I wasn’t looking forward to getting back to the UK, but my eldest offspring was marrying in a Quaker wedding in Scotland, so needs must. The unease at what I might find had been gnawing away at me quietly for months, so I was braced for the sort of social, political and economic stress which is reported so regularly and lovingly in all parts of the media. And the weather.
Long story short, I was mistaken. The Brits are all right. Actually they are better than all right: my experience found them courteous, hard-working, efficient and still self-deprecating. This observation runs true across all manner of Brits I had dealings with: young and old, with no discernible difference between the wide range of ethnicities and nationalities who co-operate to get the job done. The revolting moral disgrace of those celebrating the Hamas’ resurrection of einzatsgruppen crimes may persuade us that Britain’s multiculturalism has failed. Maybe - but the evidence that Britain is a genuinely successful and relaxed multi-ethnic society is very broad, and in the long run that is almost certainly more important. The evidence was at hand day in, day out.
Economic theory has a blind spot for those things it cannot immediately calculate. The quality or qualities of the people making up an economy is one of those things. But it obviously does matter. It has always seemed to me that the Chinese people are not only industrious, but they also sincerely want to get rich, if only the government would let them. So it was no surprise when they did just that (until the government decided not to let them). In a very different way, you’d back a Korean - any Korean - in a fight whether that was martial or material. You’d trust the Japanese with a huge national debt in a way you’d never consider letting Filipinos get away with.
And the Brits? Well, I honestly think I’d expect them to ride the rodeo of chaos to the motel of re-invention better than most. Because for a people so flexible, they are surprisingly ‘steady’. We’ve done it before, in recent memory. As the economic model inherited from the 1980s sours, and as the global political settlement from the 1990s erodes, don’t be too surprised if the UK survives and, eventually, prospers. The unfancied horse coming through.
But this is an observation about people, not systems, but you’ll not get to meet the people until you’ve met Heathrow. Is it possible to complete this without feelings of anger and despair? I tangled with Heathrow several times, and hammered home the same message repeatedly: this is an airport in a state of permanent crisis which no conceivable change of management can hope to resolve. It staggers on day by day, inflicting costs and horrors on its customers, perpetually on the brink of collapse.
Probably the best thing you could do with Heathrow - or Skidrow as I began to think of it - would be a full-scale decommissioning. Close the bugger down and start again.
Remarkably, there are still people campaigning to add a third runway to Heathrow. Are they absolutely mad?
My Heathrow experience was by no means exceptional, it was just standard. It started out when our timetabled flight touched down on time. Despite arriving as expected, there was no ‘finger’ from which to disembark. Fair enough; but there were also no buses available to get us to the terminal. So a nearly nine hour flight was extended by an hour-long wait on the tarmac, waiting for buses.
My wife has mobility issues which mean we needed special assistance. This involved a further wait, but eventually we and others were ferried to the terminal where. . . . we were simply left, told that someone would be along. After a further quarter of an hour, the group decided that no help was coming, so we collectively staggered - and the word is apt - about 200 yards to where we hoped to find help. We were still maybe half a mile, three quarters of a mile - it doesn’t matter, the distance was impossible - from passport and baggage.
But then a wonderful thing happened: the efforts of the staff to rescue a collapsing system kicked in. I saw this time and time again in Heathrow: a system held up by a staff willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to keep the show on the road. The Brits are all right.
It cost this staff member some trouble too, because having decided to take personal responsibility for us, she had to cross a whole system of internal security barriers set up to stop her. The last we saw of her, when she had finally reunited us with our baggage, she was hurrying off to explain to her superiors why she’d stepped out of her lane.
The next day was, if anything, worse. Our flight was mid-evening, but that afternoon storms had disrupted flights out of Nice, which in turn meant that the planes needed to fly passengers from Heathrow were simply not there. Departure times turned into delays and as the day wore on, delays turned into cancellations. Would-be passengers, however, kept turning up, checking in, and crowding into a terminal that had no room for them.
Heathrow was turning into the Black Hole of Hounslow.
Just as I was wondering where on earth we were going to sleep if - as seemed inevitable - our flight was cancelled, it was called! We escaped.
Once again, we escaped only because working people were willing to go the extra mile. In this case, we were sitting on the tarmac when the flight captain came into the cabin, shouting an explanation and a request above the hubbub. The explanation was that we were getting away because the flight crew had decided to put in extra unanticipated hours simply to lighten the load. His request was that we all fill in forms detailing our experience: ‘It’s important that you do this, because they take no notice of us, but they might, just might, take notice if enough of you complain’.
Travelling disabled allows you plenty of extra time to talk with air crew, ground crew, as you wait, and wait, for action. On that basis, I can assure you that my frustration at Heathrow is as nothing compared to those who’s job it is to fly in and out of it every day.
A couple of days later, the entire UK air traffic control system went down, and the system actually did collapse. The cause was not Russian interference, but simply a routing being filed which the computer deemed so impossible it shut down all flights. Then the backup did the same. It was as if I’d fat-fingered in the wrong number in an ATM, and crashed Britain’s banking system.
No, Heathrow is a mess now, and a disaster waiting to happen. Here are some contributing factors: the international aviation system operates on old software and with no redundancy; Heathrow’s own software is dated; security measures dictate a whole jenga of cracks between which everything can and does fall; decades of complacent management happily kept expanding this hideously vulnerable system.
Well, it’s too late now. Britain’s great, but I’ll do my level best to avoid Heathrow. Please don’t judge Britain on your experience of Heathrow, because nothing in my time in the UK, including a couple of other airports, comes close to its horrors.
It is a perverse shame that most foreigners have Heathrow as their introduction to Britain. Most countries recognize that first impressions matter, and spend billions on building, designing and operating their main airport as a luxury investment. Perhaps only Britain would sell their front door to a consortium of foreign investors with no such interest. Does any developed country put up with a shabbier welcome? (Heathrow is ultimately owned by: Ferrovial S.A., Qatar Investment Authority, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, GIC, Alinda Capital Partners of the United States, China Investment Corporation and Universities Superannuation Scheme.)
Skedaddling from Heathrow, I spent the rest of the time in Yorkshire and Scotland. I can honestly say that it was a delight. Not because of the weather, which was the sort of concerted damp which turns even the fashion-conscious into sodden tramps. Even Italians can’t cut a bella figura in an Edinburgh rain. But two things remain with me.
First, quite by accident, we stayed in two hotels which are part of the Innkeepers Collection. Both were reasonably priced but so good in every aspect, that I enquired further. And yes, once you’ve worked there a year, you start to amass shares in the company. No wonder the on-site managements are so on the ball, even though there was no hint of overstaffing. It’s a public company, and one of the shareholding managers assured me that the balance sheet is strong. With more than 50 British hotels/inns in the Innkeepers Collection, I’d have expected it to be carrying heavy debts. I need to check, because if not . . . .
Second, Edinburgh is a reminder in stone of civic pride and the force of architectural beauty. If you are in the financial industry, you’ll have visited a only small sliver of Edinburgh. If detective fiction is your thing, in your mind you’ll have wandered the worst bits of Edinburgh with Rebus. But after a few days of driving around (with a disabled blue-badge - massively valuable in Edinburgh, I confess), the diverse beauty of the place is what remains. Some Scots like to pretend that the British Empire was nothing to do with them. Which is pretty funny for those of us with a knowledge of East Asia or the West Indies. But at least the Scots used their ill-gotten gains to erect a crop of fine late-Hanoverian/early Victorian civic buildings which ennoble Edinburgh’s citizens to this day. Even in the rain.
A final word: Scottish Anglophobia? Phsaw - they’re a great bunch, the Scots.
There's a lot to be said for a system that enables systemic resetting without a civil war. Let's hope it only takes one term of Blair v3.0 to bring voters to their senses and end the societal distortions that result from (and now accompany) the property/credit/government bubbles. At least Blair v3.0 (Sir Keith and his merry band of idiots) will hasten the end that Blair V2 0 (Cameron, Wishy Washy) have postponed.
It's a crying shame that so much of Britain's infrastrcture is owned by other countries - other countries governments in some cases. (I'm sure deutsche bahn have something to do with LNER).
People care more about things they have 'skin in the game' with, and I would hope a UK company would care about UK services - an overseas owner has less to link them so would care less?
Can we ever get these services back to something like a shareholder system?