In my previous blog post, I focussed on his (and my) concerns for democracy in the light of the influence of social media and with rich tech billionaires “fixing the outcome of an election, by dint of his or her ownership of a self-learning model that gathers and processes information about voters’ preferences and susceptibilities”.
But the book is wide-ranging, also covering such stuff as the “comedy and tragedy” of the 2017 general election; how much of the rest of the world sees “new Britain is horrid Little England”; understanding the disenchantment of large sections of the electorate; the widening gap between rich and poor; low levels of social mobility; education; government investment; politicians; immigration; the marriage of money and technology; productivity; trade unions; robots replacing people; red tape… and much, much more.
In no
particular order, here are a few more (rather random) extracts to whet your
appetite (believe me, I could have selected pages and pages of them!):
“In 1989,
after Margaret Thatcher had done her best to liberate company directors, the typical
chief executive of a big company earned twenty times workers’ average pay.
Today that ratio is around 130:1. So have executives become 110 times more
talented, special and valuable than their workers over the past thirty-odd
years, which is what would justify that huge increase in pay differentials? Or
have they simply become 110 times more powerful? I think everyone – including the
lucky bosses – knows the answer”.
Immediately
after the Referendum result in the summer of 2016, when Theresa May was
appointed PM, she made a speech in front of 10 Downing Street. Although Peston
was dismayed by the result, he felt that “it looked as though Theresa May got
it”… (you might remember her speech: “If you’re from an ordinary working-class
family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a
job, but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you
worry about paying the mortgage. You can just about manage, but you worry about
the cost of living and getting your kids into good school. If you’re one of
those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly” etc
etc).
However,
Peston was soon shaking his head in disbelief when, in his view, she committed “a
quite extraordinary act of self and national harm… perhaps the most wilful act
of vandalism by a serving prime minister. That was her declaration at the
Tories’ annual conference on 2 October 2016 that she would trigger the EU’s Article
50 process for beginning Brexit negotiations with the rest of the EU by the end
of March 2017”. In Peston’s view, this “conference gimmick” imposed an
arbitrary and hard deadline and “gave away almost all her negotiating power,
not only to the 27 EU countries on the other side of the talks, but also to any
critic in the UK parliament or outside parliament with the power to slow up or frustrate
the process”.
I
remember commenting (others would describe it as ‘ranting’!) on facebook in the
months immediately following the Referendum result, that parliament would now
be spending all its time arguing about the Brexit implications at the expense
of all its other vitally-important business and responsibilities. Peston
clearly had similar fears: “As soon as she (Theresa May) established the end of
March 2019 as the moment we would again be an independent state, it became
impossible for the government to start work in a serious way on fixing the UK’s
fundamental flaws – an economy that is weak, unbalanced and distributes what
fruits it yields unfairly, a housing crisis, a society ageing faster than the
infrastructure of hospitals, care homes and pensions system can cope with –
because the political, legal and technical preparations for Brexit were life
and death. Everything but Brexit had to wait”.
“Many
more people than just the less-educated and the left-behind voted for Brexit,
or indeed for Trump in America. Both results are manifestations of a desperate
yearning for more control in their lives and for a clearer sense of who they
are, especially in the national sense…”.
According
to the Bank of England, “a staggering 15 million British jobs are at risk of
automation and 80 million American jobs. To put that into context, that would
mean 47% of all those currently in work in the UK could see themselves made
redundant by Metal Mickey or Max Headroom”.
“What concerns
me most is how unfit for purpose our schools are. That is nothing to do with
the quality of the teachers and all to do with the lack of imagination in
government about curriculum. Our children are being trained with military
dedication to do jobs that robots and algorithms can already do… What is
profoundly shocking and harmful is that we have a school system almost entirely
focused on compelling children to get the best possible grades in exams that
themselves measure a very inadequate set of skills”.
“Our
schools are teaching the wrong things, they are creating a generation of young
workers vulnerable to being made redundant and unnecessary by the machines…
With schools ordered by governments to become sausage factories churning out
students with the best exam grades, they do not spend enough time helping young
people become more creative, better communicators or adapt empathisers”.
Peston
thinks last year’s Grenfell tower disaster has highlighted the serious folly of the Cameron
government’s policy to reduce the burden on business of rules and regulations
deemed to be unnecessary (in 2014, Cameron announced 800 regulations had been
abolished or simplified). As Peston puts it: “This Red Tape Challenge, which
culminated in the 2015 Deregulation Act, was the corollary of austerity. A
priority for the government was to spur the expansion of the private sector as
it shrank the size of the public sector, because it feared that failure to do
so would have made us even poorer… When the public sector is put under pressure
to adopt a culture of assessing regulations to identify those that are
unnecessary, when slashing and burning red tape is what generates praise and
rewards for officials, the chances are significantly reduced of those officials
having the time or inclination to warn that regulations should be increased or
toughened in some important areas – such as fire-safety rules for public
housing, for example… Nothing could therefore be more important right now than
for the war against red tape to slammed into reverse…”.
Peston is
also very critical of the idea (during both Thatcher’s and Blair’s time) “that
private-sector investment was superior to public-sector investment had been
raised to the status of eternal truth”. “Right now, one of the most urgent
problems facing the country is the absence of affordable – or, it turns out,
safe – housing. One of the more exemplary policies of the 1950s and 1960s was
to build council housing on a massive scale, spurring the economy and improving
the lives of poor people. After Grenfell… we need to regain that post-war
ambition and confidence, to build as we haven’t for decades; financed by a
government borrowing without its habitual reluctance on global markets, for
projects that will over time improve our economic prospects, as well as uniting
a fragmented nation”.
In the
first and final chapters of his book, Peston rather touchingly addresses his
father (“Dear Dad”), who died in April 2016. He says this: “Dad, when I started
conceiving this book, it was in the immediate aftermath of the votes for the UK
to leave the European Union and for Trump to become leader of the free world. I
was depressed. And I was ashamed, because I had been so comfortable in my cosy,
smug North London ghetto that I had not noticed how alienated millions of people,
especially poorer people well away from the capital, had become with the
economic and political system that suited only a privileged few of us”.
Apologies for the length of this post…
As you might imagine, I could have gone
on (and on!)… but I’ll stop now.I strongly recommend that you read the book – it’s very readable (and angry… and honest… and, at times, funny too).
Bring on the revolution!
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