Articles tagged with: Financial Times
Lionel Barber, FT editor, thinks that one of the most underrated events of the past year was “the G20 summit in Washington featuring the leading industrialised nations as well as Brazil, China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia”, because it “lay bare the new political constellation in the world, with power shifting to east of the Euphrates”. This video gives a funky illustration of this power shift and the exceptional nature of our times. Faceback is citied in the video as an illustration of the role of technological innovation in making our times exceptional. Mark Zuckerberg of this social networking site has been described by Barber as the person that he most admires in the media. “He is cool, understated, and possessed of a brilliant business focus and an understanding of the power of human vanity”. To what extent is the eastwards political power shift driven by technology and to what extent is technology driven by human vanity?
Halldór Laxness, the Icelandic winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, once wrote a novel called Paradise Regained. But the past twelve months seem to have been more of a case of paradise lost for Iceland. The news coming out of the island, roughly as big as Ireland with a population about the size of a London Borough, remains unremittingly grim. Indeed, The Financial Times has called Iceland “the land that Christmas forgot“. However, I found Reykjavik as eager to celebrate the dawn of 2009 as would be expected from a people that lost a paradise in 2008. Nightclubs jumped, many fireworks exploded and good times were had. But will Iceland be able to regain their paradise over coming years?
It would be wrong to underestimate the economic challenge facing a country where massive national debts mean that GDP is expected to fall by 10 per cent and unemployment to triple this year. Nonetheless, when in Iceland I found my mind wandering back to a report on the competitiveness of London that I worked on last year for the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI). This report placed much stress on the importance of an innovative workforce; with quality of life issues becoming increasingly economically important as the premium grows to attracting highly skilled, though, in an age of high speed broadband and transport networks, very mobile workers.
High skill workers? More books are written and read in Iceland per capita than anywhere else in the world. Quality of life? According to the UN’s Human Development Index, there is nowhere better. And I saw plenty of reasons to agree with the UN.
Wonderful food, particularly if you like fish, with the Fish Market being one of the best restaurants I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. Hot pots that help to understand why Icelandic men have the highest life expectancy in Europe and which The Guardian is absolutely right to describe as “a revelation: part exercise, part community gathering area, and all piping hot thanks to the sulphurous, thermal waters”. Many Icelanders did, indeed, want to chat at the hot pots. I worried that they might wish to complain about the British government’s rough treatment of Iceland. Instead, interesting anecdotes flowed, such as that from an Icelander, who must have been at least 70 years old, of his time performing in Blackpool Tower with Tom Jones. The Guardian is also right to describe the landscape as “a geologist’s wet-dream”.
No wonder, then, that Damon Albarn is so keen. He has described the island as “such a beautifully preserved piece of nature”. And what is Albarn if not, amongst many other things, a highly skilled and mobile worker. So, if you buy the story that we sold the LCCI about the importance of such workers, Iceland must have an economic chance. You might not buy that story. But it is consistent with the stress upon human capital contained in some long-run economic growth models, such as neo-endogenous growth theory, and while Gordon Brown may have been met with incomprehension when he advocated policy in terms of this theory, it is hard for visitors not to grasp the wonder that is Iceland. This might suggest that Iceland can regain its paradise. After all, the fact that it went from being one of the poorest places in Europe at the end of nineteenth century to being one of richest one hundred years later, suggests that this is a place with a lot of things going for it over the long term. And GDP growth is far from the only thing that it has got going for it over that time horizon. In senses other than GDP growth, the paradise has never gone away. For example, I am pictured below at what must be one of the most spectacularly located football pitches anywhere.
Fantastic reportage in the FT on Iceland and the credit crunch. Financial convolutions may have been unprecedented here but this reportage beautifully details why and how they have provoked an existential crisis in the Icelandic spirit. It notes that one man, who waited for six hours in a bank as his life savings were counted out in front of him, exclaimed, ”I feel like an innocent man dragged from his bed, put in a barrel and hurled over the Gullfoss!” Indeed, the whole country must feel like it has just been thrown off the majestic 100ft waterfall that is the Gullfoss.
Bankruptcy is never pleasant and all the less so when it effectively happens to a country, not least a country which has such a contrasting sense of itself. “While the agricultural revolution, the Renaissance, the industrial revolution came and went, while the fine cities of Europe were built, while the artists from Michelangelo to Mozart were pouring forth with their creations, while the great inventions and discoveries were being invented and discovered, Icelanders were hunkering down in their turf houses, meeting the hardest challenge of all – survival”, so says the FT.
After one thousand years of survival, playing the global banking game seemed to offer something more. Iceland drunk in what was offered and got drunk. And then some. Just as rock’n'roll offered something more to two brothers from Burnage, Manchester who rarely decline a drink. “Be Here Now” was the album when the excess started to crash around the ears of the Gallaghers. The hang over from this cocaine fuelled opus may have hurt but the pain of credit crunced Iceland will be immeasurably more so.
Why am I making this seemingly crass Oasis comparison? A version of the photograph on the left hand side above appeared with the FT article but with that larger version the sleeve of “Be Here Now” was visible. The everyday normality of an Oasis record somehow brought the people of a distant, North Atlantic island so much closer to home, for me, at least. The three words also stand as a call to empathy with the all too human faces starring back from the picture.
It doesn’t seem right that the response of the UK to this call was the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001. Those who passed this Act can never have thought that it would ever be used to dam all Icelanders as terrorists, which might worryingly suggest that anti-terror legislation can develop something of a life of its own once on the statute book. While I am very sympathetic to the need for such legislation to protect us from a terror threat which is all too real, as is demonstrated by the awful events of the past 24 hours in Mumbai, and I also recognise the need for the UK government to protect, as far as is reasonable, British interests in post-credit crunch Iceland, it would surely be preferable if the government were able to respond to such a genuine need as this without having to deem all Icelanders terrorists.
If the notion that all Icelanders are terrorists weren’t so obviously silly in so many senses, then there is no way that I would have booked to spend my new year in Reykjavik. I only hope the Icelandic people are not as quick to judge me unfairly as we seem to have been them.
Craig Brown’s re-imagining of the first meeting between a Labour Prime Minister and the monarch captures something of the relationship between Labour and the establishment. “The King was desperate to keep Ronald MacDonald on side, so he hired a labourer’s uniform to welcome him to the Palace. Carrying a chimney brush and a whippet, clad in grubby overalls, a flat cap and clogs, his face blackened with soot, King George was taken aback to find Ronald MacDonald on bended knee, dressed up to the nines in top hat, white tie and tails. The King breathed a sigh of relief. He suggested that he and MacDonald might feel more comfortable switching uniforms. Within seconds, revolution was averted and social order was restored”.
Not only under MacDonald has Labour’s threat to the established order quickly given way to an affirmation of it after being gently fettered and feathered. The claim that Tony Blair’s premiership embraced this tendency was epitomized by the tag Tony MacBlair (in reference to Ramsey, not Ronald). Denis MacShane recently bemoaned the lack of a great novel for the New Labour era. He perhaps did so in ignorance of Blake Morrison’s South of the River, which is for the Blair years what Martin Amis’ Money is for the Thatcher years. Here the terror that MacBlair once instilled in the establishment is illustrated by a character exclaiming on the 2nd of May 1997: “He can do what he likes, with that majority. Nationalise the banks. Cream off profits. Tax us all to ruin”.
