• ABOUT

thinairfactoryblog

~ A topnotch WordPress.com site

thinairfactoryblog

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Fridge magnets, Porpoise & the power of language in Innovation.

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

#mayarse, Anarchy, Blackadder, Corporate Speak, Creativity, Digital, Easter Island, Genome, Guttenberg Press, Identity, Idiom, kaizen, Language, Porpoise, punctuation, purpose, Roald Dahl, rote, Slang, social networks, Socialising the Genome, Sound, Tabloids, technology, The BFG, vernacular, Vinyl, Wax Cylinders, Yoda

7299579_orig.jpg

Words are funny things.

Haphazard, abstract, profound, silly, shape shifting, infinitely playful, confounding, eternally powerful and utterly malleable. Language is a remarkable technology.

Glyphs, scratches and symbolic signing of sounds eventually dragged kicking and screaming into some vaguely coherent order that ticks a few syntactical boxes and language rules and shazzam! the fun begins.

Suddenly these scatters and blocks of marks, letters and symbolic sounds forge themselves into desires expressed, thoughts formed, theories expounded, opinions offered, information fixed, stories told and dreams captured. Sounds cut into the wax cylinder of our minds and played out through sharp stone point, stylus, quill and nib onto cloth, wood, parchment, stone and flax.

And our eyes scan across them and our tongues run along them like a needle in a vinyl groove, transforming them into the sound of speaking.

As time has marched the expression of our expression has been altered by the nature of how we generate the text. We have hopped skipped and jumped from painful rendering every letter by hand over vast tracts of time, illuminated by curlicues, cartoons, motifs and scenes – and the silent furious industry of re-rendering the same again and again for the benefit of a rare few – to carved crafted blocks to be set in lines, paragraphs and pages – inked rolled and pressed into sheets to be shared and distributed amongst the many.

Technology elevates technology as the presses become mechanised and the inks become jets. Vast universal printed broadsheets supplemented by the intimate particular of typing machines that throw metal letters through ink ribbons onto pages layered with carbons for multiple copies. Until the binary marks of programmes on a different ribbon digitised everything at the speed of light.

So we now find ourselves with the ability to use these marks and symbols at the speed of swipe and type in real time to fire them across the world via networks and platforms.

Yes the books still fill shelves and the magazines still scatter coffee tables. But they have become the paper monoliths of what was. The  printed word and how we consume it versus how we consume its digital cousin have become fundamentally different.

For your words to be ‘in print’ still carries a deeper value. Words on a physical printed page feel more meaningful, eternal, immortal. They are the Easter Island Statues of the written word. Their digital counterparts the writing in the sand on the beach.

The way new technologies have gamified they way we think and more importantly the way we express those thoughts through writing enables a very particular kind of playfulness rooted in eclectic multidirectional multi channel distribution. The Ephemeral Passing nature of the txt blog tweet and the written content of the live in-flow constant beta site allows everyone to ‘play’ – text as balls to be lobbed tossed kicked, rolled and scattered in every direction, only to return transformed, tweaked, built upon liked loved berated and bludgeoned.

The creativity inherent in the technology of language and subsequently in the technology we use to generate language in flow seems to have two forms when it comes to words and how we express ourselves with them.

Creativity is still as much about liberating expression as it is about liberating distribution. Language as a technology has been tinkered and played with by everyone from the lowest order to the highest mind since the technology was invented. Derivation. Disruption. Disorder. All of these traits have been alive in the spoken and written language since its inception.

New technology does not advance innovation. It accelerates our ability to unpack and play with the given wisdoms and expressions to seek something new and different. This is the fuel of innovation – new technology merely the accelerator.  And the role of language in innovation and technology’s ability to accelerate it is remarkable.

Word play – a lightness of spirit and a subversive nature in regards to language – has always enjoyed turning the given rules upside down and back to front – messing with words and language because we can – as a mark of our individual nature and curiosity.

Thats why vernaculars and slang and idiom are so important to individuals – and why corporate language is so disliked avoided and derided by ordinary people. Corporate language and ‘speak’ smacks of an Order of the Few inflicted on the Spirit of the Many.

It is an intellectual door policy – if you ain’t got a ticket you can’t come in – the bouncer on the door of the exclusive club.

Ordinary people like to own and share the language they use to express their most individual selves, in their own way on their own terms. They reserve the right to speak as they wish, express in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

It is unsurprising that fads and trends especially in the highly socialised accelerated age see @everything and #anything already running out of steam. This is not due to the academics deriding them. It is mainly due to ‘rules’ being applied. A new higher order or High Priest of Digital Expression has risen out of the chaos – defining rules of use and relevance. Thankfully it spikes the oldest of human responses. Dissent.

Rules? #myarse.

The intellectualisation of language will always occur while the human nature of assertion and pursuit of social exclusivity remains. We simply can’t help ourselves.

Language gets used to include and exclude. It always has and it always will in some shape or form. It is a tool in our tendency to assert and control. You’re not in our club. How you order sentences. How you punctuate. How you correct and edit yourself. How you use common signifiers of expression. Words and language are the cutlery of expression. How you use your knife speaks volumes about you. And there will always be those that use it against you.

BUT.

If thats the case, I say fill your boots. Subvert at every opportunity. Break a language rule everyday. Smash the shackle.

Start with fridge magnets and madness. before you take one step towards the workplace, make some shit up out of a load of words on the fridge. Set your mind free. Gobbledegook is good for the soul. Have a BFG day. Using phantasmapoppingful words. Go Yoda and reorder a sentence – like someone’s put a Germanic grammar filter on your English. Pop some nonsense in a sensical world. Embrace puns at every opportunity.

And if you’re in business – especially one that involves speaking to ordinary people – use pub speak in board meetings. Ask a 70 and a 7 year old to edit the CEOs keynote. And see the tyrannical use of language for what it is. An ugly veneer behind which mediocrity and insecurity can often lurk.

If you are working with multiple nationalities there has to be some common ground. But at least allow every one to bring a little of their own cultural idiom into the room before you set out on some highly controlled over strung and soul-less corporate conversation. Allow their free mind out as a matter of course. Build a ‘Sling Some Slang’ into every meeting. Allow each nationality to ‘play’ in their own language and share it. You will be far more likely to find yourself with human beings in the room. Much more helpful to collaboration and co creation.

Innovation starts with language and how it is used and embraced. Rote cultures create Rote people. And innovation and creativity withers on the vine. The confidence to ‘mess’ with language shows an ability to break from the norm, to turn something upside down and the wrong way around to take a different view. Mistakes are the fuel of invention. Failure is a central tenet of Kaizen. We should embrace failings in language. Before dispensing with them, check to see if there is anything good hidden in there.

So can everything be chaos and subversion? No. Like anarchy, it only exists meaningfully if there is a counterpoint to it to keep it relevant and focused. If everyone is an anarchist. Their is no anarchy. Just conformity.

A perfect example of deconstructive/destructive language play was to be found in a conversation I had with a friend of mine. Both utterly child-like far to often, we found ourselves discussing Purpose and Purposeful businesses and the manner in which this word has been taken and chiseled into a corporate straight jacket. It has lost its original profundity; replaced with a pompous self-righteousness. We found ourselves having to use ‘cod’ Noo Yawker accents to continue the conversation with any feeling.

So Purpose became Poiypuss. What! Who knoo! Badda bing badda boom. I gotta poiypuss ‘n’ I’m gonna use it.

Cue more cod accenting until eventually Blackadder and the Prince and The Porpoise sketch prevailed. And so Purpose became Porpoise.

Happiness.

PORPOISE. The prefect name for an agency that believes deeply in Purpose but with a profound dislike for the way in which it has been hijacked; made humourless, confined, dislocated; rendered inhuman and spiritless.

Porpoise. Creating Purpose with a difference: purpose with a human touch. Nice logo. Disney meets Vector with a scattering of fun.

Ridiculous. perhaps. But I do have evidence that this childlike view of the world can sometimes create breakthroughs in communication and engagement.

In a recent project – Socialising the Genome – I worked with Dr Anna Middleton to try and unpack the arcane language of Genomic science and the impenetrable academic and clinical terminology it uses when speaking to ordinary people. The objective? To be able to engage with a greater number of ordinary people around the benefits of GENOMIC science and data gathering to improve individual and collective health care.

We found that in almost every qualitative research group people had a tendency to drop the first E in GENOME, and quickly deconstruct it into something far more friendly and more palatable and less scary. GNOME.

So the massed intellect, discovery and genius at work in the world of GENOMIC science and discovery – and the gateway to understanding our most precious personal selves and the data that defines it – was enshrined in a picture of a small bearded man with a fishing rod. Cue Double Helix fish and chats about fishing in our DNA for answers – and the idea that sometimes that fishing just comes up with an old shopping trolley and river bed junk. And sometimes with something more remarkable and enlightening.

So language – a beautiful technology accelerated by newer ones. But it is not sacrosanct. It demands that we flex with it, play with it, mess it up, test its edges. Because in doing so we test our selves and the ideas we have – and through it we find new iterations and expressions.

Which is a good thing, No?

 

LANGUAGE NOTE: My use of No? at the end of the final sentence is in homage to the idioms of the French “…, nest pas?”, the Spanish “…, No?”, the Scandinavian “…, Nej? and the Glaswegian “know whit ah mean, big man, no?” and ending one’s sentence with an upward inflection “No?”.

And because it really, really irritates purists – as does the doubling up of adverbs like ‘really’.

 

Saviano, Populist Poisons & the Rise of An Ugly Society

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aquila, Barzini, berlusconi, BREXIT, Camorra, Care In The Community, City Of London, Drug Cartels, Gattopardo, Global Financial Corruption, Gonzaga, Jo Cox, Krays, Mafia, Margaret Thatcher, Mental Health, Ndrangheta, Offshore Banking, Pax Romana, Rome, Saviano, Sforza, Tancredi, Trumo, youth

5760.jpg

I have just finished reading Roberto Saviano’s My Italians: True Stories of Crime and Courage. A hugely redeeming yet desperately saddening book by a master of investigative journalism.

I read books such as this – and The Dark Heart of Italy and Illustrious Cadavers (and even Barzini’s comprehensive yet slightly sentimentalised The Italians) with a bitter sweet sensibility.

It is a sensibility born of being someone who, though bred and raised in England, is by blood pretty much wholly Italian with a smattering of Yar French – a product of the Piedmontese and Ligurian bloodlines that shaped me.

I am therefore still firmly attached to Italy, the umbilical cord un-cut. I love Italy. Which is why I feel a sense of creeping shame, sometimes frustration and sometimes rage at the dreadful toxicity, cruelty and self-serving nature of some of its leaders and its population.

These books I have mentioned focus on the medieval nature of Italy’s power structures, the darkness of its feudal and criminal heart, and the complicity of the people who are either too scared to act against it, or too indifferent to others to care. Something that until recently had seemed another country to how we live in the UK.

As I explained to someone a few days ago, Italy is more than corrupt. It is Beyond Corruption. My belief is that this issue arises because Italy is an old world culture – its modern civic and political infrastructure is built upon ancient foundations.

This has given the opportunists crooks and toxic tribes amongst its people over 2000 years to explore and exploit the structures of bureaucracy and power – studying their shifts and flaws – inveigling themselves but more importantly inveigling their nature, intention, motivation and desire – building it into the structure and the fabric of Italy.

Rome and its Pax Romana, administrated via favour, tax and violence, the centuries old corrupted relationship between Papal church and State, the internecine wars of the Ducalities and Principalities – the birth of the chiaroscuro of Diplomacy – a truly dark and light art –  in the era of the Gonzaga and Sforzas. Every one of them an opportunity for the shadiest and most self interested to set their chair at the table and systemically expand their influence and network.

In Il Gattopardo, Tancredi states this simple tenet – that ‘To remain the same, everything must change’ – a tenet that underwrites Sicilian Culture: riven, over run and over lorded so often by so many. To maintain real power and status, you must offer the illusion of change as the fuel of advancement – while behind the scenes securing even faster the immovable truth of who rules.  This is equally true to wider Italy.

These books of the dark heart of Italy project Italian society as a Commedia Dell’Arte – a society populated by slippery clowns, tortured psychopaths, stooges and idiots. The characters that populate the stage of this bizarre human theatre and their painted grins always hiding a darker truth.  They seem to prove the rule.

And the courage of the people who write them should not be underestimated, given the forces they are more than likely to unleash in doing so – especially those of the likes of Saviano.

He has rightly pointed out that his books are dangerous to the dark forces buried into the earth of Italian society because he does not take the pose of an academic distant observer. He speaks as someone who loves his country and its people, who writes as one of them, telling real stories, stories that join the dots and point fingers. His books make people not only angry about those that mock them but also names names, to create a focus for the people’s anger.

We need more of these books, books that real people read, not just the academics and the Demi Monde. But we need them to be not just of Italy.

The UK is the place where I was born and bred. And it has my heart and my loyalty. But it is smug and complacent when it comes the darker side of human nature. Simply put, our Norman-Saxon culture is written through with complacency and smugness.

Couldn’t happen here.

We still act as if this blight of crookery – the gangsters, the traffickers, the double dealers, the pimps and the tyrants – are all another country. If one is to believe the golden Norman courtly myth, none are home grown but hark from across the channel, travelled up from the Mediterranean and the Levant, the Arabic traders and merchants, or across the steppes and along the silk road.

But recent events have shown that the dark hearted clowns of Italy are merely the pre shock of a wider truth.

Berlusconi was for a me a cartoon version of a rather frightening, avaricious and problematic pseudo political creature – that of the trickster business man riddled with deceits and back room plays holding up the shining glow of ‘business’ as an alternative to the ‘old political guard’ – rallying the people away from the traditional self-serving political class and towards a golden future of a country run like a company. And who better to do that than a ‘successful’ businessman.

The repulsion I feel for people like Berlusconi, and the way he has been trumpeted in Italy and fawned on puts a rip in my soul – and rents my passion and love for a country that shaped beautiful memories and a sense of belonging.

All I could do was watch from a distance and sigh and wonder why a majority could fall for such idiocy and blatant self-interest.  But the problem with the Clown and his burlesque is that he takes your eyes off what is going on around him, the tendrils at work in every corner. The clown is also the master of obfuscation.

The redemption in Saviano’s book is part philosophy and principle – but it mainly points to the courage of a rare few people and their compulsion to act against these dark creatures– and how these creatures in turn despoil the names and destroy the lives or if needs be, snuff out the people brave enough to do so.

BUT as Trump and Farage have demonstrated more recently – until the professional political class stop talking to themselves and paying lip service to the people and their very real trials and tribulations – the chancers and the tricksters like Berlusconi and Trump – with their Boy made good, one of the people masquerade will win turnaround votes and shock nations.

There is a stark similarity between the Italian communities and the dynamic of their relationships with the Mafia, Camorra and Ndrangheta criminal families featured in Saviano’s book and those who vote for people like Berlusconi and Trump.

By voting for the ‘shiny’ successful businessmen of politics and their political stooges we create a contract between us and them that says ‘do what you need to do’ – just don’t shove it in my face.

Yes, people are scared. We live in very volatile times. Yes, the professional political classes have lost the trust of the people. But we need to be wary of what we think we’re buying with the others. And more importantly we need to be held accountable for what gets done in their and our name.

We have to take responsibility for unacceptable acts inflicted on innocent people under the guise of the politics we collectively support.

Every BREXITEER who has dismissed or not recognised the random acts of violence and rise in hate crimes directly attributable to their cause and not acted against the perpetrators, or make excuses for or exceptions of them are saying Do This In My Name.

How ironic that it is usually these people who are the first to question and pillory an Imam for not immediately damning and casting out the terrorists and hate peddlers in the midst of their communities – and we damn them with charges of complicity and harbouring.

The truth is, with the likes of Berlusconi and Trump and to a far lesser degree Farage, there is a collateral damage strategy being condoned here as part of a Necessary Act – like those that excuse the taking out the odd hospital while bombing an I.S. enclave.

Some people in post BREXIT post TRUMP world are going to ‘get it’ – they are going to be that acceptable collateral damage that happens when people want to bring about seismic change.

This is the simple human truth of the contracts we are happy to make to secure our immediate interest.

This culpable relationship is little different to the nature of the relationship that existed between the Krays and the East End community they called home. Boys done good. Smart. Nice clothes. Money. Businessmen. And they took care of their own.

“You could walk the streets when the Krays ran things around here.”

“They loved their mum.”

”Things were better then.”

You certainly could walk the streets. They certainly did love their Mum. And they also terrorised people and unleashed a particular and sadistic rule of thumb on all about them – but while they do it to others like them – and it didn’t touch the edges of ordinary people’s every day, so be it. It is acceptable.

The logic goes – If I am afraid, up against it and feeling vulnerable I will support the scariest creature who claims to act in my interests – at any cost, even that of my personal liberty and pride – and some collateral damage on the way.

Collateral Damage is so often in these cases a euphemism for human suffering and pain. Destitution. Cruelty. Fear-mongering. Bullying. Threats. And often, death.

As I have said before, the ‘people’s vote’ has on many occasions throughout history unleashed tyrannies to which they happily ascribe if the tyrant protects their interest. We’re not talking news here.

As we have seen, there seems little to separate the sensibilities that exist between marginalised communities and the gangs and criminal networks that thrive amongst them – and ultimately the kinds of politician they will support if they are provoked into having to make a political ‘point’.

The key word in the previous paragraph is the words ‘seems’. Smudging the line between the desires, integrity, morals and motivations of the ordinary person and that of the political trickster the shark and the gangster is a purposeful strategy.

This is a reoccurring theme in Saviano’s book. The blurring of the distinction between those who are compromised and those who are doing the compromising. To draw everyone into a web of complicity is to have to make them like you, you like them. You have to have created a sense of ‘We’.

That is how you get people to accept the Collateral Damage and the toxic underside of what you’re doing. By removing the vantage of morality or judgement.

To accept the toxic contract between ourselves and those who would twist the world in their interests while pretending to support us, the common people – to find this state of affairs ‘acceptable’ and to be complicit in their existence, we have to have decided and accepted that everyone is broadly the same – and that there is little difference between the self-interest of a person looking for a leg up into a job in hard times and the nature of the ‘fixer’ and the ‘spiv’ – the politician gangster or local face – who can make it happen for that person through their contacts and influence.

Saviano states that to not be complicit, we must first recognise and reject the idea that we are all the same in the end – flawed human beings who will do bad things in extenuating circumstance – for example, due to personal duress, war or extreme poverty.

We are not the same. We do not all take the slippery road – to crime, or graft, or the inflicting of human pain and misery on others in pursuit of our own gain. However hard it becomes for some people. This is not the only answer. Just one answer chosen by a certain kind of person or group.

He sets out that the greatest power we have is to say I am different. We are different. We are flawed perhaps and human. But we are not like these people. And never will be.

We will not accept that what they do is acceptable in itself or as part of greater transformation strategy.

So in the UK when we see the dark materials of BREXIT played out in acts such as the one where a Polish worker is beaten to death, we have to say I am different. I am not complicit with the people who do this. I will not hide from them. Or gift them my silence – a soundless ‘understanding’ of why they do what they do to others under the guise of defending the culture or their nation. I reject that ugly contract of collateral damage for better.

It also requires us to join the dots. To see how things interrelate and intertwine. How one act can lead to another. It demands that we interrogate how things connect – the levers and pulleys of how our decisions and those of the leaders we support play out. Not just short-term, conveniently useful snap-shots that allow us all to turn back to our own little bubble.

Jo Cox was killed by a man shouting Britain First – a man fired by the madness of the political zealot. But even here the old adage of be careful what you wish for and careful who you Vote for comes to the surface – both as cause and effect.

The key word here is ‘madness’. The ‘insane act’ of the political or religious activist, terrorist or assassin is rooted not in their belief systems but in how their existing mental condition or illness warps or allows beliefs to be twisted to acts of callous barbarity and murder.

In that way Jo Cox’s death just may also be attributable to a culture and society we choose to lobby, support and vote for. And the policies they put in place in our name.

Why? Because the fundamental flaw in how we identify and manage mental health issues in the UK. The systems in place to manage extreme mental illness are simply not fit for purpose – and they are more than less likely to leave people like Thomas Mair unchecked, un cared for and at large.

The desperate state of Mental Care in the UK can be traced back to a very particular point in time.

Jo Cox’s death is not only attached to a current populist zealotry but also by a long thread to a populist Tory movement that thrived in this country for over a decade and whom the new noisy BREXITEERS hark back to – a Tory movement that put some very anti-social policies in place.

Care in The Community began with the best intentions, removing people from the crumbling victorian institutions commonly known to offer substandard and sometimes subhuman care for their ‘inmates’.

But in the hands of the administrators it dies the death of a thousand cuts and for some it is now viewed as an utter abdication of responsibility by the people who govern us for those in our communities blighted by mental health.

It was was undertaken by a populist Prime Minister who was pro Britain and all about backbone and making one’s own opportunities – and being for the simple people of Britain.

But she also demonstrated the trait that accompanies this self-made mentality – a dismissive dislike or sometimes explicit repulsion towards those who are weak and flawed.

Let their families take care of them. Let them be cared for in the hearts of their community. It’s a better way.

Agreed, as long as government delivers the support systems and funding it promises to enable those families and communities to take back responsibility from the state. The idea of letting us return to a time when we take care of our own, intimately, with all the human discomfort that comes with it is laudable.

But the underlying systems that were meant to support that belief and the communities living it out were systematically diminished and dismantled within a matter of years – leaving the mentally ill to stalk like the dead through their communities, barely held in place by the kindness of strangers and an overstretched social system.

Populists governments have a tendency to not keep their promises if the promises do not serve their evolving agenda.

The reoccurring theme of the mentally ill and vulnerable amongst us struggling and often failing to avoid violent encounter, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution and dereliction is there for all to see.

And it just gets worse. Mental Health care for the Young is on its knees – at crisis point. In a hyper connected accelerating world, the fragile amongst our young and old will suffer and we have no safety net for them.

All roads as they say lead to Rome. We are the cause of the policies our elected government enact. Unless we stand up and say otherwise. In some quarters the silence is still deafening.

Those whom we elect to run our countries and the webs of interest and shadier nature of those who support them throws a long shadow that we rarely take any responsibility for.

In Saviano’s book a similar point is made. He tells a story of Aquila, the university town, and of the young people who died when the earthquake struck. The building in which they died collapsed because it was found to be shoddily built with watery cement and insufficient structural integrity and no screening for earthquake resilience in a region renowned for tremors of varying magnitude. The local politicians weep and despair at the loss of life. The Christian Democrats roar at the iniquity. But they are complicit in awarding the crooked contracts that built the building that killed their young people. They have to take responsibility for the cause.

On one last point, at the Hay Festival this year Saviano stated that if we want to know the capital of global financial corruption, look to the City Of London and the UK.*

“Ninety per cent of the owners of capital in London have their headquarters offshore”

“Jersey and the Caymans are the access gates to criminal capital in Europe and the UK is the country that allows it. That is why it is important, why it is so crucial for me to talk to you because I want to say: this is about you, this is about your life, this is about your government.”

He makes a direct link between ordinary people of Britain and the environment and opportunity our political class create in our name.

So, does it prove what the BREXITEERS have been saying all along? That the southern biased political elites have little interest in the rest of the country and its woes, blinded as they are by London and its skyward ascent.

Does it prove that the City of London and its powerful political friends are a self-interested gold-plated throng throwing us to the dogs? – allowing as they do the foreign stain of corruption and criminality to seep across our borders through their personal avarice and their pursuit of neo-liberal financial policies and the removal of regulation to enable them?

Perhaps.

What is interesting is what Saviano went on to say. He ventured that leaving the EU would in fact undermine joint attempts to fight illegal economies but removing the bigger picture.

“Leaving the EU means allowing the Qatari societies, the Mexican cartels, the Russia Mafia to gain even more power,”

 “We have proof, we have evidence. Today, the criminal economy is bigger than the legal economy. Drug trafficking eclipses the revenue of oil firms. Cocaine is a £300bn-a-year business. Criminal capitalism is capitalism without rules. Mafia and organised crime does not abide by the rule of law – and most financial companies who reside offshore are exactly the same.”

Saviano pointed to the fact HSBC had paid $1.9bn in fines to the US government for financial irregularities in dealing with money that had come from cartels.

I find it interesting that Saviano has also become a Distant Son to Italy. He has been put behind glass, an observer now. His armed guards and two bullet proof cars proof that he manages to speak to the heart of the matter. Otherwise the mob would not mark him for death and the politicians would not publicaly diminish and de-legitimize him.

We need to grow up in the UK. And start to see what is really going on in our midst. This is not about being anti Tory, anti Farage, anti Money or anti Business. This is about being pro-people.

There are many, many people in the UK who are both successful and soulful, who ‘give a chuff’ as one such person said to me recently – people untouched and uninterested in the gilded cage of super money and its slippery bedfellows.

Surely that is good. Thriving does not need to equate to graft and back handers and crooks as it now so often invariably does in Italy.

BUT I worry that the more we skate over the issue -seeing a BREXIT vote as job done – and the more we ignore the issues in our society, the greater the chance that we will breed the opportunity for a situation like the one Saviano refers to to thrive and survive unbothered and untouched.

I worry that – though only measured in hundreds and not thousands of years – the administrative infrastructure and the increasing interrelatedness and interweaving of the political and capital classes, both socially, culturally but most importantly systemically in the UK will create a web of complex self-interest similar to the one in Italy – one which becomes increasingly in thrall to and manipulated by the staggering scale of criminal money washing through its coffers.

It may be a wholly anecdotal assertion when I say that the bed-fellows nature of ugly money is an absolute truth but I challenge anyone to go to a Top Tier art happening in London’s Hanover Square and not find the elite gathering swollen by a number of Asian, Russian, European and Middle Eastern ‘businessmen’, and their super banker and fund trader friends, and the Politicians and Influencers who are party to their cause.

The more that the gap between the haves and have nots visibly and palpably grows, the angrier the people will become. And the more disenfranchised and disenchanted they will get until eventually, in extremis, people will look in greater and greater numbers to make those toxic contracts, bury their heads and turn a blind eye – and we will all be the worse off for it.

SOURCE: Roberto Saviano. London is heart of Global Financial Corruption. The Guardian On Line. Dan Carrier. May 2016

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • June 2021
  • December 2020
  • August 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • October 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • November 2018
  • August 2018
  • June 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013

Categories

  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • thinairfactoryblog
    • Join 28 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • thinairfactoryblog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...