Ian Murray wrote:
> Why the Germans are right about us
>
> It hurts to be told that our public services are third-rate. We
> already knew that. So why are we so patient? Why don't we complain
> more?
>
> Observer Election Special
>
> Guardian Unlimited Politics
>
> Will Hutton
> Sunday May 27, 2001
> The Observer
>
> Stern magazine last week devoted 12 pages to reporting on what the
> Germans now habitually call 'the English patient'. Its images of a
> country where its poor live in Third World conditions, a fifth of the
> adult population is illiterate, its public services are third rate,
> 25,000 people unnecessarily die annually from cancer and the
> environment is casually disregarded don't fit with our own idea of
> ourselves. The consensus was that it was over the top and one-sided -
> and we could do the same hatchet job on the Germans if we chose.
> But the truth has to be faced. There are areas of excellence, but by
> and large Britain doesn't cut it. Our public services are third-rate.
> And tellingly the same parsimony, shoddiness and acceptance of low
> standards infect the abysmal quality of much of what goes on in the
> private sector. The two are of a piece. The scale of the growing
> productivity gap with the rest of Europe is one indicator, but the
> deeper measure is the cultural stoicism with which we endure the
> second best, the hand-me-down and the botch. Try as we might, we can't
> hit back at the Germans in the same way. Their country has its
> malfunctions, but it works.
>
> Our seaside hotels are one of the more telling barometers of our
> irredeemable second rateness - and which make the transport system
> seem almost utopian. My room in Hove last year during the Labour Party
> conference plumbed new depths; fraying and pockmarked carpet, torn,
> cheap curtains, a shower that rained water over the ceiling which then
> dripped onto the bathroom's stinking carpet, a rickety wardrobe
> without hangers, and walls so thin that you could hear every aspect of
> the other sufferers' nightly ablutions. Has the hotelier no shame that
> he presides over such an establishment? Why do we feel so much
> embarrassment about telling him to his face that his hotel is
> terrible?
>
> Try a comparable three star hotel in a similar resort in Germany, and
> you enter a different world where investment, quality and service are
> all inbred - and there are the institutions and culture to support
> them. It would have borrowed from the local savings and mortgage banks
> established to support local business investment, and it would have
> ploughed the cash into the building - so there would be proper bedroom
> walls and working bathroom fittings, built by a workforce with the
> proper vocational skills trained by local, state-funded skill schools.
> And German hotel guests would have complained vociferously if
> standards fell below what they knew they should get.
>
> And this is the rub. The speed with which the 'rip-off Britain'
> campaign took off should alert even the most complacent defender of
> the British private sector to its shortcomings. It doesn't invest
> enough. It seems structurally incapable of treating its workforce
> creatively and humanely, or demanding that they have high skills. It
> treats its customers with highhanded indifference - try finding
> someone who will go beyond the standard answer to any complaint at,
> say, Dixons or a Sky call centre. And those at the top seem only
> interested in rewarding themselves with stratospheric salaries.
>
> Glance at the numbers. German workers have 70 per cent more capital
> invested at their elbow for every hour worked compared with their
> British counterparts. The combination of their high skills and high
> investment mean they produce 29 per cent more for every hour they
> work - allowing them to work 175 hours less every year. Over the 1990s
> employment grew in Germany by 0.3 per cent a year - in Britain 0.4 per
> cent year, despite our famed 'flexible labour market'. If Germany
> hadn't been consumed by the overwhelming cost of integrating the East,
> it would have generated just as many jobs as we did.
>
> For 20 years we have been told that in order to improve our
> productivity we must shatter trade unions, emasculate the welfare
> state and offer the lowest marginal tax rates in order to incentivise
> workers and managers alike. The ratio of our chief executives'
> salaries to average production workers' pay is now twice that in
> Germany; our benefit levels are about half as generous; our tax rates
> uniformly lower. We are a much more unequal society, just as the
> Conservatives said we needed to be in order to grow more productive.
> But instead the productivity gap is widening, and the gulf between
> their public services and ours has become a chasm.
>
> Where Germany scores is that it understands the importance of ensuring
> that the institutions - whether in training, science or banking - that
> support its economy and society should be of the highest quality and
> support the common interest. Article 14 of the German constitution
> openly declares that 'property imposes duties. Its use should also
> serve the public weal'. In Britain the notion that property rights are
> accompanied by duties to the public weal is so weak that a company
> like Railtrack thinks it is perfectly proper to pay dividends to its
> shareholders while requesting more public subsidy. And Railtrack's
> view is reproduced in spades across corporate Britain: business's
> first responsibility is to its shareholders.
>
> Britain needs to take the same care over the structure and values of
> its key institutions whether in the public and private sector - and it
> needs to find a way of making the quest for quality the norm. It
> should be as insupportable for the public sector to build a
> half-cocked motorway system littered with pinch-points so that
> tailbacks are endemic as it is, say, for the private sector to convert
> houses, hotels and flats so they are noisy and barely habitable. Put
> another way, we will never get a high quality public sector until we
> are prepared to regulate and create institutions that will get us a
> high quality private sector - and asking our current private sector to
> come to the rescue of the public sector, New Labour's big idea, is to
> invite the blind to lead the blind.
>
> If there are no written values at the core of the state in the form of
> a constitution or basic law, then there is nothing around which
> public-spirited excellence can cohere in the public and private sector
> alike. And there is no provocation in the culture that gives ordinary
> people the confidence to insist on the best and drop the dreadful
> British embarrassment about making a fuss. Stern, basically, is
> right - and little in this election campaign makes me think they won't
> be able to write something similar in five years' time.