any other business Is it wrong to do business in Zimbabwe? Remember what Mandela said to Shell
Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era. Both pursued nonracial business practices as far as they could, but both endured years of disrupted shareholder meetings and flak from the student Left. Shell stuck it out — and shortly after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela declared, ‘We’re glad you stayed.’ Barclays bowed to the protesters and abandoned its network of 900 branches in 1986; when the bank returned in 1995 to open one office in Johannesburg, Mandela told the men from Lombard Street, ‘You should never have sold.’ British companies operating in Zimbabwe today (including Barclays, which has been there since 1912) must be confused as to the right thing to do: the Prime Minister has advised them to ‘reconsider’; Lord Malloch-Brown, his minister for Africa, has suggested they might be pressed to leave as part of tougher sanctions against Mugabe; the Foreign Office has been quietly advising them to stay. Of course it must be difficult to operate without being tainted by such a viciously corrupt regime; banks, for example, are required to buy treasury bills from the central bank in Harare (thus ‘bankrolling Mugabe’) to meet ‘reserve requirements’ which are a condition of operating at all. But on balance, the best thing British firms can do for Mugabe’s victims is to hang in there and provide elements of commercial normality and contact with the wider economic world, while having as little truck as possible with Zanu-PF. I’m sure that’s what Mandela would recommend.
Wall Street’s gain
Sir Dennis Weatherstone, who died last month, started as a City office boy and ended up chairman of JPMorgan in New York. His rise exemplified the meritocratic approach which gave American banks an edge over their entrenched British rivals when London began to develop as a global finance centre in the 1960s. The son of a London Transport worker, Weatherstone was a foreign exchange dealer at Morgan’s London branch in the days when the dollar-sterling rate was known as ‘cable’ in reference to the 19th-century transatlantic telegraph link; what was then a back-office function would not have been a springboard to seniority in any British bank, but when Lew Preston, a rising star of Morgan, arrived from New York in 1966, he spotted Weatherstone as a sharp-eyed senior clerk who knew every detail of the business. Preston was an Ivy League grandee whose CV included captaining the 1948 Olympic hockey team; but he adopted Weatherstone as his lieutenant, had him posted to New York, and saw him promoted to chairman when Preston himself left to run the World Bank. Wall Street’s gain was the City’s loss, and it is perhaps too late to remind today’s trading-floor titans of the Weatherstone formula for risk management: ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t do it.’
Pray it won’t rain
Never mind the schism, look at the running costs. I’ve just become a churchwarden in Helmsley, my North Yorkshire home town, and I’m on a crash course in ecclesiastical finance. Besides soaring heating bills, the cost of roof lead (and incidence of its theft, allegedly to be shipped to China) has been a recent concern, the price having multiplied eightfold in four years. But last October it began to fall back; it is now 60 per cent below its peak, thanks to surplus of supply coupled with a downturn in the motor industry — a lot more lead goes into car batteries than cathedral guttering — signposting what may happen next in other metals markets. As that worry recedes, however, churches have to contend with a rapacious assault from the water industry. Having previously been exempt from water rates, churches in areas served by United Utilities, Northumbrian, Severn Trent and Yorkshire Water, are to be charged on the same scale as business customers for ‘surface water drainage’. A church with a large paved car park could face bills of £5,000 a year; if the regulator, Ofwat, approves the scheme across the country, it will transfer £15 million a year from the col lection plate to water company shareholders and fat-cat executives. If you think that sounds unfair, you can add your signature to upwards of 30,000 others on an e-petition on the Downing Street website (http://petitions. pm.gov.uk/ChurchWaterBills/).
On a happier note, I attended a ceremony last week in which our vicar was inducted into the college of canons of York Minster. The correct term for this is a ‘collation’, and Archbishop Sentamu kicked it off with a joke: ‘You are about to be collated,’ he told the candidate canons, ‘I expect you’re wondering whether you are also going to be stapled.’
Curry and vodka
Regular readers of this column already know Helmsley as a fertile source of economic parables — and here come a couple more, on the theme of globalisation. The first is the tale of a hill farmer who has gone for a bold diversification: 2,000 acres of arable land in the highlands of Ethiopia. ‘Wow, that’s brave,’ I said, when he told me about hair-raising journeys from Addis Ababa to his remote farmstead along roads that are still being blasted out of the rock by Chinese convict work-gangs. ‘Not really,’ he responded. ‘You should try farming in England these days. You have to be really brave to do that.’ Ethiopia may have drought and civil war, but the Orthodox Christian natives are friendly and they have one huge natural advantage: ‘Their lives are not made misery by Defra.’ My next vignette is an incident of interethnic tension. No ethnic Yorkshire folk were involved, however. A nearby pub was converted a couple of years ago into a curry house run by a team of cheerful Bangladeshis who commute from Bradford to this and other rural outposts. The flat above was occupied by Polish building workers, who are naturally inclined to homesickness. One evening, the upstairs Poles took to singing and dancing to cheer themselves up, driving diners out of the restaurant and enraging the downstairs Bangladeshis. Confrontation ensued, and six Poles were taken away in a police van. But no charges were brought and the flames of conflict were soon smothered under a blanket of social-services-speak: the local paper reports that ‘amicable resolution was achieved thanks to a problem-solving multi-agency approach’ — to be followed, I hope, by a banquet of curry, vodka and Yorkshire curd tart.
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