It’s 6am at King’s Cross Station which, much like the government’s low carbon policy, is still unfinished after a decade of constant redevelopment.
It’s 6am at King’s Cross Station which, much like the government’s low carbon policy, is still unfinished after a decade of constant redevelopment.
I’m holding a £140 train ticket to Harrogate compared to my £29 budget airline to Frankfurt the previous week – so much for British infrastructure. I’m off to a meeting of cleantech entrepreneurs and businesses building technology to solve climate challenges in expectation that the Copenhagen Summit will achieve small but unaggressive targets and more hot air. Meanwhile the nearby newsstand reports that an estimated 5,000 bankers will each earn £1 million plus this year for their hard work in moving money around rather than making things. It makes you kind of sick – that’s equivalent to 5,000 start-ups receiving decent funding and creating new employment and new growth prospects rather than preserving old broken jobs in financial services.
With the UK bank bail-out now equivalent to 74 per cent of UK GDP, and a further £37 billion allocated to RBS and Lloyds last month, it feels very much like a bail-out of the bonuses. Banks of course argue that they need to pay bonuses to retain the reckless talent that created this mess – but George Soros counters that such risk taking should move and use private hedge fund money, not that of the taxpayer. Over in the US, Goldman Sachs has reserved an extraordinary $16.7 billion for bonuses for what it terms ‘doing God’s work’. That’s equivalent to the UK’s annual budget for the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, which last week managed to scrape together enough equipment and uniforms to send a further 500 soldiers.
Britain appears to be running in safe mode like some defunct computer, struggling to cope with its commitments, lacking the correct infrastructure or money to grow. We’re now the last of the G20 still in recession, and laden with debt from the bail-out, with national debt estimated to be more than double GDP for most G20 countries by 2014.
This was a theme I touched upon at the recent ‘cleantech versus banking’ debate at the Cambridge Union Society. This was part of the event where Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors came to network with UK start-ups and entrepreneurs. I debated alongside Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and other cleantech entrepreneurs, arguing that the bail-out money was wasted when compared to the benefits of investing in new technology, new job creation and the real need to avoid the wider climate catastrophe.
We argued that the collapses on Wall Street have triggered a collapse in capitalism, much as the Berlin Wall ended communism, and we are on a gradual move to carbonism – an economy centered around energy and sustainability. We referred to the famous George Bush observation ‘this sucker’s going down’, made at the first peak of the crisis when it dawned that the $600 trillion in credit derivatives and virtual contracts feeding bankers’ bonuses might unravel, knocking out more than the Icelandic and Scottish economies combined and bringing down the whole house of cards that is our modern financial system.
We argued that there was no going back to the old broken system, that we need to build a new future where engineering and scientific talent, the Darwins, Hawkings and Newtons build a cleaner, not meaner future.
Yet despite all this, the Cambridge undergraduates, sensing the banks now had money to pay and hire them in the milkround, defeated the motion 60:40 and voted with the bankers.
