Britain's Old New Economy
The Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) assessment of the state of the economy, UK Competitiveness Indicators reveals that British capital investment is the lower than all its competitors in the Group of Seven leading industrial nation. The report rightly states 'evidence does not suggest that the UK is over-investing' - in fact investment stood at just 600 1995 dollars a year (p37). Despite the fact that regulatory constraints 'in the UK are lower than in all our main competitors', 'starting a new business in the UK ... remains a less attractive proposition' (p65).
The report does suggest one reason for low levels of investment, 'that the UK remains relatively risk averse' (p68). 'The UK's more risk averse approach generally contributes to lower levels of entrepreneurial activity and affects the early adoption of new technology'. The DTI identifies 'cultural attitudes' as the barrier, as 'younger people' are 'receiving limited exposure to business issues' (p69). The DTI's source is the organization UNICE, 'the voice of business in Europe'. In their Bench Marking Report 2000 UNICE write 'Europeans have many more reservations about the potential 'threats'' from new products.' 'This means that, in general, Americans are more likely to be "early adopters" of new technologies, and new products based on these technologies, than Europeans.' (Stimulating Creativity and Innovation in Europe, p16) It is of course true that public scares over every new technology from the 'paedophile infested' Internet to genetic modification and cancer inducing mobile phones are endemic in Europe. However, with European adoption of mobile phones way in advance of North America's, it seems that younger people in Europe are amongst the seventy per cent polled as being positive about new technology by UNICE.
Rather than the public being to blame, the problem of risk aversion arises first out of business, in its cautious attempts to secure markets and avoid disruptive innovations. Characteristically, the DTI insist 'business must embrace the green industrial revolution' by 'minimising waste' and cheese-paring 'resource productivity' - hardly attitudes that are likely to encourage risk-taking (p79).
Intriguingly the DTI boasts of the growth of the knowledge-driven economy, the growing importance of services and reduced role for manufacturing, though these changes are co-terminus with the low levels of investment. With the understatement that 'it is difficult to measure knowledge in the economy' (p77), the DTI nonetheless insist that 'in 1998 knowledge based services and industries were responsible for 54 per cent of business sector value added' (p78). On closer inspection, though, the DTI can find 'little evidence that ... investment in ICT [Information and communication technology] equipment is boosting overall productivity' (p75) Furthermore, the report suggests UK productivity growth has fallen off because 'the economy has generated an additional 1.5 million jobs at a quicker rate than it has increased investment' (p75). In other words, the growth in the UK economy has been extensive rather than intensive, contrary to the model of a new 'knowledge-driven' economy.
According to Peter Sharp at the Office for National Statistics, the contribution of 'old economy' stalwarts to new value created in the UK remains important. Manufacturing, though representing only ten per cent of the workforce, represents 26 per cent of new value added, and production as a whole 31 per cent. The key to the UK's recent economic success has less to do with the artificial counterposition of new and old economy, than it has with the effective defeat of organized labour, means that 'business can produce more with less', or in other words, workers produce more and get less of it back (DTI, p74).
Back to school
British Prime Minister Tony Blair demanded that 'diversity must become the norm, not the exception' in schools. Like the American populist Huey Long, who promised 'Every man a King!' the PM's contradictory proposition sums up his dilemma. Comprehensive education has indeed proved a failure for the majority of ordinary schoolchildren, but selecting an elite cannot be passed off as a populist policy.
Meanwhile Gordon Brown was ticked off by the Headmaster of the European Commission for promising to spend more public money. Public subsidies to national champions distort free trade, runs the argument. Already committed to joining Europe, the Chancellor got to have his cake and eat it, by being seen to champion British interests against the Eurocrats, and at the same time avoiding direct responsibility for restraining public expectations.
The wrong question
The Germans did know about the mass extermination of Jews, writes Professor Robert Gellately in a forthcoming book published by the Oxford University Press, Backing Hitler, Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Gellately's book revisits the controversy accompanying US holocaust studies professor Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners and its subsequent critique by Norman Finkelstein.
Gellately, a professor of Holocaust history at Clark University Massachusetts, has assembled a mountain of published material to show that Germans knew that the state was engaged in the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish people. But that much is obvious. In fact the persecution of the Jewish people would not have served the purposes it did for the Nazis if it was not known about. The final solution was an exemplary act of terror perpetrated by the state as part and parcel of the repression of the German people.
The conclusion that the German people as a whole were 'willing executioners' advanced by Daniel Goldhagen, though, does not follow. That would assume that the Nazis ruled by consent, when in fact they ruled by terror. The concentration camps were opened to house the political opponents of fascism, in the first instance. The Nazis never won an election in Germany, but were opposed by the majority in every free vote, only getting power through backroom deals with the old elite.
Some Germans did embrace fascism, the educated elite (students' unions were prime recruiting ground), the middle classes and industry. But working class Germans proved mostly indifferent to the appeal of fascism, and could only be persuaded to acquiesce under threat of force. Anti-Semitism appealed to the dispossessed professional classes, and through atrocities tried to bind the greater mass of Germans into a collective guilt. Franz Neumann wrote in 1944 that 'so vast a crime as the extermination of the Eastern Jews' was an attempt to make the masses 'perpetrators and accessories in that crime and make it therefore impossible for them to leave the Nazi boat' (Behemoth, p552. Neumann demonstrated the extermination of Jews in 1944, at a time when Western media did not report it, by showing the changes in the census figures). It is ironic that the use of collective guilt by the Nazis to bind Germans to a state they did not actively embrace should now be used by historians to tar all Germans as Nazis.
-- James Heartfield