Malcolm Oliver revisits some past editorials and wonders if - as Hegel put it – the lesson of history is that the lessons of history are forgotten.
Malcolm Oliver edited Argent from 2002 to 2006. Here he revisits his article - Frantic Boast and Foolish Word from March 2003, and looks again at the problem of words and promises not matching the delivered reality.
I pen these words with more than a degree of nervousness in mid-March, given that the best example of frantic boasting and foolish words in everyone's minds is the whole Brexit process. My nervousness relates not just to the outcome of the third (or fourth, or fifth) “meaningful vote”, but also because this edition of Argent will be published just a couple of weeks before the newly-revised “B-Day” of 12 April. So many of you may have far more pressing and stressful things to do than reading these words!
My original editorial was written in what now appears to be the halcyon days of 2003, when Rudyard Kipling's words resonated very strongly geo-politically with the about-to-be fought Second Gulf War and, within the UK financial services sector, the seismic aftershocks of the collapse of Equitable Life. The quotation is from Kipling's Recessional, which is often said to have been written to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 – but this is mistaken. That duty would have fallen to the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin – who had only been appointed four years after Tennyson's death, and after Kipling and several other better candidates had declined the offer. And Kipling's words –just five tense stanzas of six lines each – are hardly celebratory of “sixty glorious years”. Rather, they are a threnody for what he saw as the irreversible decline of the established world order (and particularly the British Empire) and an expression of his deep foreboding for the future.
Back in 2003, the frantic boasts and foolish words (remember the dodgy dossier?) were well-recognized by, it seemed, everyone but the leaders of the Western world who uttered them. In the aftermath, once the captains and the kings had departed (another of Kipling's lines) , the consequences and ensuing chaos was only too evident. Perhaps predictably, the similarly predictable consequences of the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Libya were not predicted by our then-serving captains and kings.
And in our own field, the frantic boasts and foolish words at Equitable Life – perhaps most notably its decision to launch a new advertising campaign (Start an Equitable 2000 Pension Plan … if you delay … you could be throwing money down the drain) – the day after it lost its final appeal in the House of Lords, and therefore knew that its game was well and truly up. The society of course was not alone in that delusion – it took the regulators and the actuarial profession another couple of years to revise their initial judgment that the departed captains and kings at Equitable had merely been “unlucky”. Have the politicians learned? Perhaps I just need to mention Trump, and Brexit, to make my point. But it is really far worse than that, because jingoism and insults and pandering to the extremes of views, rather than the consensual mean, have become the norm – and this is the very definition of demagoguery rather than democracy. And has financial services learned? In some ways things are better, because of either regulatory action or the rediscovery by some players of the importance of the customer. But despite all this, and despite the lessons of Equitable Life and other scandals before it, we have still endured the lunacy of the securitization of sub-prime mortgages, the credit crunch, payday loan exploitation, PPI mis-selling and perhaps even the mis-selling of PPI mis-selling redress schemes, amongst others. But that was precisely the future that Kipling warned about. In a final resonance that transcends the century and a quarter since he wrote Recessional, Kipling ends with the prescient words “Lest we forget – lest we forget!” Prescient in the context of what was to come in the future that Kipling was facing, and prescient also in the years since I wrote the original editorial in 2003, in terms of developments that I did not foresee – or at least hoped that I did not foresee. Clearly hope is not enough. So let us work to build on the positive initiatives that are in train, so that anyone reading these words in ten years time will not be drawn in hindsight to make the same rueful conclusion – again.
Malcolm Oliver is a management consultant and lecturer. He's also an advisor to an investment bank, and sits on the judging panel for The Forum's awards.