Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
‘If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to give their employees better wages… and working conditions; to use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment…’ That was Peter Wilby in the Guardian, responding to the news last week that 40 American billionaires have pledged to donate half (or in Warren Buffett’s case, 99 per cent) of their fortunes to good causes. Wilby perfectly encapsulates the British left’s contempt for the notion of charitable giving funded by free-market capitalism — and the prevalence of his view is one reason why the culture of philanthropy in this country is so subdued.
If you’re keen to fund an academy, you probably want to brainwash teenagers with right-wing ideology. If your name is attached to a concert hall you endowed, you must be a vulgar egotist. If you think your giving should be fully tax deductible, why don’t you just pay the tax and let ‘the people’ decide how to spend it? And don’t be so arrogant as to think the business skills that made your fortune can be reapplied to running the social projects of your choice: please give anonymously and at arm’s length, and let the experts get on with dispensing the largesse that should never have been yours in the first place. These are the tired clichés that need to be defeated if Britain’s tucked-away wealth is going to be redeployed to keep our social fabric repaired through the years of austerity.
That requires a lot more than just enlisting as a volunteer steward so that your local museum won’t have to close down, which is what David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ seems to be about. It requires actually parting with cash — and if we can’t do it on a Buffett scale, because so few of us are billionaires, then at least we have tens of thousands of millionaires who can learn from the Buffett example and from the Texan oilman H.L. Hunt’s remark that ‘money is just a way of keeping the score’. The lesson is this: once you’ve bought the lifestyle you want and given your kids a decent start, there’s more satisfaction in giving the stuff away and watching it fructify than in sitting on it. Get your chequebook out and have a go. You might find it surprisingly good fun.
Strive to be tiresome
It’s a mystery why petrol and diesel pump prices are so close to their all-time highs. Crude oil has been trading a few dollars either side of $80 a barrel for most of the past year, barely more than half its $147 peak in July 2008. And the weak pace of economic recovery is hardly likely to be creating pressure on supplies from refineries. Fuel tax and VAT account for 75 of the 120 pence we’re being stung for per litre — the tax take will go up in October and again in January, in case you’ve forgotten — but within the other 45 pence that covers the actual cost of the fuel and its distribution, there must be some opportunism going on.
In inflationary times — as I keep saying, these are more inflationary times than official statistics suggest — there is always an element of leap-frogging by price-setters, encouraged by lack of resistance among consumers who cease to be startled when the cost of a full tank or a full supermarket trolley is a little higher each time. Likewise, headlines about ‘the end of the era of cheap food’, prompted by the disruption of Russian wheat supplies and a surge in wholesale grain prices, will provoke exaggerated rises across a range of food items, including meat that might have been nurtured on feed grain. And when the commodity spikes subside in due course, grocery prices will be slow to ratchet down behind them. My advice is that we should all make the effort to be more tiresome shoppers, challenging retailers to justify any price-tag that looks a touch higher than last week. Sometimes they’ll quote world prices per tonne at you; sometimes, I think you’ll find, they’ll look embarrassed and quietly mark the price down again when you’ve gone.
Lehman souvenirs
Here’s a date for anyone with cash to spare and a macabre sense of humour. On 29 September, Christie’s South Kensington will be auctioning artworks, gewgaws and memorabilia from Lehman Brothers’ Canary Wharf headquarters, including the very plaque unveiled by Gordon Brown when he opened their gleaming glass tower in 2004 (est. £1,000-£1,500). PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants handling Lehman’s bankruptcy, hope the sale will raise £2 million, alongside $10 million from a similar sale in New York — though the cash won’t do much to placate Lehman’s creditors, whose claims run to hundreds of billions of dollars.
I had an early opportunity to view the lots for the London sale as long ago as October 2006, at a princely Lehman dinner for the financial press. It was presided over by Lehman’s ambitious London supremo Jeremy Isaacs, who seems to have travelled the road to Damascus since he left the firm shortly before its collapse and now describes himself (in his role advising the Bridge Ventures social enterprise fund) as ‘a keen advocate of diversity and inclusion’. Steering him between tables of claret-guzzling hacks was his PR man Andrew Gowers — the former FT editor who went on to become BP’s chief media handler, and is still in post despite the fall of his boss Tony Hayward in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill.
My lasting impression was that Lehman was not just a big player in the hybrid securities and real estate financings that they boasted were yielding record profits that year; it had also taken very long positions in lead crystal and engraved cutlery. And I remember standing in a corner casting a sceptical eye over the scene with Paul Mason, the BBC Newsnight reporter who exudes, in his amiable way, the air of a nonconformist northern preacher. In Meltdown, his 2009 account of the financial crisis, Mason ranted against the ‘abrasive, selfish, unequal society’ that was the result of capitalism’s ‘super-bubble’. I’ve often wondered whether his views hardened as he felt the weight of Lehman’s tableware: perhaps the ‘advocate of inclusion’ Jeremy Isaacs will bid for it and donate it to a homeless hostel. And perhaps Gordon will slip into Christie’s in dark glasses and buy back his plaque.
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