Politics
It's the rich wot get the blame
Published 03 September 2001
Chaucer, Jane Austen, Martin Amis: all show capitalists as greedy and wicked. Aggrieved business leaders want a rewrite. Nick Cohen is unsympathetic
Chief Executive Officers can have it all: the political parties, the public services, the tax havens, the share options, and any private facility they can pay for from salaries and dividends grand enough to guarantee their recipients will be the founders of aristocracies of wealth. You might imagine that they would be happy. But all ideologies become intolerant of small differences as they grow stronger, and the house intellectuals of the corporate world now regard free reporting of its faults and almost all depictions of commerce in literature, from Chaucer to Martin Amis, as intolerable. Real and imagined criticisms are no longer arguments that must be taken on the chin or countered. They are the diseased ravings of scroungers and deracinated bohemians whose worthlessness is proved by their failure to market a burger franchise or launch a unit trust. The whiff of the cultural commissar is in the corporate air. The souls of journalists and poets must be re-engineered.
To confound its enemies, the defenders of big business have embraced the language of victimhood, the second great ideology of our time, and one that is nowhere near as antipathetical to corporate interests as both sides like to imagine. Where cultural studies departments once found the western canon to be fatally compromised by patriarchal and Eurocentric prejudice, so the Institute of Economic Affairs, which bred the inspirers of Thatcherism, now discovers that almost every literary work that has survived is guilty of "spitting at the market and despising its institutions".
The name for this sickness is "anti-business bias". It is rampant at the BBC, as Jeff Randall explained in May 2000, while he was the editor of Sunday Business. If Radio 4 were your sole source of news, he wrote, "you would inevitably conclude that happily married Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, law-abiding taxpayers are a dying breed on these islands". The BBC dismisses "financially secure, hard-working citizens (ie, the vast majority) who are proud of their country, content with their lot, and do not regard the Union Jack as a symbol of evil". Instead of concerning itself with their industry and patriotism, the Corporation displays "obsessive obsequiousness" to "social and ethnic minorities, the unemployed, and those who enjoy denigrating con-ventional values".
So far, so predictable. Ever since the arrival of democ-racy, the right has profited by casting itself as the defender of the satirically named "silent majority" against social and sexual outsiders who cadge "special privileges" from the treacherous liberal elite.
Yet, when quasi-monopolies straddle the globe and the working and middle classes see their security assaulted in the interests of shareholder value, the old backlash alliance between the high-paid and the low-browed loses its appeal. To keep the audience from wondering why it should care, Randall made a swift polemical switch. "Business is rarely covered in Radio 4 news bulletins," he continued, "unless it is a story about a beastly multinational making workers redundant or fat-cat directors collecting outrageous salaries. It is as if this country's executive class, whose taxes underpin the BBC's funding, does not exist. The BBC's new director general, Greg Dyke, made a personal fortune from business. It is about time he looked at the corporation's institutionalised bias against free-enterprise wealth creators - and did something about it."
Suddenly Randall was no longer defending decent, ordinary families who expect a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, but the super-rich - and defending them in the language of institutional bias coined by the Lawrence inquiry. The change of subject was necessary to make the sweeping denunciation useful. "Anti- business bias" has to be a broad concept if it is to have a chance of persuading the harassed employee that he is on the same side as the multinational that may make him redundant; that his interests are at one with the "the fat-cat directors" whose "outrageous salaries", according to studies from institutions as politically varied as the London School of Economics and the Institute of Directors, can't be made to correlate with their companies' performances.
The rhetorical trick is to create an idealistic notion of "business" as a seamless whole and to ignore the conflicts not only between staff and employers, but between small businesses and conglomerates, manufacturing and finance, reputable City institutions and chancers. All differences must be submerged so that a critic of, say, the board of Railtrack can be presented as a loather of work and commercial endeavour in all its forms.
Randall's gormless philippic - how can the BBC pretend executives don't exist while reporting executive remuneration packages? - wouldn't be worth mentioning if Dyke had not been gratified by the defence of his "personal fortune". He assured a meeting of business leaders that he would make it his business to end the bias against entrepreneurs. Dyke proved he was as good as his word when, a few weeks later, he appointed Randall to the post of BBC business editor, even though Randall didn't seem to know that the Corporation is underpinned not by the taxes of the country's executive class, but by a poll tax that falls hardest on the poorest.
Needless to say, Dyke and Randall didn't discover anti- businessism all by themselves. It is optimistic to expect originality from such quarters. The exposure of the slanders came, like so much else, from America.
Denunciations of big government and unions as the enemies of free enterprise are as old as the New Deal. The modern assault on "anti-business" prejudice was developed by the nastier wing of the American right in the 1990s. In that decade, the longest boom in US economic history inflated the incomes of the rich while failing to raise significantly the wages of the working and middle classes. Those who criticised corporate power and the lopsided distribution of income were pilloried by Rush Limbaugh, a hugely wealthy shock jock who poses as the friend of the common man, and by the staff of Commentary, a magazine run by apostate Jewish leftists with an aching need to atone for their sins by being more conservative than the conservatives.
Their theme was taken up by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News network shows what he would do to British broadcasting if the government lets him have his way. In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott described how Fox delivered a ranting package of opposition to the smallest challenge to the established order, which will be familiar to the students of the Sun. Wolcott noted the equally commonplace affectation of corporate presenters who posed as prolier-than-thou populists. What was novel, he wrote, was the anchormen's descent into lachrymose wails of empathy for "America's most mistreated and unloved minority, the oppressed rich".
Wolcott quoted Neil Cavuto, a Fox presenter who raged against requests for taxes that discriminated against the rich. "Why are they being penalised?" he cried. "Why? Because they're rich, that's why, and because they can take it, that's why. I mean, when was the last time you saw a lobbying group for rich folks, or hear anyone say anything good about rich people?"
The briefest of glances at Washington and Whitehall confirms that lobbyists for the rich folks scarcely need bother with governments that will give them what they want without being asked. The presence of Dyke and Murdoch among the defenders of the business class suggests that anti-business bias may not be the most prevalent distortion in the media. Even when you leave their empires, you find that most business journalists are more lapdog than bulldog. They write for, and report on, public limited companies, and are unlikely to bite the hand that feeds them. In the mid-1990s, Quentin Bell, a manager of a City public relations firm, estimated that 80 per cent of business news and 40 per cent of general news came direct from corporate press releases, and little has changed since.
Randall and the rest have reason to be nervous, however, for all their hyperbole. Britain has still not quite accepted that wealth denotes worth. Even in the US, a 1980s study by a conservative institute found that half of all corporate chiefs on television committed crimes from fraud to murder, and only "3 per cent of tele-vision businessmen engage in socially or economically productive behaviour". I doubt if those figures have changed much, either. You can't see a CEO on American television without guessing that he will soon be poisoning the wells or eating babies.
Hollywood, not exactly a hotbed of anti-capitalism, knows that portraits of corporate criminality sell well in the sacred free market to audiences who must have faint reasons for finding them plausible. Editors know that stories about mass redundancies and stratospheric pay rises for mediocre executives interest readers. Left to themselves, they might even find the courage to cover them.
As media ownership concentrates, the Dyke-Murdoch ideology will have more agenda-setting successes. What are harder to suppress are the opinions of posterity.
Last year, the Institute of Economic Affairs corralled six English literature professors to produce a work of sinister vulgarity. Like Stalin's censors combing novels for hints of anti-Soviet deviance, the authors of The Representation of Business in English Literature sifted the classics for evidence of anti-business bias.
Once they started looking, they found it everywhere. The only author who is praised without reserve is Daniel Defoe, admired for his "unflagging" advocacy of trade and for telling us that the resourceful Robinson Crusoe managed a plantation before being shipwrecked. (The institute does not add that the plantation would have been built on the global market of the slave trade.)
The rest of the "great tradition" is a sorry affair. Chaucer - the feudal snob - would be blackballed from the Confederation of British Industry because his merchant "concealed his debts" and reeve "deceived his lord". That unteachable elitist bitch Jane Austen had the gentry's "contempt for business", which I think we knew already, although the institute has to admit, as an afterthought, that Mr and Mrs Gardiner, in Pride and Prejudice, may be in trade but are among the few relatives of whom Elizabeth need not be ashamed.
The qualifying sentence, hastily inserted, becomes a characteristic of most of the professors, who need to pull back from a full-throated cry to burn the heretics if they are to escape charges of ahistorical witch-hunting.
Thus Jonathan Swift is shown as a cynic for failing to love the new City speculative houses and writing: "through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country in the world".
He appears guilty as charged, until Professor W A Speck has to admit that the ruin of thousands that followed the bursting of the South Sea Bubble "seemed to confirm" Swift's prophecies. ("Seemed"? A strange word in the circumstances.) Grudging acknowledgements are made that the best authors can put convincing arguments in the mouths of various characters without necessarily believing every word themselves (they make things up, you know), until we get to the 20th century. Its ideological conflicts are too close to be inspected with complete equanimity. "It is difficult to find positive and appreciative images of business in 20th-century literature," sighs Professor John Morris. Forster, Yeats, Auden, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Eliot, Woolf, Miller, Martin Amis, Caryl Churchill and Larkin are all guilty of anti-entrepreneurial deviance.
I'm not misquoting: Larkin, the enemy of unions and admirer of Margaret Thatcher, is suspect for writing of the burden of work in "Toads":
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on.
As I read on, I realised that the Institute of Economic Affairs is as ignorant of what makes literature work as the BBC's business editor is of the diversity of business. The authors don't know why anyone who has been caught in a fraud (or can imagine being caught in a fraud) might read Swift, or why anyone who has thought for a day that they are wasting their life in a dreary job would offer sad thanks to Larkin.
The founder of the institute's free-market cult was F A Hayek - John the Baptist to Margaret Thatcher's messiah. Hayek, we learn, regarded intellectuals as gadflies without expertise or originality. Great writers are therefore banal generalists. They should never be able to find imaginative or emotional truths. And yet, and yet . . . for all the sneering, there is a vague awareness that the dilettantes' scribblings can have an astonishing longevity. You can almost hear the free-marketeers asking: "What if the story of these great times is told to the future by Martin Amis or Caryl Churchill? Can't something be done?"
John Blundell, the director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who contributed the foreword, believed it could and must. Writers should be bribed to deliver positive representations of business with a guaranteed shelf-life of hundreds of years.
It should be a simple task, he mused. Chief executives who wanted to fix "three centuries of bad press" should start with a "programme of outreach to brand-new emerging talent. A day spent visiting a factory or similar capitalist institution would be a positive eye-opener for most, if not all, such talent." The programme should cover "current leaders, both market-place practitioners and academic theorists, to engage them in whatever way possible. Lastly, I would argue that incentives do matter, and I would seek to find ways of financially rewarding fiction writers above all who treat business as an honourable, creative, moral and personally satisfying way of life. Some of the pounds spent on appeasing might be better spent on encouraging and rewarding."
A spokesman for the institute told me, with regret, that in the six months since The Representation of Business in English Literature was published, no entrepreneur had been found to take on the niche production of literary immorality. Branding has its limits.
But what has been a laughable flop in literature is a grim triumph elsewhere. As the orders of Dyke and Murdoch reveal, the continued receipt of "incentives" by a large majority of those who write for a living in journalism, PR or advertising depends on their treatment of "business" - all business, presumably - "as an honourable, creative, moral and personally satisfying way of life". They are being branded. And the irons are getting hotter.
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