Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with connotations obviously intended to be negative. It’s true that Greece and Portugal in particular are deep in the porker-manure, with the bond markets repricing their debt (Greek government bonds currently yield more than double those of Germany) in a way that suggests they may soon be unable to finance their spiralling deficits at all. They will then have to be bailed out by stronger eurozone states plus the IMF — and the austerity measures demanded are already provoking unrest. As pressures mount, the euro could fracture — and, as I wrote here five years ago of the inevitability of just such a crisis, ‘you may be sure that if restructuring the euro without its most delinquent members becomes a political imperative, the French and the Germans will find a way to do it’. But we will have no opportunity to be smug, because our own ruined public finances will certainly be caught in the hurricane. So not much scope for jokes then. But let me at least speak up for pigs — which, if you think about the way they process fodder no one else wants into tasty products from their trotters to their chitterlings, are models of productive efficiency. How insulting to associate them with Europe’s most profligate and incompetent governments.
Made in Japan
One of the best cars I ever had was the Toyota Carib in which I buzzed around Tokyo in the mid-1980s. I cannot recall it ever developing a single fault. Pride in craftsmanship is an element of the Japanese psyche that long predates industrialisation but became all the more central to national self-esteem in the modern era of export success, when the international image of ‘Made in Japan’ turned — as Sony founder Akio Morita put it — ‘from something shoddy to something fine’. This devotion to near-faultlessness in manufacturing has always been in contrast to Japanese attitudes to finance, in which they often behave like saké-fuelled mah-jong gamblers. So the current crisis at Toyota, in which more than eight million cars have been recalled worldwide because of a potential defect in the accelerator pedal (and the Prius hybrid is having trouble with its brakes) is a deeper wound than the financial crisis at Nissan a decade ago that resulted in what amounted to a take- over by Renault of France. A loss of reputation for product quality could not come at a worse time, as Japan struggles to haul itself out of two decades of stagnation — and it would be hard to think of a crueller economic metaphor than a jammed accelerator.
The walking man
Alberto Giacometti’s ‘L’Homme Qui Marche I’ was described by Sotheby’s as a ‘humble image of an ordinary man’; to me, the bronze figure’s emaciated frame and purposeful stride suggests a hungry ‘economic migrant’. So there’s an uncomfortable irony in its world-record £65 million sale last week — as well as a mystery as to who on earth has that sort of cash to throw around. The bidders’ identities remain secret: there were, apparently, ten at the start, but only two as the price surged from the mid-£30 millions towards the final hammer price. Various lists have been published of new-money art-fanciers who might have been in contention — oligarchs, hedge-fund princes and real-estate barons, most of whom have risen from obscurity to wealth almost as fast as the auction bidding. All this brings to mind the late Max Rayne, the multi- millionaire London property developer and philanthropist whose collection of contemporary sculpture at his Hampstead home (he also owned a Giacometti or two) included a huddled figure of a Jewish child from a displaced-persons camp — as a constant reminder to Rayne of his own origins as the grandson of poor migrants from Poland. I hope the Walking Man plays a similar role in the household of his new owner, whoever that may be.
Parp! Parp!
A curious intersection of politics and economics has caused a very irritating phenomenon: a glut of nanny-state advertising. On the one hand, Labour ministers in their last weeks in office are reluctant to cut departmental spending and determined to get messages across. On the other, private-sector advertising budgets have been slashed, so poster sites and broadcast slots are available dirt-cheap to public-sector space buyers. Hence we’re bombarded with the Transport Department’s ‘Kill Your Speed’ campaign; those creepy NHS ‘I’d Do Anything’ ads in which children plead with their parents to stop smoking; and most tiresome of all, Ed Miliband’s £6 million essay in ill-timed alarmism, ‘Act on CO2’, urging us all to drive five miles less a week. It’s easy to imagine the Climate Change Secretary’s people thinking how smart it would be to roll out a campaign designed to ride the post-Copenhagen zeitgeist — never imagining that the UN summit itself would turn into farce and that the ‘climate-change consensus’ would suddenly fall apart. In consequence, numerous readers have told me that the impact of ‘Act on CO2’ has been to provoke a powerful Mr Toad-like urge to take the motor for a spin.
Carbon pawprints
Mind you, there was an even more striking example of the climate-change lobby’s capacity for sounding ridiculous on the Today programme, in the form of an interview with Dr John Barrett of York University about the carbon cost of cats and dogs. ‘They’re bad for the environment, aren’t they?’ barked Sarah Montague, like an ill-tempered miniature schnauzer, while poor Dr Barrett tried to make his point that domesticated carnivores have a CO2 impact that could be measured against ‘personal carbon allowances’. Having checked that I had not woken up on 1 April, I tried to apply this analysis to my golden retriever, Douglas. He could certainly cut out five self-indulgent miles a week of chasing (but never catching) rabbits and squirrels. He shows little inclination to use public transport and none to ride a bicycle, preferring to be chauffeured in a 4×4. And the only method I’ve found of reducing his own toxic emissions is to feed him high-carbon Charcoal Bonios. He’s the canine equivalent of a stretched Hummer, in fact: I’m surprised Miliband’s crew haven’t been round to film him for a scary advert.
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