of Human Rights, which – if the Bill passes – will become a British statute. The Convention is the text on which the European Court of Human Rights bases its judgments, the court at Strasbourg which in recent years has declared so many decisions of the British State to be violations of the rights of man.

  There ought not to be any doubt now that liberties in Britain need protection. This particular Government has practised an odious combination of laissez-faire in the economy and society with a rapid increase in state and police power over the individual. Few democratic countries with a written constitution would have got away with the Public Order Act, the tilting of court rules against the accused or the string of laws reducing trade union rights – to name a few recent offences.

  But we have no constitution and therefore, no defined rights. The State is happy to be prosecutor and judge in its own cause. Take recent events. The police smash down a journalist’s door. They occupy the offices of the New Statesman to search them. They also launch cavalry charges against demonstrators at Wapping, in the course of which a number of identifiable journalists doing their job are battered by clubs and trampled by horses. The Home Secretary is responsible politically for the police. But which authority in the land carries supreme responsibility for the defence of press and broadcasting freedom? Stap me, if it isn’t the Home Secretary again!

  By itself, a Bill of Rights cannot halt a drift towards authoritarianism and towards conflicts born of injustice. But it offers a ledge of legal ground on which the injured subject may stand and fight. By incorporating the European Convention into British law, the Bill – if passed – would save us the slow and fearfully costly business of taking an appeal abroad to Strasbourg. The ‘importing’ of the Convention raises, however, some ugly doubts in my mind.

  The hope of Sir Edward Gardner is that the Bill would ‘ensure that the rights of British people are protected by British judges in British courts.’ Yes, well … British judges? With their track record? My own first impulse is to reply: ‘Thanks, but no thanks!’ If I wanted my rights upheld against Government, I would not feel safe until I found myself up before a German, French, Dutch or Greek judge – somebody who was at least trained to think in adult political terms.

  Here we have the Ponting case judge who said that the interests of the State were the same as the policy of the Government of the day. We have Lord Denning observing that justice could not have miscarried in the case of the Birmingham pub bombers because that would imply that the police had engaged in perjury. We have their lordships’ judgment in the thalidomide case, when they refused to permit the Sunday Times to publish facts of desperate public interest, a decision, which Strasbourg reversed. Thanks, again, but no thanks.

  Lord McCluskey, in his Reith lectures, presented this argument against a Bill of Rights as a question: ‘Why it should be supposed that elderly lawyers with cautious and backward-looking habits of thought are qualified to overrule the judgments of democratically-elected legislators … I do not profess to understand.’

  That is all right as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. The Strasbourg judges have, as a matter of fact, delivered some quite reactionary and authoritarian opinions recently. They are not a panel of radicals or liberals. But neither are they ‘elderly lawyers with … backward-looking habits of thought.’

  Many Continental judges are young, energetic, modern-minded and intelligent, and they most certainly are qualified to overrule the judgments of legislators. The real implication of Lord McCluskey’s words, which he in no way intended, is that to make a Bill of Rights work, we may need a new breed of judges.

  Here, at last, the underlying point of a Bill of Rights begins to appear. The thin end o
f a gigantic wedge is being inserted. I don’t know how much the Bill would do for bullied British subjects. But one thing is certain: it is absolutely alien to the practices and theory of the British State and, if it survived, would begin to subvert, split and topple them one after another. And that is why – on balance – I am for it.

  In a leading article last year, The Times said that ‘at first blush’ (I like that) the Bill would seem just another law which Parliament could amend or scrap as it pleased. But it was supposed to be a fundamental statute guiding all other laws, so that couldn’t be right. And yet if it were entrenched against parliamentary meddling, that would shatter the whole traditional doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament…

  The last blush is the one that counts. The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy is the curse of British politics, the Druidic dogma which makes effective reform of our institutions almost impossible. A Bill of Rights challenges that dogma. It suggests that there should be some authority to which even Parliament – or the Crown-in-Parliament – should be subordinate. In most modern countries, this is a written constitution, which is not just a sacred piece of parchment but a statement that the people are the ultimate source of power, that the State and its legislature and its civil servants and laws are the servants of the people.

  It’s argued that constitutional reform is of no interest to British citizens, a fad for lawyers and academics. But that has suddenly and rapidly ceased to be true. A poll in 1985 showed that only 55 per cent of the sample thought our democratic institutions still worked well. Nearly a third felt their rights were not sufficiently protected, and 46 per cent wanted a Bill of Rights.

  A few weeks ago, another poll showed that the desire for a Bill of Rights had risen to 71 per cent – and three-quarters of the sample knew about the European Court and what it did. This, it seems to me, marks the dawn of a real popular understanding about what is wrong in British life. My fear is only this: that British judges and parliamentarians, by rendering a Bill of Rights ineffective, will create a disillusion so powerful that it will halt this enlightenment in its tracks.

  [1987

  The No-Go Area

  Many years ago, when I was even more gullible than I am now, two kind gentlemen took me to a City chop house. They were tweedy, they were fatherly, they had ginger hair growing out of their ears. They were in charge of some money entrusted to them by my family. As later transpired, they were about as honest as night is day.

  It was a murky, downstairs place, where men were drinking port from what looked like half-pint tumblers. Suddenly one of those figures rose, and advanced towards me. I recognised a school friend, a merry frivolous lad from a Jewish theatrical dynasty. ‘Get out!’ he said to me in a terrible voice. ‘You here? Of all people? Get out of this place, before they lay hold of you and make you into what they have made of me!’

  It was a scene from Victorian melodrama, the speech of the emaciated boozer or gambler who rises from his bed of rags to shriek that warning which always goes unheeded. My friend, however, wore the three-piece chalk-stripe suit of a merchant banker. I tried to laugh. Perhaps he was drunk, or mad. He peered at me, then turned and shambled back to his table. I don’t know what became of him. But his irruption, something like that of a Purgatory soul surging out of the dark to seize Dante’s elbow, was something I have never forgotten.

  This sense of the City as a subterranean place apart, a sort of West Beirut into which fresh-faced lads will be ill-advised to tread, isn’t mine alone. It’s only spread by events in recent months and weeks: here are streets ruled by Deadly Ernest Saunders; by Halpern of the Topless Fiona with the million-pound salary; by Tony ‘The Animal’ Parnes, by the Lloyd’s militias and the public-school Druzes of Morgan Grenfell. Hundreds of others, their sins as yet unaudited, only sit and sweat. Beirut, too, is a self-regulating city.

  Outside those precincts, there is a public inclination to have a good laugh. The City is less stuffy than it was, but its godfathers are still apt to tell the rest of us how we should behave. It’s the familiar message about pulling together, working harder, acquiring a new sense of the common weal and not asking for more wages. A thousand Guildhall speeches by nervous politicians still suck up to the City as the mighty cornucopia of national prosperity, model of financial responsibility and all that.

  This is now modified by mention of the odd rotten apple in the barrel. Why this is thought reassuring, I don’t know. What if one were to call the City a fine can of corned beef with only the odd maggot?

  This thought of preachers whose own state of grace is dubious allows me to recall the mighty Caradoc Evans, once the terror of Godly Wales, whose books were banned from Welsh public libraries. Caradoc Evans, who published some of his cruellest anti-clerical outbursts in the Western Mail, was eventually driven to exile in Fleet Street, whence he was rescued by the love of a good, rich woman. Some of his works have just been reissued in Wales, an event as astonishing as if Mr Gorbachov were to order publication of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ in Moscow. Anyway he would have appreciated all this.

  The preachers, wrote Evans, lived off the fat of the land, while the peasants were ‘labouring all the light hours to keep them in comfort … they say to the congregations: “People, bach, we are the Big Man’s photographs”.’ He went on: ‘They close the doors of the public houses and open the gates of Sion at a late hour for prayer meetings, and I know of dreadful things that have befallen servant girls at the hands of praying men on the road home from chapel.’

  And, indeed, before the Big Bang and the deregulation of the City, grave and smooth faces appeared in the prints and on the screens assuring the ‘people bach’ that they were the Big Man’s spitting images. Now this! And yet our City of the Plain has been spared brimstone. Instead, its vacant thrones are now being occupied by an invasion force of poker-faced old Scotsmen, sent for because the English suppose the Scots to have standards.

  When I laugh at all this, I do so uneasily. There is something about the way that the rest of the nation looks at the City which is horrifyingly antique. Here is a place apart yet in the midst of us, which is held to do something useful and even on balance necessary, but which – on the other hand – can only do so by following standards of morality quite alien to most ordinary people. It suits us to harbour this colony of sin, but it is somehow comforting to reflect that its creed is so foreign to our own….

  And with that a vision from the past begins to assemble itself. Here is the Christian baron in his castle, with his loyal feudal subjects huddled around the keep, and there – in their own quarter outside the walls – are the fur-hatted merchants who speak strange languages and worship curious gods, who enforce their own private justice and practice wickednesses like usury. They are Jews or Lombards, Scottish pedlars or German craftsmen, but heretics all. Sometimes the baron’s men chase them and beat them. But to punish them by death or expulsion would be unwise. Without their money and their learning, how could the baron make war?

  And this, roughly, is where we have stuck. Other countries seem to have dissolved the finance industry into their general awareness of what makes up a national economy. The Frankfurt bankers are not loved by most West Germans, but they are certainly not regarded as mysterious. Britain, however, remains medieval in its ignorance of the Square Mile. I suppose that 99 people out of 100 assume that they could never understand what goes on there, and that they would be morally revolted if they did. The grove of glass towers by the Thames is treated still as if it were a foreign enclave, the Kitaygorod of old Moscow.

  This, of course, is preposterous. The City has certainly enjoyed and encouraged its protective mystique, inducing the average ‘politician bach’ to fear that if he brought the Big Man to account, he would come out in boils and every factory in his constituency would close. But the popular combination of dislike and awe in the face of City finance is only another aspect of Britain’s inability to come to terms with the elementary facts of trading life – the prejudice of lande
d aristocracy mediated to the masses.

  The City of London is a tough old institution. And the business of providing investment, credit and a money market is not inherently complicated. These abuses of take-overs, share-puffing, naked speculation and fraud which do so much harm to industry are only a monstrous street-riot of looting and greed which has developed because British political society still thinks of the City as a no-go area.

  The trouble is that there is a deep sense of complicity between a no-go City and a no-go State, which is now engaged in protecting its own secrecy by hounding journalists and broadcasters all over the landscape. A good government would go into the City with drums beating and clean it out, destroying nothing the economy really needs in the process. A good government – which we do not have.

  [1987

  A Dumb-Bell World

  I don’t know what the Westland affair is really about. Reading, viewing, listening – at times collapsing into wild laughter – I have become convinced that I am missing some point. It’s not about helicopters, not about the free market, not entirely or even mostly about personal ambitions.

  It obviously proceeds from Mrs Thatcher’s way of running her Cabinet in the manner of Stalin running his evening parties at the dacha. She winds the gramophone; her Ministers dance together; outside in the snow, the van for Siberia waits with engine running. Hysteria mounts. One Minister treads painfully on another’s toe, and suddenly there are screams, flailing fists, blood and vodka everywhere and people running for the door. OK, but what is the Wesdand quarrel about?