Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (20 page)

Similarly, small children might expect the answer to the question “Who gets paid the most?” to be “The prime minister.” The prime minister is in charge, so it might seem logical that “the prime minister's salary” means the same as “the most amount of money imaginable”, and that anyone being paid more than that is an evil usurper of the Queen's treasure. In stories, such villains, grand viziers and the like, get punished. They're humiliated and made to give the money back. A child might even contemplate, in moments of post-sugar binge viciousness, chopping their heads off.

But small children are idiots. As each human foetus sloshes into the world, wailing and weeing, unable to walk, crawl, speak or even sit – a helpless lump of ignorant self-interest – society takes a deep breath because, in just 18 years' time, that blob will be allowed to vote. The professionals whose job it is to get them up to speed are called teachers and, according to newspaper reports, one of them is paid more than the prime minister.

It's a credit to the children and parents at Mark Elms's school that they still don't want to chop his head off. In general, they seem to think that he's very good at his job and deserves the money. You don't expect primary-school headmasters to be paid that much, but he's brilliant and, to borrow a phrase from the private sector, you get what you pay for. But that's not everyone's view. Many are disgusted by the news that, contrary to our expectations, at least one teacher has a high salary.

How deeply depressing. This isn't some risibly job-titled council functionary – a “deputy manager of procurement services”, a “bureaucracy maximisation taskforce co-chair” or a “litter tsar”, one of those people responsible for all the “waste” we're asked to believe that the previous administration encouraged in direct defiance of its own interests. This guy runs a primary school in a grim area that was as crap as you'd expect when he took it over and has got vastly better under his leadership, to the immense
benefit of his hundreds of pupils and their families. Why can't we treat him like the high-flyer his CV proclaims him to be?

I think most people are comfortable with the idea that if you're a brilliant doctor, surgeon or barrister, you'll get quite rich – nearly as rich as a second-rate management consultant or an inept banker. But the fact that we react so differently to a teacher's pay approaching that level gives the lie to our vociferous assertions that we think teaching is an important job. We don't think it's important, we think it's badly paid. And when we discover an instance where it isn't, it makes us angry, not glad.

It even makes the unions representing other teachers angry because, apparently despairing of ever seriously improving their own members' pay, they've focused on dragging headteachers down into the same under-remunerated swamp. One example is cited of a teacher's career that has involved success, fulfilment and money – a beacon of hope to talented graduates with a vocation to teach but who fear it would leave them absurdly less well-off than their peers in other jobs – and the very unions representing that profession want it snuffed out, so that teaching remains the preserve of the self-sacrificing or the mediocre.

The government agrees because this is the public sector which, according to Tory orthodoxy, is inevitably inefficient. The country must live within its means and so can't pay public sector wastrels at the same rate as their private sector equivalents, even though the main cause of those means becoming so straitened was the credit-crisis-induced recession, a disaster brought on by monumental private sector inefficiency – if the word “inefficiency” is sufficient to cover that thoughtless spiral of hedonistic incompetence.

Nevertheless, to this government the private sector is automatically better. To suggest otherwise is heresy. That's why they're restructuring the NHS in a way that will encourage more private enterprise, despite the fact that, in June 2010,
the Commonwealth Fund declared it the most efficient health service out of the seven it had studied – that's ahead of Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, all systems with more private sector involvement. The NHS might well be, in terms of the results it delivers with the money it gets, the most efficient health service on Earth. And yet the Tories are convinced that hasty and sweeping organisational reforms will make it even more so.

Meanwhile, paying higher salaries to get more able employees is, in their view, a technique that only works in the private sector. They've arbitrarily decided that it's a scandal if any public servant is paid more than the prime minister. But the prime minister's salary has always been incredibly low considering the importance of the job. To most prime ministers, the pay is irrelevant; they don't have much time to spend it and they know they can rake it in with a book deal and a lecture tour as soon as they resign.

I don't know if the country can afford to pay hard-working and well-motivated primary-school headteachers, who also work in the community to help other schools, £180,000 a year (which is roughly what he got after backpay for the previous year and employers' pension contributions are taken away). But I hope so, and I'm pleased that Mark Elms has been well paid for doing a good job. The fact that so many felt otherwise is a sign of how hysterical with envy some people, and a lot of news reporting, have become.

Occasionally, just for a moment, I think it might be a good thing if money ceased to exist, if the eurozone sovereign debt crisis spiralled so hopelessly out of control that there was an international bank run of catastrophic proportions, and so all of the numbers – and, in millions of cases, negative numbers – next
to our names on screens became academic because the screen-owning institutions had run out of the pieces of paper that the numbers were supposed to represent – and indeed weren't even sure for how much longer they'd receive the electricity to run the computers that stored these now notional numbers.

Maybe, I catch myself thinking, such a great levelling would remind us of the fundamental truth that we're just a few billion humans clinging to a rock spinning in space, with certain requirements and problems, and certain resources and skills with which to address them. The bottom line is not the proverbial bottom line. Our obsession with money has even infected our idioms; it's made us believe that cash is something concrete. (The builders got to that one before the accountants, which makes a bit more sense.) When you think about things in this way, you're harder to sway when people argue that the British economy depends on a vibrant financial services sector or that environmental campaigners don't understand the real world.

The reason I try to romanticise this potential cataclysm is that I'm depressed by how money always latches on to power – how affluent people and institutions aggressively and unashamedly lobby to sustain and advance themselves. With money gone, this couldn't happen. Admittedly, the chequebook's demise as a sign of power would mean a return of the mace. Might would be right again, which is hardly a fairer system – but at least it encourages people to take exercise.

For now, money remains sovereign. Chris Huhne's girlfriend, Carina Trimingham, has made the papers for sending a “Nod nod, wink wink, I know lots of cabinet ministers” email to a lobbying company in the hope of getting a job. Meanwhile, we had cross-party cross parties in response to Sir Christopher Kelly's proposed reforms of their funding. He wanted a cap of £10,000 on money given by individual donors so that people
are primarily giving to support rather than influence a political cause; state funding would make up the shortfall.

The Trimingham email isn't much of a scandal; it's just another own goal by the Lib Dems. I doubt they've got the organisational skills to be properly corrupt. Like the priests at St Paul's when Occupy moved in, they've just been flustered by the unaccustomed limelight into briefly abandoning all their principles. And, while there's a thriving market for governmental influence, Trimingham doesn't strike me as a major stallholder. I doubt that the networking overtures of the younger woman your colleague just left his wife for seem any more inviting in political circles than they do anywhere else. She's just another hapless jobseeker, a victim of history: a hundred years ago, a woman having an affair with a cabinet minister would have been set up in her own flat on a generous allowance. Chris Huhne would probably think that was sexist. He's very much a new man who was always happy to let his wife drive, for example.

The rejection of reform to how political parties are financed is more troubling. Clearly, the parties fear that a £10,000 cap would open up a massive funding gap. This would partly be caused by genuine, generous supporters being forced to give less. But some of it would definitely be a result of those who wish to buy influence being unable to. From trade unions to Lord Ashcroft, many institutions and individuals give money to political parties because they want, at the very least, to be listened to more intently than those who haven't donated. They want to get round the pesky one-person-one-vote principle that democracies anachronistically cling to in the face of economic reality.

This is money that, in an ideal world, honourable political parties wouldn't want. But this isn't an ideal world and politicians probably tell themselves, sometimes accurately, that they can take the money, nod and smile at the donor's weird views, and then use it in pursuit of legitimate political goals. And while this
grubbiness sometimes brings bad PR, it's less hassle than asking for public money at a time of hysterical state parsimony.

But this approach is not in the taxpayer's or the people's interests. The money Sir Christopher Kelly wants political parties to get would be a pittance, in terms of the national budget, and it could save us so much. In allowing political parties to be so broke they're prey to cynical donors and politicians to be so underpaid they grub around for directorships, we risk spoiling the ship of state for a ha'p'orth of tar.

The link between money and power may never be broken but, in a well-run democracy, the overall wealth of the many can be brought to bear. Collectively, the electorate is much more financially powerful than any corporation. Big business wants our wealth, our custom and preferential trading conditions in our realm. We, as customers and taxpayers, can make or break them; they know it and will pay to subvert that power. This causes immense waste and injustice, much of which would be obviated if our political system enjoyed the comparatively modest state funding that would protect it from lobbyists' cash.

By December 2011, over three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the country still felt like shit …

Sometimes it's down to the director-general of the British Retail Consortium to sum up the national mood. “Non-food is having a thoroughly miserable and difficult time,” he said. He's so right – it really is. And, of all the non-foods, the humans are particularly depressed, with more than 2.64 million of us now out of work. But I like his note of optimism. We remain non-foods. We haven't started to eat one another. While we've not yet been reduced to carrion or prey, there are still grounds for hope.

We're in the grip of a historically significant slump, possibly as notable as the Great Depression. Our current trials will definitely be on the A-level history syllabuses of the decades to come. Any more disastrous developments and we may even make GCSE.

The question the kids of the future will be trying to answer is: “What caused all that suffering?” As a former lazy history student myself, I know that the trick here is to look for the point in the debate where someone says, “It's a bit more complicated than that,” and then go back to the previous assertion. The things that historical events are a bit more complicated than are, in my experience, also the things that they basically are.

Proper controversy is when one historian says “This is caused by Thing A,” and another says “Shut up, you! It was caused by Thing B.” But when one is saying “It was Thing A,” and the other says “It's more complicated than that,” I reckon we pretty much have an answer. Some say it's Thing A, others say it's partly Thing A – that's as close to a consensus as naturally argumentative people are ever likely to come to.

In the case of our current troubles, the thing that it's a bit more complicated than, but also basically is, is “all the bankers' fault”. I know my saying that will annoy some people, but that's OK because they're the very people I take most pleasure in annoying. So if you're thinking about getting annoyed, you might want to consider not giving me the satisfaction and agree with me instead.

The Financial Services Authority has finally offered its considered opinion that the collapse of RBS in 2008 was caused by “underlying deficiencies in RBS management, governance and culture, which made it prone to make poor decisions”. It's easy to take the piss out of this because it's a bland statement of such a self-evident fact; but it's like when a miss-hit at Wimbledon flies off into the crowd – a linesman still has to call “Out!” when it finally hits the ground.

So it's clear that, while other factors must be borne in mind, such as feckless midwestern property developers, consumers spending beyond their means, Greek fiscal imprudence, George Osborne's point that it was the snow and George Osborne, we'd be in shallower shit now if more bankers had got theirs together. This is why I'm worried about Bob Diamond.

Barclays' new boss first came to my attention in January, when he told MPs that the “period of remorse and apology for banks … needs to be over”. I didn't like that, partly because I hadn't really noticed any period of remorse and apology, unless you count “I'm sorry our various scams didn't work” as an apology; and partly because it's not for him to say. If you're really sorry for something, you should just keep being sorry. It's for others to decide when you can be let off the hook. If you're the first to be asking whether you've apologised enough, then you haven't.