One consequence of the Greek crisis — in which default remains a strong possibility despite the latest bail-out, and either way the Greek economy will be dead for a decade — must surely be a wave of Greek migrants looking for work across the EU. And since they won’t find a welcome between Macedonia and the Channel, that means an influx into Britain, absorbing many of the new jobs that will be on offer when real recovery finally kicks in.
So it’s curious that David Cameron chose this week to sign a letter, with ten other EU leaders, calling for a ‘more integrated open labour market’ to help migrants settle where work is available. That hardly chimes with employment minister Chris Grayling’s appeal to employers to put our own school and college leavers ‘at the top of their priority list’ ahead of east European job-seekers who are ‘quite an attractive recruitment option’. Nor does it underpin Nick Clegg’s new scheme to throw money at ‘the ticking time bomb’ of teenagers with poor GCSEs who are not in employment or training.
The uncomfortable truth is that our education system and social structures still produce too many young people who are plainly unfit for the world of work and will lose any open competition against eager migrants — as a friend of mine proved to himself when he had 30 vacancies in a Midlands warehouse and decided to allot 15 to foreign workers and 15 to natives; of the latter, only two lasted the first week.
Ah, but the Greeks aren’t such a threat because they’ll never be as hardworking as the Poles, I hear you say, if you’re susceptible to national caricatures. Well — I can retort, having spent time in Warsaw in the early phase of the post-Soviet era — today’s young Poles are not at all like their demoralised parents, who couldn’t be bothered because their efforts had never been rewarded. Necessity and opportunity have bracing effects. Before you know it you’ll be swapping dinner-party clichés about ‘my Greek builder’, while next door’s teenager is still on wageless Tesco work experience.
Late tackle
Is Rangers FC another victim of greedy bankers? Hardly: controlling shareholder Craig Whyte, who had previously been banned for seven years from being a company director, has been widely blamed for the 140-year-old Glasgow club’s financial collapse. But there’s a connection. The issue that precipitated the fall was Rangers’ standoff with HM Revenue over the use of ‘employee benefit trusts’ to reward players: there’s talk of a tax liability of £43 million. How does an EBT work? In the heyday of such schemes, a contract employee received a modest basic salary while the balance of his remuneration was paid into an offshore trust from which he was able to draw ‘loans’ that might one day magically be written off; he might also have the use of a house owned by the trust. One way or another, it was possible to achieve the take-home equivalent of 85 per cent of gross pay — however gross.
Naturally, the banking community was first to exploit these attractive possibilities; in the City in the early 1990s, I recall whispers of Bermuda-based trusts for star traders. Since then, tax advisers have long warned that EBTs were vulnerable, and in 2010 the Treasury declared a crackdown that was expected to net £500 million-plus — chiefly from City bonuses, which was the point of the exercise. Most of the sum recouped will have been recorded as top-slice income tax revenue, thus also helping prove the utility of the controversial 50p rate. So there were twin political incentives to outlaw EBTs which had everything to do with fat-cat financiers and little to do with Scottish footballers. But Whyte failed to take the ‘settlement opportunity’ offered by HM Revenue last year, and if I were a Rangers fan I’d be hurling abuse at him too.
Getting on with it
Two responses to my call for exciting small businesses illustrate the breadth of this column’s readership as well as the range of entrepreneurial ideas out there. A foxhunting Yorkshire neighbour recommends Precision Decisions, which offers yield mapping and soil analysis to help arable farmers decide precisely which crops to grow where. And a doyenne of London’s private equity scene tells me to take a look at Tamworth-based Kallik, which provides ‘automated artwork’ software for pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies whose labelling is subject to frequently changing regulations in different markets. Founded by Neil and Carole Gleghorn (‘she’s finance and he’s sales’), Kallik is now a £2.5 million business with clients on three continents. ‘In a world where everyone is complaining about banks not lending, venture capital not investing and government not supporting,’ says my correspondent, ‘the Gleghorns stand out for just getting on with it without help from anyone.’ Hats off to them.
Savage cut
At Opera North, of which I’m a trustee, we’re very proud of this season’s production of Norma, with Annemarie Kremer in the title role (favourably reviewed by Michael Tanner, 11 February). Audiences have been intrigued by director Christopher Alden’s updating of Bellini’s action from Roman-occupied Gaul to what appears to be rural 19th-century America, where a primitive sect is oppressed by top-hatted capitalists. But I wonder whether — appropriate to a show touring from Leeds to Nottingham, Salford and Newcastle — he also had in mind the passage in J.B. Priestley’s English Journey (1933) about the City of London doing to the northern working classes ‘what the black-moustached glossy gentleman in the old melodramas always did to the innocent maiden’. No doubt we’re in for a wave of financial-crisis metaphors on the opera stage, but none more vivid than the moment when Roman banker Flavio is castrated with a druid’s sickle. That must be almost as painful as having your bonuses clawed back.
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