Brexit. Is it done yet?

A couple years ago I was looking for new Podcasts as I was growing tired of the ones I’d been listening to for years.

I had noticed a trend similar to the bars in Bangkok. They lure you in with innocent promises before demanding money with menaces once you had made yourself comfortable. Advertisements started appearing with increasing regularity, pleas for voluntary donations that would shame charity muggers and teasing you with clips of what was available behind the paywall.

I found myself gravitating towards the comforting shores of the BBC. They maintain a public service principle that applies not only to the British people who pay the BBC licence fee but to those of us in their former colonies. That was how I stumbled upon Brexitcast.

As is obvious from the name, this is a Podcast about Brexit and given that it comes from the BBC it is pretty balanced. It has the rabidly pro Tory Laura Kuenssberg on one side, and the pro-European Katya Adler on the other. I lean towards Katya of course but I enjoy listening to Laura Kuenssberg because she balances up the echo chamber stuff I read in the Guardian and The Irish Times.

It means that although I live as far from the UK as possible, I’m as up to date on Brexit as a resident of Birmingham. I wonder sometimes why I’m so obsessed by it. Is it because I lived in the UK for seven years or because I grew up five kilometres from what has now become the land border between the United Kingdom and the European Community? Actually, I don’t think it’s either of these. I’m just a political nerd who loves watching a country destroy itself.

Brexit is the sort of thing that will be studied by Political Science students in years to come and their reactions will be like Economics students today who study the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 17^th Century. Amazement that people could ever be so stupid and yet strangely fascinated at the same time. It is patronising to tell the people who voted for Brexit that they are idiots. But I’d say the same about the people who voted for Trump or the ones who vote for right wing parties everywhere. And I do this safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever read this.

A British friend once told me that the biggest trick the Tories ever played was to convince the working class that they cared about them. I think Brexit trumps that. There are deep rooted problems in Britain but hardly any of them are caused by the European Union. Take immigration for example. If you scratch below the surface, those British people who don’t like immigrants are usually upset by brown people who come from ex British colonies and not Europeans. The ones who are upset by trade are annoyed because traditional manufacturing that powered the towns of Northern England has vanished. But it has moved to China and not the European Union.

Britain had a lot of problems in 2016. People used the EU referendum as a chance to protest against these issues. But none of them will be resolved by leaving. They are like a miserable teenager who yearned to leave home because they thought that their parents were the root cause of their misery. Only to find themselves in a rat infested squat with the dawning realisation that their spots and bad breadth were a bigger put off to the opposite sex than their Dad’s lame jokes and their Mother’s nagging.

They finally left the European Union on 31^st January 2020. Or at least, they moved into the next transitional stage. Leavers will boast that the sky has not fallen in, as though this was any measure of success. You could equally say that none of the promised land of independence has materialised yet. The truth is that Brexit will be a slow poison. The coal mines and steel works of Northern England will not reappear. There will be no queues of scruffy Englanders waiting to take fruit picking jobs at minimum wage.

Few things are predicable with certainty when it comes to the political and social future. But it’s hard to see how Brexit will turn out positively for the British, at least for the next twenty years or so. They may turn themselves into a Canada, bordering a huge trading empire but having a positive outlook to immigration and the World generally. But it’s more likely they will become like Singapore. Inward looking, hostile to its neighbours and a playground for the wealthy and a prison for the less well off.

I shouldn’t really care to be honest. I live in New Zealand after all. But Brexit will impact my friends and family in Ireland. That border I grew up beside is likely to become a centre of tension and hostility in the coming years.

And then there are my friends in Britain. An Irish journalist once said that the English are fine on an individual level. They only become problematic in groups, like at football matches or on ships on their way to the Falklands.

I tend to agree. Some of my best friends are English and all of them are Remainers. I really feel for them as they must think that they fell asleep on referendum night and then they woke up in a different country. It must be tough to look on half your fellow countrymen and realise that you’ve got nothing in common with them.

Brexitcast continues although they are rebranding it as Newscast as the public are sick and tired off the word Brexit, I’ll continue listening because I love the BBC and I’m a political junky. My next blog will be on New Zealand politics. Nothing as exciting as leaving the world’s largest trading block or inviting the Political wing of a terrorist group into government. But I’ll do my best to come up with something juicy.

Irish Politics for beginners

Last month I did something I swore I’d never do. I joined Facebook. I didn’t do it because I’m interested in fake news or having my personal information harvested and sold to some shady election fixing company. I did it because the drama group to whom I belong only post updates there. Group emails are too complicated it seems.

I felt dirty when I registered, as though I’d just handed over a small piece of my soul. Luckily, I had a spare and rarely used email account available, so I can separate the evil world of Facebook from my normal day to day life. It sits there in the background like an evil troll that I only see if I deliberately go looking for it.

I’m not on Twitter, Instagram or any other social media (apart from the sanitised arena of Linkedin). This is not through contempt for the modern world of communication. It’s more that I’m nervous that I’ll get drunk one night and post something that I’ll later come to regret when I’m famous. I’d hate to be receiving my Nobel Prize for Literature or Oscar for Best Screenplay, only to have the papers splash a headline the next day with my ill-advised comments on the Me-Too movement from five years previously.

Fortunately, this space is anonymous, so good luck tracking down these opinions when I’m accepting the Booker prize.

A friend at work here in New Zealand asked me to explain Irish politics. He’d read something in the Guardian and wanted to know how we ended up with parties with unpronounceable names that have swapped power for one hundred years.

I told him that Fine Gael, the current holders of the keys to power are descendants of the rich farmers who benefited from the distribution of land after the English absentee landlords were forced to give their estates back to the Irish in the late nineteenth century. They didn’t give it back to all the Irish though. Just like when the Soviet Union collapsed, those in the know got their hands on the good stuff first. Not surprisingly, these people are the most pro-British that you’ll find in Ireland which is not surprising considering they benefitted most from the British departure.

A typical big farmer would leave the land to his eldest son. If the second son was smart, he’d be sent to the seminary unless he realised that he was interested in girls before the bishop got his hands on him. Then he’d run off and join the British Civil service and end up in Delhi or some other God forsaken corner of the Empire.

If the second son was too thick to pass his Latin or Civil Service exams, he would join the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). That was the Police force that the British set up to control Ireland and particularly its property. There is a push in Ireland now to commemorate the RIC members who were killed in the Irish War of Independence. And guess what, it’s the Fine Gael party that’s pushing it. Blood it seems is thicker than water.

Those supporting the commemoration are pushing the line that every Irish person is descended from a RIC member. This is rubbish. Most of us are descended from tenant farmers and factory workers. The sort of people the RIC used to harass, not recruit from.

Fianna Fail (the other party with an unpronounceable name to Kiwis) are descendants of these tenant farmers and factory workers. They spent the 19^th century trying their best to cheat the British, so it’s no surprise that Fianna Fail politicians and supporters have problems with paying tax and respecting things like planning permission.

Sinn Fein are the other party I get asked about. They are the party no respectable Irish person would ever support because of their association with the IRA during the ‘Troubles’. If you look at the last one hundred years of Irish history, then you can see where Sinn Fine came from. Sixty per cent of the population accepted the Treaty that the British offered. This was mainly Fine Gael supporters and everyone else tired of years of War. The Civil War erupted shortly afterwards, leaving a stain on Ireland forever. When it finished, the vast majority of rebels buried their arms and became Fianna Fail. Those who still refused to surrender became Sinn Fein. The Irish People’s Front of Judea. They keep splitting of course as more and more of them join the mainstream. Eventually, it will be one man in a tree screaming about 800 years of oppression and holding onto Ireland’s last Armalite rifle.

And that leaves us with the Labour and Green party. These are the parties that most closely represent politics overseas, although the nature of Irish coalition governments is that these parties have traditionally been the junior members of government and sell their soul for a government car and a fancy office. They tend to get none of their policies put into practice but pay the price at the ballot box for all the failings of the right-wing parties they get into bed with.

Sinn Fein has never been in government in Ireland and plays on the virtue of never having made a mistake as a result. They have hoovered up all the left-wing votes in Ireland and decimated Labour and the Green Party. But that will all change when they eventually fall into the same trap and agree to prop up a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in government. That will be the end of Sinn Fein. They know it but they’ll still decide to consume the golden apple. It is the destiny of all small parties in Ireland. They crave power and are ultimately destroyed by it.

My New Zealand friend looked baffled. New Zealand politics is a lot more straightforward. That is until you try to explain New Zealand First, the junior partner in the current three-party coalition government. But all that will be explained in the last part of my three-part rant on global politics. Next up is Brexit.

To Bee or Not to Bee

I remember the first time I was stung by a bee. I was thirty years old and walking across a lush thick grassed meadow in the Cook Islands in my bare feet. I didn’t see the bee and I guess she didn’t see me. But when I trod on her she did what bees are programmed to do. She launched the ultimate sacrifice and released her sting into the sole of my foot to guarantee that I at least would remember her passing.

I howled like a baby. Partly because I have a comically low pain threshold but also because I was on a remote pacific island and couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t trod on a creature with more fatal consequences. Thankfully my host at the time was able to confirm that it was a simple bee sting and administered a local poultice which relieved the pain in minutes.

I had reached this venerable age without a sting, not through luck, but through avoiding animals in general. I would cross the road if I saw an unleashed dog coming towards me and wave my arms like a manic orchestra conductor if a bee came within twenty metres. It’s not so much that I’m not an animal lover. I passionately hate a lot of species (the entire rodent population for example) and range from dislike to passive disregard for the rest. If truth be told, I’m not that fond of most Homo Sapiens either.

So, you can imagine how I felt when my wife told me that she was in advanced negotiations to procure a fully stocked beehive. Love conquered fear in this case and I acquiesced, although she was getting it from her Dad and it was in the back of our car before I noticed. Her Dad lives 144km from our house, so we had a scary two hour drive back with 20,000 bees on the back seat. They say the best way to expose your fears is to confront them and maybe they are right. That was probably the longest car trip of my life and every movement of hair on my head caused a momentary panic as I assumed the insect hoard had escaped their bondage and where heading my way.

When we got home, I helped carry the box of bees up to their new home with no more protection than a tee shirt and a pair of shorts. It was one of those situations when no alternative was available. The bees couldn’t stay in the car and 20,000 bees in a hive is actually quite heavy and not a job for one person.

Since then, I’ve left them to their own devices. They are far enough from the house not to bother me and they more or less look after themselves. That all changed last Sunday. I got a text from the missus to say that the bees had swarmed. She followed up with a few photos. Swarming is a process that happens when they get fed up of their digs and set off for pastures new. Most often it’s caused by a new Queen who tries to take over the existing hive, gets her ass kicked and heads off in a huff with half the colony.

The biggest fear in this scenario is that the swarm will land in a neighbour’s garden, particularly in the garden of one of those neighbours who weren’t all that happy about having bees in the area in the first place. The other fear is that they land in an inaccessible place, like the roof or near another bee keeper’s property. The salvage rules in the bee world are similar to those on the open sea. If a hive is found in a public place, it’s finders keepers.

Thankfully, in our case the swarm landed in our back yard and attached themselves to a wall above our flower beds. It’s handy being close to your food supply I guess.

But my wife was in a panic. She was on her own and had no protective gear. I had a dilemma. I had bought her a bee keepers outfit for Christmas and didn’t want to ruin the surprise. But needs must and I explained where I’d hidden it in the house. By the time I got home, she had managed to shovel them all into a box. And there they remain to this day, about two metres from the back door.

Bees are a fascinating species. They have an internal GPS system that allows them to find and return to the best feeding places and to find their way home after a 5km daily forage. That’s why you can’t move them more than 30cm at a time. Otherwise they act like tired holiday makers returning to the long term car park and wondering where they left their car.

You will notice from this missive that I seem to have built up some knowledge and interest in this particular species. I have to admit that I’m a little smitten. I find nothing more peaceful than sitting on the deck of an evening and watching all the little fellas come back from their days work and fight to get into the hive. When it gets hot many of them like to cling to the outside of the hive in a process known as bearding. When they cover the entire hive, it’s actually quite beautiful but also an indication that the hive is over extending itself. That’s one of the problems of bees. When they are healthy they keep expanding and then you need to find a friend or neighbour who will take half your colony off your hands.

I think the reason these have become the first animal I like is because you never have to touch them, feed them or pick up their pooh. But I know how long this love affair will last. The first time I get stung, that hive is going straight back to my father in law.

The Rugby World Cup is Class

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with rugby. The earliest game I remember watching on TV was an Ireland v Wales game in what was then the Five Nations. I was about fourteen and working in a pub in my home town labouring away one Saturday afternoon, cleaning ashtrays and the other general detritus left behind by the previous night’s revellers. I had the upstairs lounge to myself and while I cleaned tables I turned the television on for company.

I can’t remember the result or anything else about the game, but for some reason it has lodged in my memory. I think it’s there because it throws up the contradictions that rugby causes me. The very fact that I was working in a pub at the age of fourteen is a give away. I come from a firmly working class background where the only way I could procure a bike to get me to school was to get a job and pay for it myself.

Rugby, then as now, was played by the sort of middle class toff in Ireland that I generally despised and would have harboured dreams of putting up against the wall come the great revolution. As a child, we played soccer on the streets, Gaelic Football at school and at the local club and aped the sports we periodically saw on television, be it Wimbledon or athletics. We never played rugby. I don’t even know anyone in my town that had an oval shaped ball.

And yet, I remember being fascinated by that game. I think the technical rules appealed to my intellect and I’ll admit that the sight of eight burly men driving eight others down the pitch while the crowd howled “heave” appealed to my animal sentiments too.

As I got older, I continued to battle with class sensitivity while my friendships and amorous intentions pulled me towards the middle class. My favourite social destination in my late teens was the rugby club disco on a Saturday night, where you could meet the Doctor’s daughters who lived on the hill that overlooked the terraced house that I grew up in. 

I balanced precariously on the dividing line between my working class past and my middle class future, often falling on one side or other depending on the company I held. I was a social chameleon, comfortable singing off-colour songs at Arsenal matches, while discussing the merits of playing a forwards based game in wet weather at Twickenham with my professional actuarial colleagues.

However, it took me a long time to build up the required social capital to be a true rugby devotee. I had contacts in the soccer world to secure tickets for international matches. But getting access to rugby tickets was a different matter. They were the preserve of people who were members of clubs that would never have me as a member.

I solved this by finding a girlfriend who had social capital I could only dream of. So, it turned out that the first live game of rugby I attended was the World Cup Final in 1991. I followed this up with another visit to Twickenham the following spring to see Ireland lose 38-9 to the old enemy, England (I have to thank Wikipedia for that score as my memory is weaker than Ireland’s defence that day).

I do remember being in the toilets under the West Stand in the immediate aftermath of the match. A rotund English gent in a sheepskin jacket with a large red rosette ambled up beside me.

“Bad luck, old Chap”, he bellowed when he noticed my Ireland scarf.

My most recent direct encounter with England fans was at a soccer international and my old self kicked in.

“Thanks, but you know where you can stick your fuckin’ chariot”, I replied.

After that girl dumped me, I lost my easy access to rugby tickets but maintained my love for the game. I’ve been to most of the great stadiums of the world to see the oval ball game played and it has provided me with some of my best days out.

And now I find myself living in New Zealand, a country supposedly obsessed with rugby. I thought I would become immersed with the game in the way I was with AFL when I moved to Melbourne. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

To start with New Zealand is not quite as fascinated with rugby as people overseas think.  The Maori and Pacific communities are into rugby league. The Chinese and Indians are into basketball and on-line gaming and many white parents are keen on their kids playing soccer.

The country only really gets into rugby when the All Blacks are playing and even then, the expectations that it will be an easy win takes away some of the excitement.

I’ve also noticed that I’m only really interested in international rugby. The Super 15 is the primary club competition in this part of the world, but I wouldn’t watch one of those games if it was played in my backyard.

Then the World Cup came along. This is the first one I’ve witnessed in New Zealand and the first one that Ireland went into as number one in the world. It was all looking good until the country of my birth and the country I live in came face to face in the quarter finals. The Auckland papers were full of references to Leprechauns and ginger haired Guinness drinkers in the week before the game. Ireland was patronised and written off before the game in a way that no other team would be. I had my reply all ready for posting if and when we won the match. It wasn’t to be, but sport is a fickle mistress as the Kiwis found out when England beat them in the semi-finals.

I’ll watch the final with a weathered eye, more interested in tactics than results. And may the best team win, as long it’s not England.

St La Salle, our dearest father

I’m an old boy of De La Salle School Dundalk in the grand old Republic of Ireland. A very old boy at this stage. I left in June 1982 and last set foot in the place in August of that year when I crawled back to the guidance counsellor with my tail between my legs and apologised for mocking him for the previous five years.

The reason for my ego destroying visit was that my grant application for University had just been refused. At the time, Ireland was economically depressed but if you had a job you were either working for yourself or somebody else. My Dad was lucky enough to have employment and he worked his backside off to provide for us by doing every hour of overtime he could wrangle. His wages were taxed by his company and reported to the government. To obtain a grant, my parent’s income had to be below a certain amount. I didn’t make it by a couple of hundred bucks and so had to surrender my dream of becoming an Arts graduate, which in fairness in 1980s Ireland had the job prospects of a steam locomotive driver.

My careers guidance teacher was kinder to me than I had been to him and he set me up with an Interview in an Accountancy office that led me to a high paid career and a comfortable life in New Zealand.

It worked out well in the end, but I still carry some bitterness from those heady days of 1982, particularly as one of my first jobs in that Accountancy office was to complete grant applications for the off spring of farmers, who had far more income and assets than my Dad but were able to hide most of their earnings.

I think my understanding of inequality and injustice started around this time. I was teenage Socialist but this was the first proper kicking I got from Capitalism.

I thought of all this last Monday when I stepped into the foyer of De La School in Auckland. I was curious to see how it compared to my Alma Mater. My first impressions were that it had better sports grounds, which is not surprising when you think about the number of All Blacks it has produced. But the school itself was a rambling collection of pre-fabricated buildings scattered around a crumbling old Victorian building that would not look out of place in a Harry Potter movie.

I got there at 9.30am and late comers were scurrying around in a uniform that was very different to the stylish outfit we rocked back in the 80’s.

My reason for visiting was to drop off sandwiches for kids who get sent to school with no lunch.  My company pays me for five days work but expects me to work just four. In return, I’m expected to do four charity days per year. I chose a sandwich business that provides a free sandwich to hard up kids for everyone it sells.

My job was to be their delivery driver for the day. They gave me a list of four South Auckland schools and a map and sent me on my way. I should explain that Auckland is similar to a lot of cities in that the poor are funnelled into one part of town, so that the rest of the population can live in blissful unawareness that inequity exists. In Dublin, the north of the city is generally poor while the south is rich, although ironically the poorest suburb is in the south and the richest in the north. In Melbourne, they push all the poor out to west.

Auckland follows this structure rigidly. When I was still working in Melbourne, I visited the Citibank building in Auckland. As I knew we planned to live here one day, I asked one of the guys there where was the best place to live in Auckland. He pointed east and said that’s where the English live, west was where the other European immigrants lived, north across the harbour bridge is where the recent wave of white escapees from South Africa lived. I asked about South Auckland and he gave me a knowing smile. “That’s where you live if you support the Warriors rather than the All Blacks.”

We bought a house in South Auckland in 2016, partly because it was near my wife’s family but also because we had no jobs at the time and could afford it without a mortgage. It’s a nice house but 35km from the City centre. That means I’ve spent the last three years on the train each day enjoying the scenery that South Auckland has to offer. That’s a succession of car breaking yards, falling down, damp ridden houses, angry dogs on rope, cars on bricks and vast yards where shipping containers go to die. It’s where Auckland’s Maori and Pacifica communities live. They tend to be the most disadvantaged communities in a country that is still run by and for the privileged white community.

And Maori and Pacifica tend to favour Rugby League over Rugby Union. Union is more egalitarian here than in Europe, but it is still considered to be the white man’s game. The Warriors play in the Australian National Rugby League and that’s the only sports shirt you see in South Auckland.

I visited four schools that morning, delving deeper into the heart of darkness. The boxes of sandwiches got bigger as the schools got smaller. My final destination was a small primary school, where by my calculation every second kid in the school was getting a free sandwich. The America’s Cup will be here in 2021 when Auckland will showcase it’s beautiful harbour and flaunt the wealth that this country clearly enjoys.

I doubt if De La Salle or the other schools in South Auckland will make it onto that coverage. They form the part of New Zealand that nobody wants to talk about. They are hungry for sandwiches and also for a voice.

Take your fast car and keep on driving

I think it was the white leather seats that appealed to me, or perhaps it was the winking wing mirrors that warned of an approaching car in my righthand lane. Whatever it was, it didn’t take long to convince me that this particular car was the Mazda CX5 I’d be looking for. Ten minutes later, I shook hands with the salesman and handed over an obscene amount of money for a second hand vehicle.

When we arrived in New Zealand, we realised that we needed a car quickly. Very soon afterwards, we realised we actually needed two. Kiwis have the highest number of cars per capita in the world. There are a number of reasons for this. Public transport is piss poor in the cities and non-existent in the countryside. There are none of the restrictions on owning old, smoke guzzling rust buckets like you find in Europe. And finally, New Zealand is a dumping ground for all the second hand cars the Japanese no longer want. 

So, the average Kiwi family has a big car for the weekends, a little car for dropping the kids to school, a thirty-year-old Toyota Corolla for each of the teenagers over sixteen and an old Hiace van for when they go camping. And if you leave out the big car, the rest probably cost less together than an average family car in Ireland.

We bought a 2002 Honda Accord when we got here in 2016. So, it was seventeen when we sold it recently. That’s pretty normal for a car here, where most of the cars are driven by people younger than the car itself. A week later, we bought the Mazda CX5. Like most second hand cars here, it was fresh off the boat from Yokahama. It was a 2016 model and as I did the test drive, I noticed that things have moved on since I last drove a modern car. You don’t need a key anymore and the handbrake is a little button on the dashboard that gives you no confidence that the brake has been set.

The dials and clocks on the dashboard have also disappeared, to be replaced by electronic displays that wink and flash like a joyride at the playground. It makes you feel that you should be sitting in the back reading the newspaper and let the electronic wizardry do its thing. On the test drive, I noticed the onboard display was providing tons of information, but the problem was it was all in Japanese.

Now, I watched a lot of war movies as a kid and can stretch to a “Tora, Tora, Tora” or “Banzai” if required. But I’m at a loss for the Japanese for “Average Speed” or “Litres per kilometre”. So, I agreed with the dealer that they would fiddle with the software to fix this for a not insignificant price.

I picked the car up three days later and headed to the in-laws house on the coast. The first part of the trip was uneventful until an orange light appeared on the dashboard. I pulled in and checked on-line and it said that this was a warning about tyre pressure. I checked all four tyres with the time-honoured method of administering a swift toe poke to each of them and they seemed fine. I called the dealer and he said the tyres had all been pumped up before he handed the car over and the warning light was probably due to “settling”. He suggested turning the car off and on again, demonstrating what a loss he was to the IT industry.

Anyway, this seemed to work and we carried on. I pulled in for petrol and spent ten minutes trying to find the cap release switch (why can’t they put these in the same place in every car). When I pulled out of the garage, another orange light flicked on. This one was for “check engine” which is the sort of vague answer you’d get from a fifteen year old if you asked what they had been up to.

Google told me that either my petrol cap was loose or my engine was about to seize up catastrophically, proving that the greatest search engine in the world can scare the life out of you by giving widely divergent results when giving car information as well as medical updates.

My petrol cap was indeed loose and I fixed this and carried on my merry way. We soon reached the motorway. The speed limit there is 100kmh and most kiwis keep to the limit. I found myself overtaking everyone and whizzing down the outside lane. I glanced at the speed dial as I did this and it said I was doing 75 to 80. As I overtook a Ferrari, I realised that there was a problem with the software. I assumed they had set it to miles per hour rather than kilometres but the problem as it turned out was even dumber.

Speed dials in Japan only go to 160kmh. In Europe and New Zealand, they go to 220km. So, when they changed the software to English from Japanese it assumes my dial reflected this. If I was travelling at 110kmh, the software would set the indicator at half way around the dial. I still had the Japanese speedo display, so this showed as 80kmh. Luckily, I didn’t have to explain that to a speed cop. I’m not sure how hot the New Zealand police are on calibration and mathematics.

I brought it back to the dealer to be fixed. They said it would take a day or two. Eight weeks later, I finally got the car back. The entire dashboard had been replaced and from what they explained, it seemed like they had to contact NASA to get to the root of the issue.

As I drove from the showroom after finally picking the car up, I noticed that some of the dashboard readings had gone back to Japanese. I pondered my options and came to the conclusion that it would be quicker to learn a new language than to try and get the software fixed.

The Good Old Days

I left home when I was 22 and took a flight to London. It was February 1988 and I joined 80,000 others who deserted the sinking ship that was the Irish economy. Unlike most of them, I had a job in Ireland, but left it for the bright lights of Soho and the smell of a pound.

The job I left was a 35 hour a week role in an Accountancy practice. When I got to London, I expected this to change. To my country bumpkin eyes, London was the centre of the financial universe, with young hustlers in striped shirts and braces working 16 hours a day to cover markets in New York and Tokyo.

The reality was a little different. Thatcher had been in power for nine years by the time I arrived, but she hadn’t quite snuffed out the flame of collectivisation and worker’s rights. I got a job with a large insurance company, as an Accountant in their head office finance team. I thought I had finally arrived in the Promised Land. That at last I was dining at the altar of high finance. But in many ways, it was like stepping back into the 1950s.

There were twenty other Accountants in the team, all white and all male.  I was there when the first female Accountant was hired and management patted themselves on the back for their sense of diversity. On my first day I was invited to the pub for lunch by my boss. I had never drank at lunchtime before and starting the habit on a Monday didn’t seem a good idea. I found out later that he was an alcoholic. He would have happily drank every lunchtime but settled for three times a week to keep up appearances. He had Wednesday and Friday already sorted out but needed to be creative to find an excuse to go on Monday. I was his excuse on my first day but blew it by turning down the invitation. I had been offered three jobs and took the one with the Insurance Company because they had an excellent canteen. At that age, I couldn’t boil an egg and finding a job that would feed me every day was key.

The other thing that happened on my first day was a meeting with the staff association representative. He told me about the company sports club, the social club, the collective bargaining process and the company working hours. We were expected to work a 35 hour week and had to be in the office between 10am and 4pm each day, with an hour for lunch. The remaining two hours a day could be done before 10am, after 4pm or for most people an hour each side.

If you did an additional seven hours in a month (which wasn’t hard as it amounted to twenty minutes a day) you were entitled to a day off.

This wasn’t unusual at the time. Companies competed on how many benefits they could offer employees and employee care and well-being was high on their priority list.

I mention all this because the company I work for now has introduced a four day week. We still get paid the same as when we worked five days and in theory you don’t have to increase your hours on the four days you are in the office. This has been met with huge interest from the likes of CNN, BBC and every morning show from here to Hawaii. The owner reckons it has been clicked on two hundred million times and he has received more free publicity than Banksy did when he shredded that picture.

 

I get met with incredulity when I tell people about this. The most surprising thing to them is that a company would introduce a policy that is beneficial to their staff when the trajectory of the last thirty years has been in the opposite direction.

I left that comfy job in London for a three year posting to Luxembourg. When I rocked up back in Dublin in 1996 the world had changed. Globalisation was stalking the world and Capitalism was king. If you weren’t working hard enough, your job would get shipped off to some third world country overseas. Thatcher and Reagan’s legacy was that collectivisation and employee welfare were consigned to the rubbish bin of history and that individuality was king. We moved to single contracts, performance based pay and a bonus culture.

If your job is office based, it’s difficult to objectively measure performance because the metrics aren’t as straightforward as it is in say, the widget manufacturing business. People are positively assessed for the amount of hours they work because this is the laziest form of measurement. Like the guy who sends emails at 1am or the girl who is always first in and last to leave. It’s an easy optic and one that is easily abused by the cunning masters of presenteeism. I’m not immune to this myself and am in fact writing this at work while pretending to be busy.

I am indulging in this trip down memory lane to make the point that the policy my company here in New Zealand has implemented is not revolutionary. It is more generous than the one I worked under in 1988 (I now have to work 30 hours a week rather than 34 then) but the principle is the same. They both aim to reward staff by giving them time back rather than money. At the centre of both policies is a concern for employees above profit. Although both companies believe that if you have a contented and rested workforce, then more productivity will result.

It should not be shocking that my company has introduced a policy like this. What is shocking is that everybody used to think like this and then moved in the opposite direction. We lost our way over the past twenty five years. We are taking the first steps to re-embrace that glorious past.