Things Past East of Suez

Ann Widdecombe was born in Bath (SW England) in October 1947, became an MP in 1987 and was John Major’s Minister of State for Prisons from 1995 to 1997. She left Parliament in 2010 and subsequently appeared in BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing and in pantomime. She has recently published Strictly Ann – The Autobigraphy.

Browsing a copy in a local bookshop, I saw that she has included a photograph of her class at the Royal Naval School in Singapore in 1955. Below is a similar, but slightly earlier, photograph showing her (I am reliably informed) in the front and on the far right, appropriately enough. This blogger is one of those children, now in their middle sixties and therefore all members of a demographic cohort  described here before, the UK’s “post-war bulge”.

The photograph comes from a booklet (extracts below) to mark a visit to that school during the then Duchess of Kent’s Tour of Malaya in October 1952. She also visited the Admiralty Asian School. Blissfully unaware at the time, I now feel distinctly uncomfortable when faced with late-era colonialism and racially-segregated education. By then, the perpetuation of British rule had been undermined by the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945 and Singapore went on to achieve independence from the UK in 1963. The Royal Navy withdrew from its base in Singapore in 1971.

There is an obvious irony in the Singapore educational system’s now being held up as an exemplar by the UK education minister, Michael Gove, or at least that was the case last year when the Financial Times (£) reported that:

Michael Gove has tired of Sweden and New York City. After claiming to be inspired by those places’ school systems, the education secretary has now embraced Singapore as a model. His curriculum reforms seek to mimic elements of the small Asian country’s high-performing education system.

Singapore’s post-colonial economic success is beyond doubt. The ninth edition of Dan Smith’s State of the World Atlas shows: Singapore’s GNI per capita (on a purchasing power parity basis) as being US$ 55380 vs 36590 in the UK; life expectancy in 2009 of its citizens as 82 years vs 80 in the UK; in 2008, 28% of Singapore’s adults were overweight vs 62% in the UK, and so forth. Its problems are probably inherent in a small city state – dependency on its neighbours for water and vulnerability to their pollution.

Denis Healey, when Defence Minister and faced with an urgent need to make savings, took the decision to liquidate “Britain's military role outside Europe, an anachronism which was essentially a legacy from our nineteenth-century empire”. This policy of withdrawal led to the closure of the bases in Singapore and other locations “East of Suez”, a description much used at the time but little heard of from governments since, even in the last 10 years of UK military deployment in Afghanistan. Surprisingly it turned up in a speech by David Cameron on 10 June, Plan for Britain's success, marking the start of the UK’s presidency of G8:

… I have revived our friendships in the Commonwealth and reinvigorated relations with our old partners in the Gulf, where we’re active commercially, diplomatically, and with renewed military co operation to the east of Suez.

No doubt the drafters of this speech and the PM knew the phrase came from Kipling’s poem, Mandalay:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst …  

Where the old Flotilla lay,

(at Mandalay not Singapore of course), and they are aware of the last line:

An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

Bojoburg

Two members of the commentariat fixated on the same idea last week. The London Evening Standard on 14 May ran a piece by Simon Jenkins, London should quit the EU and ditch the UK too, and, the next day in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch explained why it was necessary to Unshackle London from the backward shires.

According to Jenkins:

There is an easy solution to Britain in Europe. Let the rest of Britain stay but let London leave.  

… Its future is global. Its two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. They depend on self-government, on regulatory discipline and on the value of the pound. Financial services are worldwide in application. They are clearly threatened by what Lord Lawson called “jealous European banking officials”, by regulations designed to underpin German bankers and clip London’s wings.  

The new city state would have a physical boundary, roughly that of the M25. Digital mapping would police the circumference, though open borders are no great problem. They exist like those between Gulf states, between Ireland and Ulster, Monaco and France. London already has its own government under its elected “monarch”, Boris Johnson.  

The rest of Britain may have reasons for wanting to “stay in Europe”. It is time for London to “get out”, of both the EU and the UK.

Goodness knows what Jenkins thinks digital mapping is. Aaronovitch saw the problem as being one of culture, typified in PMQs the day before:

… of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.  

… Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.  

… Londoners differ from some of their compatriots in attitudes towards the outside world. The pollsters Ipsos/Mori sent me figures for the regional variations on immigration and the EU. Aggregated for January-December 2012, polling showed an average of 21 per cent of Britons naming race relations/ immigration/immigrants as “one of the most important issues facing the country”. The highest figures were the South East with 28 per cent, then the East Midlands, East of England and Yorkshire/Humberside all on 25 per cent. In London it was 13 per cent. This was less dramatically true for Europe/EU. In the South East 10 per cent had it as a vital issue, compared with 5 per cent in London and 6 per cent nationally.  

It is clear that London and the South East are in some ways two different countries and that is why Boris has to be Janus-faced. To become Tory leader he must somehow finesse the fact that he knows a lot of rural/ suburban Tory-Ukippery just doesn’t make sense in the big, competitive, changing world. Like Boris, I do not want to inhabit this parish of 1950s retro enthusiasts.  

… So we may need to secede from the hinterland. And the same is true of our other great cities and university towns which, together, could make an outward-looking, open-minded polity.

So not so much an island state as an archipelago one. Well pundits have to write about something – in 2011 Aaronovitch thought the UK should become part of the USA. And it might have been inhibiting if the position Mrs Thatcher found herself in in 1982 had been remembered:

On the morning of Wednesday 22 September I and my party took off from Tokyo, where I had been visiting, for Peking. Fifteen years remained of the lease to Britain of the New Territories which constitute over 90 per cent of the land of the Colony of Hong Kong. The island of Hong Kong itself is British sovereign territory, but, like the rest of the Colony, dependent on the mainland for water and other supplies. The People's Republic of China refused to recognize the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, by which the island of Hong Kong had been acquired by Britain. Consequently, although my negotiating stance was founded on Britain's sovereign claim to at least part of the territory of Hong Kong, I knew that I could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony. (The Downing Street Years, page 259)

London, with its “boundary, roughly that of the M25” (see above and the surrounding regions), would be far worse-placed than British Hong Kong. Being on the coast (see below, right), the former colony could trade with the rest of the world without having to enter PRC airspace or territorial waters and at least produced its own electricity and gas.
 

Somehow I don’t see “monarch Boris” converting Tate Modern back into a power station. A secessionist London would have to import electricity and gas from the English grids, would be dependent for its water on the English Thames into which it would also have to discharge its sewage. No doubt the supply of all these things, and a few others (like the westward extension of Heathrow or its replacement) could be arranged amicably – at a price and in return for financial services from London. Until BNP Paribas arrives in Bristol and Crédit Agricole in Birmingham. Of course, London has virtually no armed forces apart from the ceremonial, so all defence capabilities including the nuclear deterrent would be in the hands of the Welsh-English-Scottish rump, as would GCHQ. London would be run out of the Mayor’s office because Jenkins thinks that:

The bulk of British government would have to relocate out of the present capital. Because no one would agree on where, departments would be fragmented around the provinces, to the benefit of all. Parliament could relocate, perhaps to Salford or to an Orwellian “Elizabethville” in south Yorkshire. Essex and Sussex would concentrate development around Stansted and Gatwick, relieving pressure on Heathrow.

All quite barking because London, unlike Singapore (above, left), is land-locked and geography dictates that it cannot become an island city-state. But perhaps there is an even deeper flaw in Jenkins’ concept that London’s

… two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. … Financial services are worldwide in application.

He should have read an article in the Financial Times (£) on 7 May, Cornwall beach buoys London’s financial status. It explained that a beach near Bude in north Cornwall in SW England:

… is one of the main landing points for thousands of miles of submarine cables that carry trading data from New York. Britain’s westerly location means data can reach traders in London several milliseconds quicker than competitors in Frankfurt and Paris – a key advantage in the era of high-frequency trading.  

… “The UK is an underwater cable hub for all the financial institutions in Europe,” says Jack Steven, asset manager at the Crown Estate. “The alternative is to go through somewhere like Portugal, which is closer to the US but which historically hasn’t developed capacity in the same way.”  

According to the Crown Estate, about 95 per cent of the UK’s communication, such as email, internet and telephone calls, is transmitted through submarine cables. They are cheaper and more reliable than satellites, which are expensive to get into orbit and vulnerable to collisions with space debris. The shorter the cables, the quicker data can be transferred. It takes about 65 milliseconds to trade between London and New York. From east London it takes a further five milliseconds to Frankfurt.

Anyone interested can learn more about the global undersea cable network (above) on the Guardian Data Blog.

Boris Johnson, to be fair, has not expressed any opinions, as far as I know, in favour of London’s independence, even though Aaronovitch seems to think he is a closet isolationist. A shame when London could so easily be renamed Bojoburg in his honour as its first head of state. I don’t think either Aaronovitch or Jenkins think for one minute that their proposals will ever happen but, as part of London’s media elite, they are expressing their exasperation with the rest of us.  But most people don't live on six-figure salaries, probably getting away with a day’s work a week writing a thousand words or so about whatever they chose, and having expenses-paid lunches in top restaurants with interesting people talking off the record.

Engineers in the UK (and China)

In a post in February I lamented the status of professional engineers in Britain, and the misuse of the term “engineer”. I didn’t hold out any prospect of significant change then, and the situation was hardly helped last week on the BBC1 reality show, The Apprentice.   Lord Sugar (enobled, and rivalled for charm, by Gordon Brown) chairs a “Board” and selects an aspiring young business person for (in this series) investment and partnership – tasks are set and each week one of the wannabes is stood down. On the 15 June show Sugar decided to ‘fire’ senior design engineer Glenn Ward from the competition because he was an engineer. According to the New Civil Engineer, Sugar told Ward:

“I have never yet come across an engineer that can turn his hand to business. I’m not convinced that a leopard is ever going to change his spots, and [that] an engineer is going to have the right ideas to come in business with me.
He later said that Ward was “exactly the example” of an engineer who fails at business.

This produced a predictable chorus of complaint, for example in the Observer from James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner tycoon. He was kind enough not to bring up Sugar’s famous prediction in February 2005: 'Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,'.   In fact it was well before then that Sugar seemed to have lost the nous for consumer electronics he had shown in the 1980s.

While not intentionally trying to make amends, the BBC is providing a much less half-baked view of the role of engineers in Made in Britain, a three-part series presented by Evan Davies . Unfortunately this is on BBC2 and will get a much smaller audience than The Apprentice on BBC1. In the first episode on 20 June Davies visited China, including Shanghai, to look at high-volume, low-value manufacturing of the type no longer viable in the UK. That morning, The Times (£), under the headline, Children get maths lessons from Asian ‘Tigers’, reported that maths teaching in English schools would adopt practices from Singapore and Hong Kong. It also pointed out:

Singapore came second in the latest international league of pupil achievement in maths, the UK was in 28th place. Shanghai came first.

Davies’ later programmes (if his accompanying book of the same title is anything to go by) are very likely to bring out the need for graduate engineers, if Britain is to undertake the necessary expansion of its manufacturing base. There is already no lack of demand: Dyson remarks “… the City loves engineers. I wish it didn't. I'm trying to lure another 400 bright minds to our Wiltshire laboratories.”

Rory Sutherland (vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK ) revealed in an article in the Spectator on 18 June, a marked contrast to the British way of running things :

This is from a 2007 blog, listing the Chinese politburo:

Hu Jintao, 62, President of the People’s Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, Department of Water Conservancy Engineering.
Huang Ju, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, Department of Electrical Engineering.
Jia Qinglin, 65, graduate of Hebei Engineering College, Department of Electric Power.
Li Changchun, 61, graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, Department of Electric Machinery.
Luo Gan, 69, graduate of Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany.
Wen Jiabao, 62, premier of State Council, graduate of Beijing Institute of Geology, Department of Geology and Minerals.
Wu Bangguo, 63, graduate of Tsinghua University, Department of Radio Engineering.
Wu Guanzheng, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, Power Department.
Zeng Qinghong, 65, graduate of Beijing Institute of Technology, Automatic Control Department.

I just checked to find out if anything had changed since 2007; perhaps they had recently decided to embrace diversity, appointing two female poets and someone with a background in contemporary dance. And so they have. Of the four new appointments since 2007, one is only in his late 50s and only three are engineers. Li Keqiang, the lone non-engineer of the nine, has a PhD in economics. This preponderance of engineers is not quite so exceptional as it first seems, since it reflects the communist fetish for heavy industry 45 years ago. And it is not all good — left unchecked, engineers are prone to devise grandstanding infrastructure projects that deliver little human value. But it is still revealing.

How many scientists are there in the House of Commons? Rather few, it seems. … No, I don’t want to be ruled by engineers. But you can’t deny that over the past 150 years they have solved more problems than politicians have.

China came up again in The Times when, kicking off its CEO Summit, it provided the results of a Populus opinion poll which had asked voters to rank the UK alongside its five major competitors on tax, infrastructure, skills, workforce and business friendliness, as summarised in the table below.

Obviously this is about public perceptions more than realities on the ground – after all how could “2,047 adults aged 18+ online between 17th June 2011 and 19th June 2011 across Great Britain”, and, “Generally speaking from everything you know or have heard or read”, be equipped to make such judgements?   38% of the sample had not taken a foreign holiday in the last three years, and 34% had left school before the age of 16. “Infrastructure” was defined “like the road & rail networks and other transport links” – but what about broadband, secure supplies of electricity and water, and so on?

Not that my views are likely to be of much value, either. I’ve been to the US and Germany in the last 10 years, but never to China or India, although I’ve probably been to France enough to have a stab at comparisons with the UK. Looking at the Table, the workforce skills relativities look dodgy: China second to Germany – one day maybe. France is almost certainly not fifth in workforce skills, nor behind the UK in my view, I’m sorry to say (plombiers being only a minor element of the French workforce). I also find it difficult to believe that France is worse than India as a place to set up a small business, and I wonder if France’s infrastructure is superior to Germany’s, taking the old East and West together, despite the enormous investment of recent years in the former. With its large fleet of nuclear reactors, France certainly won’t have Germany’s dependence on imported gas for electricity production in years to come.

To end on a more upbeat note, I see that BT send a ‘technician’, not an ‘engineer’, out to fix your stuff, unlike British Gas (see previous post). However, BT are well aware of the cost of what they call “wagon rolls” and, unless the problem is their fault, you may well get a bill shortly after the visit! I would expect that in China they are all called technicians.