I'm booking myself in for next year's protest, waving the banner of liberty
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Idressed down for May Day by leaving the collar-stiffeners out of my shirt. It would have been a mistake to go further, for I would not have wished to be seen in the undress uniform of an investment banker. In the event, my precautions were needless, for the mob stayed away from the City this year, hunting for global capitalists in the less promising covers around Oxford Circus. The City and, even more, Canary Wharf are in all but form offshore financial centres, transcending frontiers and nationalities and moving capital around the world with a keystroke. There is a school of thought which says that history has ended and this is the way things are now going to be. It would surprise me if history were to have ended in our time, and as for capital, it has moved freely round the world before now, and then stopped. Wars can stop it, revolutions can stop it, so can defaults and financial failures, so can the markets' herd instincts when the herd trips over its own hooves. Protesters can check it. They took Barclays out of South Africa and they may put smaller companies out of business by violence. They can even contrive to make free trade look oppressive, though that does no service to the people they profess to help. The world's poorest countries are shut out of Europe's markets — most of all, for food — by tariffs, by regulations and by the infamous Common Agricultural Policy. Next year the protesters should lay siege to Brussels. I shall come with them, waving my banner with its quotation from Hayek: 'Without economic liberty, there can be no liberty.'
Currency cocktail
MY fact-finding visit to Italy established that the negroni exchange rate remains highly favourable. You can still get three of these excellent drinks for 30,000 lire, which leaves you change out of a tenner, and two of them are quite enough to get you going. The rate is a function of the euro, which is going through another of its sticky patches. This has to be somebody's fault, and the blame has been awarded to Wim Duisenberg, the mop-headed Dutchman who governs the European Central Bank. He is under attack from all sides for not cutting interest rates. This, he is told, should be his contribution to keeping Europe's economy going, and everyone else's economy, too. He thinks that his job is to keep inflation down, and that after the euro's loss of value there is quite a lot of it about. These are the priorities of an old-fashioned central banker. If he goes on like this (and if the French do not contrive to get rid of him) he may begin to make his currency sound credible. Bad news for negroni drinkers, of course.
Privatising BT
NO crystal ball was needed, no spy crouched beneath British Telecom's boardroom table. 'The Chairman's Curse hangs over Sir lain,' I was saying here two months ago, 'as BT runs short of cash. The natural course would be to ask the shareholders for more, but they would want to see a strategy, and, so I imagined, a human sacrifice, too. Sir lain Valiance had been chairman since 1987, which was quite long enough — 'even if he had not sealed his own fate by becoming president of the Confederation of British Industry, an appointment long established as the Chairman's Curse'. So it has proved. BT will have to refinance its £30 billion debt by selling more shares to its shareholders — what am I bid, £3 billion, £5 billion, any advance? — and on Monday of this week Sir lain cleared his desk. He had joined the Post Office before BT was even invented, he was privatised along with it and, when it was suggested that he should serve under a non-executive chairman, he dug his heels in and took the job himself. He leaves behind a company which still feels like a nationalised industry in private hands. Now his successor, Sir Christopher Bland, must privatise it all over again.
The money-maker
IT IS odd that he should come from the biggest business entity to be insulated by statute from the laws of supply and demand. The British Broadcasting Corporation lives off its own private income and can have us prosecuted if we do not contribute, whether we use its services or not. Sir Christopher is a money-maker by instinct and practice, and when at London Weekend Television amassed piles for himself and a small group of allies, few of whom, if any, had ever been seen at either end of a camera. How bored he must have become at the BBC. If at British Telecom, where his first clearance sale has netted £5 billion, he can link his fortunes to his shareholders', they may none of them be disappointed.
Do not pass Go
IT is a bad law that blows nobody any good. The British Safety Council — which sounds like a quango, but is in fact a self-financing outfit with charitable status — has latched on to the government's plan to invent a new crime called corporate killing. (No wonder that nobody wants to be chairman of Railtrack.) This is the BSC's cue to stage a conference and charge £229 for admission. My advice, which comes with The Spectator at no extra charge, is that companies should follow the example of Italian newspapers and appoint a direttore risponsibile. He would be well paid and would not have to do any work, but if someone had to go to jail, it would be him.
Strait is the gate
ST Michael's, Cornhill. parish church of the money market, always knew how to send its parishioners off. After a final chorus of 'Who would true valour see', the congregation would move to the Jamaica next door for a restorative drink and a gossip. Now St Michael's new rector attacks the new style in memorial services. In The Spectator (Frankly, I'd rather forget', 21 April) he girds at the mimsical musical interludes and banal reminiscences of the dear departed. The old style had its hazards, too, though. I once went to St Michael's for a memorial service in which we were asked to recite Psalm 15, listing the qualifications for heaven: 'Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle?' The church fell silent when we got to the sixth verse: 'he that hath not given his money upon usury'. This was the staple industry of almost all those present. More than ever they felt the pull of the Jamaica.
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