When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (26 page)

Sir John Hoskyns, director-general of the Institute of Directors, put the matter bluntly: ‘Our attitudes to capitalism and enterprise have been shaped since the war by politicians, civil servants, university professors, trade union bosses and a few big business leaders. Their common experience has been
safety
. Few have had competitive business experience, almost none has taken personal high-risk decisions. Most of them have had effective security of tenure and have neither experienced nor risked unemployment or bankruptcy. Together they have helped to shape a culture which has led people to expect and demand a life devoid even of minor risks … It is a culture which is snobbish towards small business.'

The tenants of Carrington would warm Sir John's heart. I met one man who had been made redundant three times, another who had been bankrupt. Many had a trauma in their pasts. All those I talked with had concrete ambitions to expand. ‘Deb' Parrington had travelled a long way to become boss of an insulating firm employing fourteen people including himself and his wife. One of twelve children – ‘first up was best dressed: we didn't always get to school when we should' – he had begun his working life as an apprentice on the Carrington site in the early sixties. He had worked round the country on such construction schemes as Fylingdales early-warning system and power stations. He himself was a union convenor, but he hated what he saw of industrial relations – buses called to take workers home
before
the strike meeting was held; buckets of excreta thrown over fellow workers sent to Coventry; militant groups who shouted the loudest dictating what happened. He returned to Carrington to work for Shell as a 25-year-old foreman with his political attitudes fundamentally altered.

His career with Shell went well, and he rose towards management, never thinking of breaking loose and starting on his own. ‘I had a good job and prospects. I was young and comfortable. My wife had a job. We had two children. I didn't see why I should take any risks.' he said. Then came the redundancies, and, although Shell wanted to keep Mr Parrington, it would not have been in the job he had trained for. He was asked to put work out to tender, decided he could form a company and do it himself. He won the contract, and, when I met him, two years later, had never looked back. He remained deeply suspicious of human nature, working from an office with windows overlooking the shop-floor so that he could check on his men. ‘Never a day goes by without problems,' he said. ‘The biggest is dealing with people. Basically I've got a good core, but once you start building up, it's difficult to get all the right people.' I asked Mr Parrington how he was doing financially. He laughed. He hadn't, he said, had time to spend. He had only had one week off in eighteen months. He had had to stop playing squash through lack of time. But orders were coming in regularly – ‘we've met our targets, and haven't let anyone down' – and he had even turned down a big job in South Wales, in part because he did not want to expand too fast, and in part because it would have been hard to exercise control at that distance. Slow payers had caused cashflow problems – though Shell, his chief customer, had a policy of paying small companies immediately – and he favoured a proposal then before parliament that all bills should be settled within thirty days. ‘We have to pay our suppliers within thirty days. My wife spends a lot of her time chasing people for money.'

Mr Parrington (the ‘Deb' is short for Debroy when you're one of twelve your parents have to be inventive) was fair-haired with a strong, determined face. His political odyssey had taken him from the socialism of his roots to a belief that a future Labour government would ‘destroy the foundations of the last few years, and we'll end up in a bloody quagmire. It just frightens me. I'd hate to see it all lost.' What would be lost he felt was management's new-found confidence to manage – ‘there's been a hell of a change in the past few years: everything is turned upside down' – and working people's realization that ‘the world doesn't owe them a living.' He said: ‘I can't understand why people think that everything should be done for them, that they're entitled to a job, and that once you're in business you're making a bloody fortune and don't have any problems.' He brewed a cup of tea for his workers in the morning, and used the contact to put his views in a bantering manner. ‘We are not,' he told them, ‘in business to provide ourselves with jobs, but to perform for the customer.' Looking round his small office, he said: ‘the buck stops here.'

Mr Parrington was then the biggest employer in the Carrington Business Park, but an equally unpassable buck lay behind each door throughout the complex. It was the tenants' common badge: they were the commandos of the British economy. John Poulson sat in the ‘Top Table' coffee shop, with a portable phone at his elbow. He had a beard, tinted glasses and, for public consumption at least, a ‘devil may care' attitude. He ran a company specializing in computer-aided design, and did design work and sold equipment. CAD, he said, had moved from being fun for the enthusiast to a practical tool. You could throw away the drawing-board like swapping your pen for a word processor. He had expanded his business cautiously, having seen others come to grief by growing too fast. By the time I met him, he was on the verge of a big leap forward. His original company might be launched on the unlisted securities market (USM); he was thinking of buying a sports shop and even a cheese manufacturer; he was about to attend Manchester Business School – ‘like taking a personal health check: it might open up one or two areas where I have been short-sighted.' Life, he said, should be ‘an extended hobby.' By making money, he could afford the time to indulge in his actual hobby, shooting. He had just bought a fifth shotgun.

What made him an entrepreneur? Well, he laughed, he was no good as a delegator, he had no experience in business or staff management or as a salesman. What he had, he said, was ‘self-reliance and ego. I got fed up with relying on other people to make decisions for me. I was big-headed enough to think I could do it better than the gaffer who'd been telling me.' When he had been employed by others, he found he got on better with his bosses than his peers. ‘It had been a long-term aim to work for myself: I was on the pushy side.' Most people, he had decided, ‘actually like to be told what to do.' His greatest problem was getting his staff to get on with it.

Mike Smith and Brian Jarman were salesmen through and through – the firm handshake, the easy familiarity, the knowing wink, the sharp suits, the shiny briefcases. Betjeman's lines swam into mind:

I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner;

I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina.

They had both worked for the Control Data computer company, and, like John Philpott, had spotted that belt-tightening by large companies was creating opportunities for small enterprise. The computer giants had been slashing their sales forces, down to one man, perhaps, instead of six or seven. ‘We were well paid, with company cars, expenses, all the usual perks. But when we saw that the big companies were no longer able to offer a personal service, we took a calculated risk. You tend to be sheltered with a big company, and it is one hell of a jump to give that all up, take a deep breath, and go on your own,' said Mr Jarman. However, they had exceeded their forecasts for each of their first six months, and they were already desperate to expand, get bigger offices, employ a secretary and a tele-sales girl. They were working harder than they ever had, including at least one day each weekend, but were stimulated by being their own masters, and excited by the potential. ‘We have a better day-to-day existence. Our decisions affect the course of our lives. We avoid the frustration of being told what to do by some god almighty.' Mr Smith was only twenty-eight, but he had once run a pottery business that had gone bust. He had repaid all the debts, and didn't regret the experience. In this, he was more like an American, bouncing back from adversity, than a Briton who is often crushed by one failure.

Their joint plans included getting into property, and speculating on the Stock Exchange. Mr Smith dreamed of running several big businesses, while Mr Jarman, who was forty, talked of making enough to retire in his mid-fifties. They both hankered after the ‘good' life – Mr Jarman for a villa in Spain and a Ferrari (he was having to ‘make do' with a Mercedes), and Mr Smith for a large boat. They admired and sought to emulate people like Freddie Laker, Alan Sugar (they were Amstrad agents) and Richard Branson. ‘It can be done,' they said, ‘you've got to buck the system, grit your teeth and go for it.'

Philip Cook had gone for it straight out of Manchester Polytechnic, where he had gained a degree in industrial design. He clearly had a natural spirit of enterprise, having marketed some of his college projects. From what I saw of his work, he also had considerable talent. One college idea, a ‘bit of fun' – a ‘soft' ghetto blaster in a bag, with a busy colourful design, which he called a ‘Jimmybean' – had been bought by Sony. Several British companies had shown no interest. Sony had flown a man over from their German-based European design centre, and he had concluded a deal on the spot. The British tradition of allowing others to exploit our best ideas appeared secure for another generation. Mr Cook had designed an electric vehicle for airport use, was working on disposable fountain pen designs for Berol, and had just completed a trendy gas fire for a company that had jettisoned the idea because a similar fire marketed by a rival had flopped. Mr Cook had not realized how many design ideas end up on the cutting-room floor. ‘It's very frustrating,' he said, ‘when you do something you think could be a world-beater.' It was also frustrating that so few British companies understood the value of design. That had proved a ‘massive stumbling-block' when he was starting out, and was the reason why he was aiming his work at design-conscious companies like Sony.

Mr Cook enjoyed the amenities of Carrington Park – the coffee shop, the conference rooms, the busy atmosphere. He laughed: ‘I can look out of the window, and see the people drive up in their Mercs and Porsches, and think: “That's the reason why I am here.” His art-student-like air – the wire-framed glasses, the pullover, baggy trousers, white socks – hid a thorough-going ambition. He wanted to employ one other person almost immediately, and visualized one day having his own design studio. ‘You need material aims to keep you going – too many designers regard profit as a dirty word,' he said. He got half his pleasure from the creativity of his work, and half from its profitability.

Mr Cook's frustrations with the lack of vision shown by many British manufacturers, who believe that churning out the same old product is all they need to do to keep their share of the market, was widely shared by his distinguished elders in London. Louis van Praag, founder and boss of Sabre International textiles, was conducting a missionary campaign on behalf of the future of young people like Mr Cook. He had headed a working party, which had fashioned a design curriculum for inclusion in management courses, alongside marketing, finance, labour relations and the rest. ‘I would claim without hesitation that Britain enjoys the best design education in the world. Design is not the problem, management is,' he said, reserving his finest disdain for the City of London – ‘the last bastion of philistinism.' He had failed to attract one volunteer for this working party from the City. ‘Most merchant banks would rather finance an oilfield than a new product,' he said.'

As a mature consultant, Wally Olins, the founder of a major London design company, had an experience a few years ago that foreshadowed Mr Cook's failure to sell his ‘Jimmybean' to a British manufacturer. When he was working for both Renault and Volkswagen, British Leyland executives declined to travel a mile across Marylebone to see what his firm might have to offer them. The idea that the British are a species of Neanderthal man, which doesn't care for style is, of course, nonsense, as the sales of Volkswagen, Renault, Sony, and the rest show. Good design is not a fancy option, like chrome plating, but an integral part of any product that is going to work efficiently and give maximum aesthetic pleasure. British manufacturers have tended to think that ‘design' was merely for the Habitat shopping classes. The cooking-stove industry was almost wiped out because manufacturers presumed that only the brie and wine set wanted anything better conceived than the free-standing models their mothers used. Mr Keith Grant, the director of the Design Council, pointed out that one had only to eavesdrop on a pub conversation about new cars or compact disc systems to realize how sophisticated the British are in at least some design areas. Manufacturers have worried themselves to death over issues like labour relations, interest rates, unfair foreign competition and wages, and have almost ignored the product. ‘Civilizations,' said Stephen Bayley, who was charged with launching a national design museum in London's docklands, ‘are remembered by their artefacts, not their bank rates.'

So careless are we with our talents that ‘new' industries like computer software, which were to replace the old, are themselves collapsing with the speed at which shipbuilding and steel contracted. In 1986 a government advisory body, headed by the chairman of Rolls-Royce, warned that the software industry was in danger of being wiped out by foreign competition. It said bluntly: ‘The man in the street currently sees the UK software industry now and in the future as a high growth, export revenue-generating industry contributing significantly to UK employment and the balance of payments. This view is wrong.' The share of the world market owned by British companies had already dwindled to 2 to 3 per cent, and by the early nineties, said the advisory body, our balance of payments deficit in software was predicted to have reached two billion pounds annually.