An open letter to a friend

People have asked me about you in the last fortnight, mentioning that your name doesn’t crop up in conversation as it used to. But it’s hard to explain what has happened.

When we met a while back, after something of a gap, it was a meeting born not of business but of friendship. I wanted to find out how you were. This was not so surprising, I guess, as we enjoy many shared experiences, values and hopes.  The difference in age – which might have been significant when we were younger – is negligible now.  Unexpectedly (for me at least), from that reunion arose an opportunity for us to collaborate in a dream that mattered to us both and I am grateful for this.

Well, we stole some horses, as they say.  We hustled a little.  Perhaps we changed a few minds, where minds were open to the possibility of change, though (Goodness knows!) few are. From time to time we got to ask why the emperor was so scantily-clad. We dared to speak a little truth to minor ‘Power.’

It was fun!  And if our stumbling efforts may have occasionally served a higher purpose, the fun was no less important. But what has become of the friendship which was our first aim?  And how quickly we drop off someone’s priority list for returned calls.

There are too few good friends in the world. As I have blogged before friendship, once affirmed, is too precious to allow simply to wither through neglect.

Last of the summer reading

Just back from a quiet(ish) week away in Norfolk with some easy day-visits to historic sites, local beer and plenty of time to catch up with reading. I thought I’d share the highlights of my late summer reading with you.

At the suggestion of my good friend, Chris Winfield, I read What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel. I am glad I did, although it made for several audible sighs of incredulity.

A professor at Harvard University, Sandel analyses the impact of the free market on our lives. He builds up an impressive series of examples to suggest that unregulated markets inevitably tend to turn as much as possible into commodities. This leads to a kind of corruption which destroys some of the key values that makes us most human.  Here are described so many choices that money can buy, potentially rendering the democratic process, health, life and death and the most intimate of human activities subject to who pays the most. For the most extreme of free-marketeers, this is not only an acceptable situation but a desirable one.

This book appeals because of its anecdotal approach. The reader stands amazed at the kind of things which it is possible to buy and left with questions about how much of innate human value is being corrupted, seemingly without challenge. A worrying, persuasive and necessary read. 

The second of my top of this summer’s reading list is The Establishment: And how they get away with it by Owen Jones.  

The premise is this: our democracy is a façade behind which there is a powerful but unaccountable network of people who control and steer society to meet their ends. They hold the power and receive most of the rewards.  We journey with Jones through global boardrooms, Westminster, public schools, the news moguls and the City.  The author contends that there are well developed links between all these interests – The Establishment – that represent a clear and present danger to our democracy.  Indeed they use democracy as a shield to conceal their activities.

This is another highly accessible book, despite its length (it would have been just as persuasive at half the number of pages).  One of my early questions was to ask myself if this was going to end up as an entertaining set of conspiracy theories. But those who like to see conspiracies everywhere always overstate their case. Jones is a skillful writer who sets out his stall and then leaves the reader to join the dots: an approach which, in this case, successfully engages the reader.

This is another sobering read.  For myself, I found that there were simply too many instances highlighted by the author to dismiss as coincidence. I am not a fully-paid up convert to his convictions about the Establishment as he portrays it.  There are some rather old and threadbare arguments from the bogeyman collection of the Left brought out yet again.  But it seems to me that there is enough of a case to require some answers.

I also read Owen Jones’ Chavs: the demonization of the working class.  Once again, it makes some telling and worthy points but it could have done this much more succinctly.