While François Hollande was being shoulder-barged by Angela Merkel as they inspected a rained-on guard of honour during the French president’s tense first visit to Berlin, I was enjoying a parallel encounter with military formality in the spring sunshine of Rome. In town to lecture at the Nato Defence College, I shared a staff car with a Luftwaffe general. A former fighter pilot who did his training with the RAF, he’s now part of Nato’s ‘smart defence’ command structure, which seeks efficiencies by combining national resources where it makes sense without compromising the kit that individual nations might one day need for themselves — such as, in Britain’s case, for defending the Falklands again.
Writing last week about a ‘mood of defeatism’ in the fag-end of Nato’s Afghanistan mission, Con Coughlin characterised the 63-year-old organisation as an arena for ‘unseemly squabbles’ between its 28 member states. Underpinned by American funding, at arm’s length from democratic accountability, Nato can hardly be presented as an exact role model for the European Union. But a flexible military co-operation which draws on national strengths and respects differences certainly seems to work better — as evidenced in the Anglo-French-led Libyan campaign — than the politico-monetary fiasco whose cataclysmic denouement we await shortly after a left-wing victory in the Greek election on 17 June.
Everywhere I went on this trip, in fact, I observed examples large and small of the ways in which multinational connections have become a hugely positive factor for Europe. I flew onwards to Toulouse, where the airport café affords a view of the fleet of bulbous Beluga transporter planes that carry Airbus aircraft sections from remote sites (wings from Britain, tails from Spain) for final assembly here and in Hamburg. An odd way to design a heavy manufacturing business, you might think, but Airbus has grown up to be a global giant and technology leader. And at the simplest personal level, a crowd of French, Dutch and Brits enjoying each other’s company in a village restaurant in the Dordogne speaks of barriers effaced to the benefit of all. It’s only the monstrous, megalomaniac and ultimately doomed construct of the single currency that was, to use a military phrase, a bridge too far.
Pillars of society
To Manchester, more prosaically, to talk to the Building Societies Association — whose 47 surviving members represent a fifth of the UK’s mortgage and retail deposit markets. Most of these mutual societies trace their roots to the 19th century, while only one is a modern creation: the Ecology Building Society, founded in 1981 as ‘the first lender to provide green mortgages’. Another, the Kent Reliance, is now a hybrid in which the mutual has joint-ventured with the New York private equity group JC Flowers, giving the latter the foothold in the UK retail banking market that it previously sought as a potential bidder for Northern Rock.
Mutuality and deep roots did not make the societies immune to financial crisis — several smaller ones ran short of cash and had to be absorbed by larger brethren — but they still offer a steadier, less rapacious business model than the high-street banks which have nabbed the other four-fifths of their market since it was opened up by Thatcherite reforms. And the societies have enjoyed surprising levels of growth in recent months, partly because banks have been reluctant to lend and partly because homebuyers were keen to complete before the stamp duty exemption ended in March: compared with the same periods in 2011, building society mortgage approvals were up 40 per cent in the first quarter and the number of mortgages granted to first-time buyers in March more than doubled.
But if that sounds like a dangerous mini-boom, it is tempered by the fact that mutuals cannot inflate their balance sheets at will because they do not have conventional access to new capital; most also tend to avoid offering very aggressive mortgage terms lest they be swamped by applicants directed from comparison websites. And it’s all but impossible to launch a new building society, because (as with the earliest ‘self-terminating’ societies in late-18th-century Birmingham) they have to gather in a critical mass of deposits before they can start lending.
The tragedy is that so many destroyed themselves through demutualisation, in which greed — for cash windfalls followed by unrestrained growth and stockmarket gains — got the better of social purpose and institutional stability. The 47 survivors of this great progressive movement, the bricks-and-mortar foundation of British middle-class prosperity, cannot now be much more than a poignant reminder of lost virtue.
No truck with solicitors
Britain’s favourite trucking company, Eddie Stobart, has set its satnav in an unexpected direction. Under the slogan ‘We’ll give it to you straight’, Stobart Barristers offers to put anyone with a legal case to fight directly in touch with a specialist barrister, for a fixed fee, without the need to go through expensive solicitors first. Most of us probably think of barristers as smug fat cats and solicitors as benign family advisers — but then most of us never end up in court, whether as plaintiff or defendant. And the criminal bar is currently threatening to strike in protest at successive cuts in legal aid which, it’s claimed, have caused journeymen barristers’ incomes to stagnate since the mid-1990s. In response, ventures like Stobart’s herald a wave of attempts to cut out the middleman: evidently the trucking company itself has long bought its own legal advice this way, and has now decided to commercialise the concept. It was the late Edward Stobart (son of Eddie the founder) who turned the family name into a motorway icon by polishing his trucks and ordering his drivers not only to wear ties but to smile, honk and wave. If you spot a Stobart driver who’s not smiling, he’s probably a former solicitor who’s been forced to find a new career.
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