We owe a great debt to paintballing
He didn’t even look old enough to pay the congestion charge. I have now retired to nurse my injuries in some Surrey gastropub, while the younger generation continue their happy mimesis of war.
As I wait for my lunch, I am thinking about the role of paintball in the UK economy, and the relative importance of services and manufacturing. Look at the dosh we are all pushing out this afternoon in this heaving Surrey gastropub: vast Sunday roasts washed down with knockout Chilean Cabernets. I swear: it is almost 3pm and some of them are still having their prosecco aperitifs. Where is it all coming from?
There in the car park are the sort of vehicles you would expect to see in this neck of the woods: big, burly 4x4s, their haunches and flanks gleaming in sinuous waves of metal. They come from Japan, they come from Germany, they come from France, they come from Korea. Just about the only place they don’t seem to come from is the UK.
If you were a pessimist, and you were worried about our manufacturing base, and the recent defeat of Bombardier at the hands of Siemens, you might be disposed to see a terrible lesson here: other countries have paintshops; we have paintball. Other countries still make things; we pay to run around in the woods. You might think that paintball was just another low-skills service-based industry that does nothing for this country’s competitiveness or exports. And you know what, I reckon you would be almost completely wrong.
Yes, of course we need to boost hi-tech manufacturing, which is one of the reasons I am pleased that all the new aircon tube trains will be made by Bombardier, and the new hop-on, hop-off bus for London will be made in Ballymena. But don’t sneer at paintball, because the difference between making a car and supplying a sylvan paint- based war game is not as big as you might think.
The paintball company I have just used is called Delta Force, and it not only employs 1,000 people already, with 24 sites across the UK. It is now expanding into New Zealand and Australia. It is one of the biggest paintball firms in Europe, and according to Alex and Russell, two paintball marshals, it has just had its best year ever in the UK market. The company is hiring staff in Crawley, Edinburgh, Broxbourne and Leicester. It is looking for a supervisor to run the camp in Auckland. And these are not mickey mouse jobs: they require leadership, charisma, and the ability to marshal 300 people and teach them the safe use of a CO2 gun.
Given the savage indiscipline I have just seen, I imagine that if you can run a paintball camp, you can run just about anything. The guns themselves are made in England by a firm based in Aldershot, so that every boost to paintballing has a knock-on benefit for old-fashioned manufacturing; and I can easily imagine that there will soon be paintball apps – enabling you to tell where your enemies are on your handheld – so that there is scope for a fusion between paintballing and the digital economy.
And if paintball is simply servicing a fantasy, then so are the great big shiny cars outside the gastropub. These butch 4x4s aren’t any more useful, really, than my clapped-out 16-year-old Toyota: they just allow their owners to have a certain conception of themselves, just as paintballing allows you to dream of being Rambo. The value is in the fantasy.
Paintballing, finally, is good for business. It builds esprit de corps. It helps you let off steam. It gives many thousands of young people the rush of adrenalin that is so often missing from their childhoods, and it teaches the rest of us a vital lesson: that there will come an evening or a morning or a noonday, when you least deserve or expect it, when someone will shoot you in the back.
Wimbledon 2011: Game, set and tax – why Andy Murray will always get clobbered
Poor old Andy Murray. He was only a ginger whisker away. It was just a shot, they say, that barred him from the glory of the Wimbledon final. We all saw the moment in the second set when he had Nadal pinned and wriggling, with the whole of the right hand court exposed. All Andy had to do was keep his cool and thump it over with all the skill and violence we know him to possess; and then he mishit and whoof – it was like a soufflé taken too early from the oven.
The finest tennis writers in the land are still punishing their keyboards with the psychological post-mortems. All sorts of theories will continue to be produced for that sudden lassitude in the fiery Scot, the visible evaporation of the killer instinct. Some will say that it was a sort of self-fulfilling horror of becoming the next Tim Henman. Some will want to look again at the background field of causation – the systemic weakness of British tennis, perhaps, or the shortage of coaches or the 50-year decline of competitiveness in school sports. All these things may or may not be relevant to Britain’s continuing failure to produce a Wimbledon champion. But no one has so far been so vulgar as to ask the million pound question. What about the money?
I was glad to see George Osborne and Mervyn King in the crowds at Wimbledon last week – not just because they are quite right to support a great London business. They were beholding a symbolic pageant of Britain’s global competitiveness. There were 12 nations in the last 16 of Wimbledon, including some of our most important economic rivals. We had representatives from America and Latin America; we had the Russians and the newly market-driven ex-eastern bloc countries; and there was a good smattering of our historic counterparts from western Europe. Now let us imagine that each of these players had won the £1.1 million prize money and dutifully carried it home for the inspection of the local taxman in his own country. It is a stunning fact that Britain’s Andy Murray would have faced a more vicious fiscal clobbering than virtually anyone else at Wimbledon.
Spain had three players in the last 16, including Rafael Nadal. In spite of his country’s enormous budgetary problems, Rafa would have paid less than Andy – 47 per cent; and the Spanish got rid of their patrimonio, or wealth tax, two years ago. Moving down the tax rates, we come next to Australia’s Bernard Tomic, who faced a bill of 45 per cent. The three French players were going to be hit for 40 per cent tax – mais oui. We used to think of France as a much higher tax economy than our own, where people were bled white to pay for their trains to go at tres grande vitesse; now their top rate is fully 10 points lower than our own. The American Mardy Fish and the Argentinian Juan Martin del Potro were facing bills of only 35 per cent.
But it is when we come to the former communist countries that we see some really astonishingly generous incentives. In every case, an eastern European or Russian victor would have kept more than three quarters of his winnings. Guess how much income tax Novak Djokovic can expect to pay on his triumph of last night? A mere 20 per cent. No wonder he strains and trains. No wonder he fixes the ball with that implacable hawklike gaze, and chases shots that a lesser player would regard as hopeless. Then look across at the women’s game, and all those lissom Pullovas and Legovas from countries that were once beyond the Iron Curtain. What is their secret? I suppose they may retain the vestiges of commie military style training for sport. But it may not be irrelevant that their tax rates are all lower than 30 per cent.
If the Polish Lukasz Kubot had won, he would have done even better than Djokovic. He faced a bill of 19 per cent flat rate. The Czech Tomas Berdych would have got away with as little as 15 per cent. It seems that Roger Federer of Switzerland has been eligible for a piffling 13.2 per cent on his stupendous income over the years – and money is surely among the embrocations that has kept his genius so elastic for so long. But the man with the most sensationally low theoretical income tax bill was Russia’s Mikhail Youzhny, who would have been asked to make a derisory contribution of 13 per cent.
Only Belgium’s Xavier Malisse would have been notionally required to pay more than Andy. But we should remember that the Belgian top rate of 53 per cent is more honoured in the breach than the observance, and that Brussels remains very handy for those splendidly discreet banks in Luxembourg; and in any event, if you add in National Insurance (as we must), then Andy would have been forced to part with even more than the Belgian. I am not for a second suggesting that money is the most important incentive for a great tennis player. No doubt there are more powerful imperatives: the lust for fame and glory and the hope of bringing honour to your country. And we must be realistic, and accept that Britain was not notably better at producing Wimbledon champions when our taxes were lower. But don’t forget that these guys are professionals.
Andre Agassi once described the numbing tedium of endlessly bashing a ball over a net. We can’t rule out the possibility, at the margin, that money will make a difference – perhaps not in the adrenalin frenzy of Wimbledon, but in the daily grind of training that is the life of a working player, and that is essential for success. I am not saying that the 50p rate is the only problem: if we were to cut taxes now, it might be best to start with VAT to get people shopping again. But we need to remember that we can’t compete endlessly with other nations that set their income taxes substantially lower than ours. They will attract jobs, and investment. They may generate more tax – and they may even persuade their tennis champs to run that extra half yard for the ball.
Boris derails Cameron’s ‘perverse’ £34billion high-speed link
Mr Johnson goes on to spell out his objections to the current plan – including “significant environmental concerns”, particularly moves to send the route at ground level through Ealing and on a an elevated section at Hillingdon.
“It is perverse that a section of the route through Greater London, clearly affecting large numbers of people, has been subject to so little environmental mitigation.
“I am seeking substantial changes in design of the route to ensure these impacts are properly addressed, preferably by tunneling the whole route through London.
“Without such changes I cannot support the current proposal.”
The Mayor complains that HS2 will lead a doubling of the current number of passengers arriving at Euston station every morning and that the Underground will not be able to cope.
“I wanted a commitment from the government that their proposals for HS2 would include new underground rail capacity between Euston and Victoria,” he writes. “Thy do not and on this basis I cannot support the current proposal.”
Mr Johnson also says the planed HS2 station at Old Oak Common in North West London will not be properly “plugged in” to the capital’s infrastructure.
If ministers do not meet Mr Johnson’s demands, and his objections to the project continue after negotiations, it could mean massive delays or even the scuppering of HS2, whose first phase is planned to run from London to Birmingham, with to further northern “spurs” reaching Manchester and Leeds.
Mr Johnson, who will fight Labour’s Ken Livingstone in mayoral elections next year, has annoyed Mr Cameron by picking a series of fights over key issues of government policy – of which HS2 is the latest.
Mr Cameron’s supporters have accused him of “political positioning” in a bid to be best place to succeed the Prime Minister as Tory leader.
The Mayor has clashed with the Prime Minister over Europe – by calling for a referendum on the Lisbon treaty – and on immigration by publicly objecting to moves to moves to put a “cap” on the number of people allowed into Britain from outside the European Union.
Mr Johnson said this was bad for business, a claim he repeated when he objected to the continuation of the current 50p top rate of income tax for higher earners. He also claimed coalition plans to curb housing benefit could lead to “Kosovo-style social cleansing” in London.
Many in the government object to Mr Johnson’s call for strikes only to be legal if 50 per cent of a workforce have taken part in a ballot, while in October last year Mr Cameron declared thee government had “no plans” to build an airport in the Thames estuary area.
Most recently, the Mayor attacked plans – subsequently abandoned – by Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, to let criminals off half their sentences in return for guilty pleas.
Mr Marshall said: “The Mayor has raised serious and sensible questions about the impact on London of this eye wateringly expensive project.
“The Government’s refusal to acknowledge these issues shows how fearful they are that cost will rocket still further. As the true extent of the disruption and costs becomes clear the tide of opposition is growing.”
A Department for Transport spokesman said: “London’s economy stands to benefit from the improved connectivity and increased capacity HS2 has to offer – that’s why the capital’s business community strongly supports the scheme.
“While our proposals for high speed rail will obviously have an impact on those communities directly affected, we are absolutely committed to doing everything possible to mitigate this.”
The £34 billion HS2 link is the government’s flagship transport infrastructure project, enthusiastically promoted by ministers as boosting the economy and helping end the north-south divide.
It is expected to cut journey times from London to Birmingham by up to 30 minutes, to Manchester by up to 45 minutes and to Leeds by up to an hour.
Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, has pledged that the government will sell the line to private investors to recoup a large part of the taxpayer’s investment in the line, which is planned to begin operating around 2025.
Campaigners, however, claim it is an expensive white elephant being planned at a time of massive Government cuts to public services.
John Redwood, the former Conservative cabinet minister, has said the line is a “luxury we cannot afford at the moment”. In addition, ministers have faced protests from those living along its proposed route, including from Tory donors.
Labour supports the scheme on principle but has called for “more clarity” on the precise costs.
Shakespeare, torchbearer for the Chinese way of doing things
His popularity survived the revolution to the point where it is acceptable for a communist leader to hail Shakespeare, not as a bourgeois reactionary, not as an imperialist capitalist running dog, but as the greatest writer who ever lived. When you stop to think about Shakespeare’s prevailing ideology, it is easy to see why.
Think of Shakespeare’s political context, the Elizabethan age. This was the era when England was the world’s boom nation. The Armada had been thrashed. English companies were forming and trading around the world. We were laying the foundations for the greatest commercial empire the world has ever seen; and yet of course it was also a time of domestic paranoia. There was no real political freedom – of course not, when there was always a risk that the Spanish would strike back, or that armies of secret Catholics would launch a Counter-Reformation, or that the Queen – a poor, weak woman – would be deposed by one of her charismatic earls. That was why Walsingham deployed his secret police. Authors and playwrights had to be very careful about what they said. If you offended the regime, it could be curtains. Thomas Kyd was tortured to death. Christopher Marlowe was probably bumped off by the secret service, in the course of that mysterious “brawl” in Deptford. Ben Jonson nearly had his ears and nose cut off.
Shakespeare himself played a very cool hand. He was, frankly, the poet of the established order. We don’t want to go back to the tumult of the Wars of the Roses, is the nub of what he is saying in the histories. We want to stick with the Tudor settlement. You can see why his message might be agreeable to Beijing. Look at what happens to the family members who are so impudent and ungrateful as to depose the gerontocrat King Lear. They get their comeuppance, all right. No wonder King Lear has always struck a chord in Japan and China and other societies where old age is particularly reverenced.
Look at what happens to the putschist Macbeth or to the Gang of Eight conspirators who kill Julius Caesar. They all come to pretty unsavoury ends. And what is the theme of Hamlet, that work of cosmic genius that Mr Wen watched yesterday? Well, it is also about a constitutional outrage, in which the King is murdered by Claudius; and when the battle is over and the stage is strewn with bodies at the end of Act Five, Shakespeare takes care to leave the ruling party in power. Fortinbras takes over from Hamlet (and remember, we are laboriously told at the beginning that he has a good claim to the throne). Kent and Edgar take over from Lear. Macduff takes over from Duncan. Antony and Octavius take over from Caesar. Usurpers never prosper, unless, of course, like Bolingbroke, they take over from bad kings like Richard III.
Shakespeare did occasionally get into hot water himself. He was spoken to very severely when he obliged the Earl of Essex, on the eve of his abortive rebellion, by staging Richard II – a play about a king who is deposed. Such was the anxiety about any play depicting a regicide that you could not buy a copy of Julius Caesar for 24 years after it was first staged. But Shakespeare never really fell foul of the secret police. He was too fly for that. He ended his life quite rich, by the standards of the day, and that is hardly surprising when you think that his plays contained so much poetry, so many insights into the human heart – and such ingenious defences for keeping things as they are, and keeping the ruling party in power.
Yup: he was the greatest writer of all time, but he also knew how to cope with censorship, the secret police and the absence of anything that we would now call pluralist democracy. Which is why, I venture to say, it is very safe and correct to admire him in Beijing.
Boris Johnson: we should support armed services
Mayor of London Boris Johnson attends flag-raising ceremony to mark the forthcoming Armed Forces Day.
The greatest gift to the Greeks might be to let them go it alone
The Greek debt crisis is deepening, in other words; and there are only two options. We could continue down the road we are on, in which the euro shambles becomes an invisible and surreptitious engine for the creation of an economic government of Europe. Indeed, there is a sense in which the slow-motion disaster of the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain – has been terrific for the federalist cause. Bit by bit we seem to be creating a fiscal as well as a monetary union, in which huge sums – including about £20 billion of UK bail-out cash – are being transferred from the richer to the poorer parts of the EU. The idea is that Germany, France and others should “socialise” the debts of the periphery – take them on, in other words – so as to keep the eurozone together and to stop the domino effect, with all the attendant damage it is feared that would do to the European banking system.
These profligate and improvident countries would be obliged, in return, to submit to a kind of economic supervision that is now proposed for Greece. Taxes, spending, benefits – all the panoply of economic independence – would then be subject to agreement with Berlin and Brussels. I sometimes think Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and co instinctively knew that this would happen.
They probably calculated that if only they could achieve monetary union, the euro would create such strains that the de facto creation of a United States of Europe would be impossible to resist. The trouble is that there is just no democratic mandate for anything of the kind.
As Angela Merkel is constantly obliged to point out, the German people would never have supported joining the euro if they had been told that they would become the guarantors of the debts of Greece. The Greeks would never have gone into the euro if they thought it meant the complete surrender of their economic independence and the destruction of their standards of living. As for the UK taxpayer, none of us believed that a condition of EU membership was the payment of billions in ransom money to stop the euro blowing up.
For years, European governments have been saying that it would be insane and inconceivable for a country to leave the euro. But this second option is now all but inevitable, and the sooner it happens the better. We have had the hamartia – the tragic flaw in the system that allowed high-spending countries to free ride on low interest rates. We have had the hubris – the belief the good times would never end. We have had nemesis – disaster. We now need the anagnorisis – the moment of recognition that Greece would be better off in a state of Byronic liberation, forging a new economic identity with a New Drachma. Then there will be catharsis, the experience of purgation and relief.
I don’t believe that Greece would be any worse off with a new currency. Look at what happened to us after we left the ERM, or to the Latin American economies who abandoned the dollar peg. In both cases, it was the route to cutting interest rates and export-led recovery.
The euro has exacerbated the financial crisis by encouraging some countries to behave as recklessly as the banks themselves. We are supposedly engaging in this bail-out system to protect the banks, including our own. But as long
as there is the fear of default, as long as the uncertainty continues, confidence will not return across the whole of Europe – and that is bad for the UK and everyone else.
It is time for a resolution. And remember – if Greece defaults or leaves the euro, then we will not see that UK cash again. Indeed, we are more likely to be repaid in stuffed vine leaves or olive oil than we are in pounds or euros. We should stop chucking good money after bad.
