As Simple As ABC

I have usually voted Conservative at General Elections in the past, but find it difficult to imagine doing so again any time soon.

I was quite surprised when my father told me at some point during the early 1970s that he was a Conservative voter; he seemed to me to be an almost archetypal Labour man. He had never owned his own home – we lived in council housing when I was young, although an inheritance enabled my parents to buy a house of their own during the late 1980s – and his employment situation was always precarious. A French polisher by trade, he had a series of short-lived jobs during the 1950s and 1960s (some lasted less than a week), and my mother had to keep a notebook with details of all of them otherwise they would never have been able to complete his tax returns.

 

The Labour party, having grown out of the trade union movement and with their well-known support for the disadvantaged and the working man, seemed a natural fit for my dad, but no, he was of the view that he was always better off under a Conservative government. My parents were not well off when they married. When I was born and my mother stopped working, making ends meet was a struggle. It made sense to my dad to vote Conservative if it improved his family’s standard of living by even a tiny amount.

 

My dad and I rarely spoke about politics, and although if he had lived long enough for us to be able to discuss Brexit, I have a feeling we might not have agreed on the subject, I am fairly sure that he would have reached the conclusion that the whole process has descended into farce. But this is not about Brexit. Equally, I am fairly confident that he would have had an opinion on coronavirus and the government’s response to it, and I doubt it would have been complimentary. But this is not about coronavirus either.

 

The General Election in 1979 at which Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, was the first in which I was able to vote. Thatcher’s victory ushered in a decade when Britain became galvanised. The sick man of Europe suddenly became prosperous and thriving. Privatisation made shareholders of virtually everyone. The right to buy made home owners of council house tenants who had never previously been able to get onto the property ladder (the first house that I owned had previously been a council property). The grey, drab 1970s with its shortages and terrible fashions were replaced by the vibrant 1980s in which even the music got better (and music had been a rare high spot of the 1970s).

 

My parents and I were much better off in the 1980s than we had been a decade earlier. My dad’s belief that the Conservatives were better for him and his family rang true. There are many who will never forgive Thatcher for some of the things she did, but even some (many) Labour voters must have liked what they saw because in 1997, when Labour regained power what they really voted for was the Tories in a red tie.

 

I’m fairly sure that Margaret Thatcher would despair of the current Tory government. This administration is without parallel among incompetent governments that this country has produced, and it starts at the top. While Boris Johnson wanted to be Prime Minister it does not seem that he is very interested in actually being Prime Minister. This is apparent every time he is asked a question. Hamstrung by a complete absence of any knowledge of any subject he is being questioned on, he merely concocts some puffery as a response that bears scant resemblance to reality. It’s not so much lying as making stuff up on the hoof to give the appearance of understanding and knowledge. In that respect Johnson is merely Donald Trump with a wider vocabulary; the American President – in the absence of any knowledge or understanding of a subject – merely makes things up too.

 

Johnson reminds me of managers I have worked for in the past whose lack of product or industry knowledge results in them promising clients the moon on a stick, leaving others to extricate them from proposals that are impractical, unethical, possibly illegal, sometimes impossible. Johnson’s performance in interviews (his shambolic interview with Andrew Neil when he displayed his ignorance of WTO rules being a case in point) and at Prime Minister’s Questions suggest that outside the rarefied Westminster environment or the journalistic old-boys network, he would be lucky to find employment.

 

While I have never had much truck with people whose knee-jerk reaction to anything the Conservatives do is to label them ‘Tory scum’ or ‘the Nasty Party,’ after the last couple of years the truth is inescapable; the majority of them are incompetent or offensive, and many are both. Even people who were severe critics of Margaret Thatcher during her Premiership are quoting her on the duty of government to uphold the law in light of this administration’s unconventional approach to international law vis a vis their reluctance to comply with their own Brexit withdrawal agreement, the one they trumpeted as a triumph and whizzed through Parliament with little scrutiny last year.

 

One might have thought that Jacob Rees-Mogg would have taken note of the criticism he received after his ill-chosen remarks about the Grenfell residents following the fire there, which were uncalled for and thoughtless if we are charitable, despicable if we are more honest.  Apparently not, since after his colleagues had previously assured the public that anyone who needed a coronavirus test could get one, he stood in the House and chastised those same people who fear they are infected, saying that they need to be “reasonable” and stop their “endless carping” at the lack of testing capacity, a lack of capacity that his own Government is responsible for even while it boasts at the number of tests it claims to be processing. Rees-Mogg ended his speech by saying we should be proud of what the government has achieved; another parallel with Trump, who feels he deserves praise for his response to coronavirus despite it being a total disaster.

 

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, George Smith (or Iain Duncan Smith as he prefers to style himself), has chastised US Presidential candidate Joe Biden for his warning that “Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the (Good Friday) Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border (in Ireland).” With Brexit looming and a new trade deal with the US of such importance, I’m sure that George has a master plan to secure a deal that is entirely predicated on insulting the man with whom that deal may be conducted – but probably not.

 

The next scheduled General Election in 2024 is a long way off, but what with the chaotic manner in which the Tories have handled the pandemic, and depending on how well (or badly) Brexit turns out, you’d think that the Labour party might have a chance next time round. To the outsider, Labour look like two separate parties however, more at war with each other than with the Conservatives. The Tories who – for all their many and various faults– at least look united. At present, and despite everything, I’d give Labour little chance of forming a government any time soon, possibly not even within my lifetime.

 

Goodness alone knows what the state of the nation will be next time we go to the polls, but if you were to ask me right now who I would vote for, the answer is as simple as ABC – Anyone but Conservative.

 

 

 

A Midland Odyssey - Part Thirteen - Leadership Challenge

It is a couple of years since I last posted a blog about my time working for Midland Bank/HSBC, and if I am to write any more of them, I probably need to do so quite soon, before my memory fails me, so here is one on what I can remember of an unsurprisingly mundane management course that spawned a couple of memorable and rewarding voluntary exercises. As you’ll see, some of the details are a bit sketchy.

 

I have written before that over the years the courses that the bank ran changed from focusing on the technical aspects of particular roles - whether that was cashiering, or foreign work, or anything else - to dealing with soft skills like leadership and managing people. The course I’m featuring here was called Leadership Challenge, and to go with the day’s activities, there was something extra that followed and required working as part of a small team in planning and delivering a project.

 

It is quite scary to think that the Leadership Challenge was now nearly a decade ago, which is why some of my memories of it may be somewhat vague and lacking in detail! For starters I cannot remember whether this was a bank-wide course, UK bank specific, or simply just for Payments Department, where I was working in 2011. My suspicion is that it was the last of these.

 

What I do remember is that there was a day of activities at the bank’s sports ground in Beckenham that featured the normal round of events that are a cross between role playing exercises and parlour games. Frankly I always had a hard time with these sorts of events, I really struggled to take them seriously, and – and this may be because I take things too literally at times – found them difficult to relate to the real world. The main memories I have of the day were learning from the office of an outage on the system for which I was, in part, responsible. Gary Cook, my colleague with whom I worked on that system was with me on the course, meaning that a hefty percentage of the team were out of the office. One of my few memories of the activities was some exercise in which we had to spot objects that were scattered in trees and bushes; quite what the purpose of that was I cannot recall.

 

HSBC's sports ground at Beckenham

As part of the course we were placed in groups of six people, and after the day’s events each group was asked to put together a proposal to work with a local or national charity to raise funds for them, or contribute in some other way. At the time – and I really hope that this is still the case – the bank allowed staff time off to contribute to charitable events, not something many people were aware of, hence the fact that I cannot recall anyone ever doing so other than in connection with the Leadership Challenge.

 

Our group’s initial meetings after the day of the course concluded that we did not want to just do some fund raising, especially since another group had become involved with the highly popular armed forces charity, Help for Heroes. Founded in 2007, Help for Heroes raised over £40 million in its first three years of work. We decided instead to volunteer our time to a charity local to where we worked in Southwark.

 

After a false start or two, we identified Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST), an environmental and volunteering charity to work with. Set up in 2000, BOST aims to improve people’s health and wellbeing by making where they live and work greener and more beautiful, protecting, preserving and enhancing parks, gardens and other amenities in London SE1 and surrounding areas. [1]

 

The idea was that in partnership with BOST, we would decide on some tasks that we could undertake, and that the bank would give us a day off to do the work. But first we were supposed to prepare a presentation for management of what we would do. In part, and in terms of the course we had been on, this was probably supposed to be as important as the end result, providing an example of how we could work together (and we were by no means a group who worked together on a day-to-day basis) to devise and create a project and presentation. Although we worked on doing this, we never did get to deliver our presentation. We did however, follow through with our proposal and work with BOST, on not one, but two projects, which was more worthwhile than any presentation.

 

Our first project, which took place in June 2011, was on Waterloo Millennium Green, and involved clearing debris, weeds and other detritus from the pond and water feature there. My colleagues Paul Land, Anna Martyr, Gary Cook, Solidea Cocciatelli, and I [2] spent a whole day removing rubbish and weeds, and clearing away the overgrown vegetation from the pond, which had been drained in advance. It was hard work, and at one point, when I removed the two pairs of gloves I was wearing (one pair latex, one pair fabric), I had to pour away about half a pint of sweat from each, but it was very rewarding and at the end of it, the pond looked a lot better. A few weeks later I took a stroll over there to see what it looked like after it had been refilled, and very pleasant it was too. Sadly, I don’t have any photos of it before or immediately after.

Waterloo, Millenium Green 

 

The following year, in 2012 (I think it was February as it was during the school half-term holiday), the same group of us contacted BOST again and found a voluntary job, working for a day at a school in Southwark (again, I cannot remember which one, although I’m pretty sure it was in Redcross Way, so it was either St Joseph's R C Primary School, or The Cathedral School of St Saviour & St Mary Overy - I really ought to have written this sooner after the event!). This time our task involved installing raised flower beds for the children’s vegetable garden. Hard work again, but no less rewarding.

 

What other groups did – apart from those who raised money for Help for Heroes – I cannot say, and how many ever delivered their presentations I don’t know either, although my recollection is that the presentations were an idea that petered out somewhat.

 

Of all the courses I ever went on, the Leadership Challenge event was right up there with the most tedious, average and predictable (frankly it was a waste of a day out of the office), but I would not have passed up the opportunity to crawl around in a pond on Waterloo Green, pulling up weeds and putting empty beer cans in black plastic sacks, nor the chance to build some raised flower beds on a cold winter’s day, so there were compensations. I just wish I could remember it all better.

 

[1] https://www.bost.org.uk/about-1

[2] I am sure there was a sixth person, but for the life of me I cannot remember who it was! If it was you dear reader, all I can do is apologise!