Читать книгу Conversation with God - David C. Wilson - Страница 7

As a child I used to love stories, listening avidly to the Greek legends read to us at primary school and also to the Old Testament bible stories at the Baptist Sunday school I attended until the age of ten. At about that age I discovered temptation, when under the influence of ‘friends,’ I began to duck out of Sunday school, deciding instead to spend the threepence collection money on liquorice at the nearby herbalist shop. From that point on, and for a further thirty six years, I rarely graced the inside of a church building—save for births, marriages, and deaths, that is, the ‘normal’ and socially-required rites of passage. I set out on the great adventure of life becoming ever more determined to do exactly as I pleased but taking a long time to learn that life, or so it seemed, merely consisted of mutual, short-term reciprocity. One simply performed an appropriate number of transactions with other members of society in order to achieve one’s desired goals, and the efficiency of this process determined the amount of success met with. Whilst inwardly accepting that this was the ‘way the world worked,’ I singularly failed to make the system work for me. For one thing, I enjoyed science and chose to begin work in manufacturing industry during the labor governments of the nineteen sixties, and Harold Wilson seemed to sum up my entire belief-system in his promise to bring about a “white hot technological revolution.” The reality of course has been different, and in the post modern, post industrial society of today, the manufacturing sector has shrunk to perhaps a tenth of its previous size.

Having eventually qualified as a Chemist, however, I found I had other life-affecting problems, not least my impeccable timing, for I had managed to qualify during a major manufacturing recession. Finding a job when whole research departments are being closed is difficult to say the least, so I decided to train as a teacher, without it seems realising that those same redundant chemists were all doing the very same thing. It should have come as no surprise to find teaching posts in short supply when I began to apply for them twelve months later. The need to take stock of the situation pressed in upon me. I realized that I had spent fourteen years doing the wrong things at the wrong time, and the question which now arose was, should I add to my problems by seeking a teaching post in the wrong place? Being from the north west of England I was loath to uproot the four of us (for I had married and now had a wife and children to consider) and move to Hackney or the nether reaches of Glamorgan in order to teach. For the first time in my life I was compelled to reflect on ‘the quality of life’—for want of a better phrase, and to decide in discussion with my wife, the direction our lives should take from now on.

Bereft

Now I was qualified to teach in schools, although I had been trained as a teacher of chemistry in further education, and it was a post in a college of further education or technology which I ideally sought. In the absence of such a post, the choice presented became one between teaching in a secondary school which might perhaps be at the other end of the country, or making a complete career break. I looked around for inspiration and saw what I thought was my salvation—I became an insurance agent! The attractions of this work for me lay in the relative freedoms it provided, since each working day comprised of a series of meetings with ordinary people during which I looked after their insurance needs and collected their premiums. No longer would I be trapped inside large organisations where advancement depended so much upon the interpersonal politics of the company or department, and with which I had so little facility. Instead I would be free, almost my own boss, and in my naivety I believed I had escaped the system–the enslaving matrix. As if to emphasize the irrevocable nature of this complete change of career, three days after accepting the insurance job I was offered sixteen teaching hours in a college of technology in south Manchester. Now sixteen hours is not a full post, it’s about two thirds of a post and I was worried about the salary being enough, so I declined what would almost certainly have been ‘a foot in the door.’ Besides, there were other compelling reasons to remain an insurance agent. Firstly, the new job involved working out of an office in a town in East Cheshire, which was just far enough away from our home in Greater Manchester to qualify for financial assistance from the government towards removal expenses under a then current scheme. Secondly, and most importantly, the new employer was in financial services, and as such, offered discounted mortgages to its staff. This was vitally important because it permitted us to cross the North Manchester—South Manchester financial ‘apartheid,’ which normally prevented such movement. In other words, one normally needed a much higher salary, in order to migrate from the gloomy, industrial north to buy the more expensive houses of the leafy suburbs of South Manchester—or better still the towns and villages of East Cheshire. The net result was that I had contrived and manipulated my way into the ‘good life’ and I remained an insurance agent, going on to discover some very revealing things about both myself and the ‘world’ I thought I knew.

In the pre regulation Britain of the late nineteen-seventies it was possible to reply to an advertizement—usually one column-inch in length—in the local newspaper and get a job as an industrial branch, insurance agent without qualifications or experience of any kind in this work. As the name suggests the work involved the selling of life insurance to the ‘industrial’ or working classes, usually in their own homes with premiums being collected by the agent on a weekly basis. The insurance agent or ‘clubman’ was welcomed into homes on council estates and into terraced cottages throughout the land. He was the archetypal, bicycle-clipped, and anoraked individual who was so familiar on the streets of any British town of that era. Times were, however, changing and whole communities had been transplanted into satellite shire towns from the cities, by the slum clearances of the fifties and sixties. When combined with progressive deindustrialization, this produced massive social changes, not least, to sales of industrial branch, insurance policies. I had realized instinctively from my first day as an insurance agent, that there was a declining market for the weekly paid, industrial branch life policies, and so had concentrated upon sales of ‘ordinary’ branch life policies (collected monthly through the banking system), together with general or non-life policies. Gradually, this resulted in a great deal of free time since I found I could efficiently service my ‘round’ in little more than two days, leaving the remaining time available (theoretically) for new sales. In practice, however, I filled this time with innumerable hobbies and activities—anything to take my mind off my current situation.

That current situation involved a number of factors which in hindsight I have come to understand in total as a kind of bereavement, and I now understand that I was undergoing grief which did not diminish as the years passed by. But what, it may be asked, was I grieving for? It certainly wasn’t the change in the ‘status’ of my current work compared with the scientific work done previously, and I felt no remorse for seemingly abandoning the fruits of my expensive education. In my refusal to remain in science, or at least in the teaching of science, I had it seems killed off my first love, my own potential, indeed my own becoming. Science had not simply been my work, it had been my belief-system, and I had believed in the new humanism based as it was on scientific materialism. I was now no longer intimately involved in that work with the consequence that I was floundering in grief as a result of a severed relationship with my erstwhile ‘god.’ I was learning the truth of the maxim “no man is an island” at first hand, and the gradual formation of new personal relationships with hundreds of clients, many of whom became friends, never completely alleviated these feelings.

Anger

Although the feelings of grief never went away, they could be anesthetized and this was done by means of furious activity, and numerous hobbies were indulged in, including winemaking, often five or ten gallons at a time, which on this scale dominated the house. Then there was the kit-car, which became a vast money-sink, the investments in stocks and shares which, although successful, didn’t prove to be the big money-spinner hoped for, and all of these were accompanied by the perpetual DIY. Throughout this time the children were not exactly neglected or deprived so much as left to their own devices, for as a father I wasn’t giving 100% and I knew it. Sundays were different, however, and the whole family as often as not would go walking on bits of the local Gritstone Trail—a footpath through the nearby Pennine foothills. As these walks continued and the seventies gave way to the eighties, I began to experience another emotional state which curiously only occurred during the walks, and in the very places where one would most expect to find peace I became angry. I spent those later walks in silence, seething with a resentment against the world in general for not realising my quintessential excellence, and my ‘Micky Mouse’ employer in particular for its insistence on pressing for sales of yesterday’s financial products. In perfect hindsight of course, it seems quite natural to have expected grief to be followed by anger, an anger that more accurately highlighted my own unfulfilled potential. I was also angry with my wife, Chris, who was dragging me off on these walks when I really wanted to be planning ahead, checking my shares portfolio, working at something, anything, which would realize that lost potential. So as I walked, I inwardly fumed until the anger gave way to a determination to change things—once and for all. It should be understood that the angry determination of these walks was an internal state, which did not spill over into nastiness or unpleasantness towards either Chris or the kids. Indeed, it led eventually to a constructive dialogue with Chris about our future, as we worked out our plans to go into self-employment.

Status

We struggled for a long time over precisely what we were going to do in self-employment, before Chris agreed to join me in opening an insurance brokerage. Such a venture permitted me to employ the accumulated expertise of the past few years, years during which I had made a specialism of general branch insurance. Things didn’t turn out the way we expected, however, and our new office took just 20 pence for photocopying in its first week’s trading. Instead of doing business ‘off the street’ I found it necessary to continue to make personal calls on clients, who, if I were able to help them with their car or house insurance, would usually reward me with purchases of the more lucrative financial products. I discovered to my great surprise that I could sell, indeed had to sell to survive, and that this was linked to a more fundamental self understanding in that I was at last in a meaningful relationship with society by contributing my new expertise to it. I was amazed to discover, moreover, that the world had finally sat up and taken notice of us, seemingly because we had opened an office and I had exchanged my anorak for a three piece suit. The practising of my new ‘profession’ was finally allowing the grief and anger of the past few years to subside, especially as clients and even friends and family began to look on us in a new light. In the space of six or seven years I had experienced a roller coaster ride in terms of status, as I had moved from professional chemist/teacher to insurance agent before ‘ascending’ once more to the dizzy heights of self-employed broker. All this was of course taking place against the Thatcher backdrop of support, acclaim, and praise for entrepreneurial activities, and although our ascendancy seemed archetypally Thatcherite, the thought never crossed our minds that we might be included amongst those who would come to be called Thatcher’s children. Thatcher’s children included the ‘Hoorah Henrys’ and the ‘Yuppies’ (young and upwardly mobile), and I suppose we could have been described as ‘Yuppies’ if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was fast approaching forty. Upwardly mobile we remained, however, and we demonstrated this to all and sundry by buying a huge, stone-built house with a correspondingly huge mortgage. The mortgage could not be justified by any multiple of our non-existent accounts, and derived from a liaison with the hungry and aggressive manager of a newly opened building society branch office. So there we sat, kings of the hill—the house was in fact called ‘Springmount’—apparently set up for life and even discussing early retirement.

Regulation—The Theft of an Industry

In the early nineteen eighties some sixty five percent of the retail financial services industry—then known as the life assurance industry—lay in the hands of small firms of brokers. There were perhaps twelve and a half thousand such firms, usually comprising two or three partners, and whose combined business was worth many billions of pounds a year in new business fees and commissions. Many of these were composite brokers like our own firm, combining sales of financial products with general insurance sales. Sadly it seems, the wind of change is always blowing, and if a way could have been found to wrest this billion pound market from their hands, then the 1986 Financial Services Act was that way. The analogy, which springs to mind for this process, is the way in which the big supermarkets relieved the thousands of small grocers of their market share in the fifties and sixties. The grocers succumbed to the supermarkets whose massive buying power enabled them to undercut prices. Unlike the grocers, however, the brokers could compete on price with the big banks, building societies, and direct-selling insurance companies—their main competitors, and were consequently safe from this ‘fair’ form of competition. Businesses are, however, not only sensitive to price pressures, they are also vulnerable to cost pressures, and the onset of regulation under the new act brought about a massive yet disproportionate increase in business operating costs for the small brokerage. Although staggered over several years, the costs rose inexorably, beginning with the self-regulatory fees of several thousand pounds per year, and progressing with the enforced implementation of new systems and the quadrupling of paperwork. The new compliance visits to clients brought about a doubling or trebling of servicing costs, before finally the imposition of the requirement that all brokers (now called financial advisors) must obtain qualifications in financial services, ratcheted costs up further.

None of this could be done in a political vacuum of course, and the blind hatred of the ‘chattering classes’ for the commission based remuneration system of the industry provided the necessary political pressure. It is interesting to note that as I write, I do so to the anguished squeals of pain from policyholders of the famous, non-commission paying office, the Equitable Life, many of whom were led to believe (by an antagonistic media) that a life office’s financial strength lay in its refusal to pay commission to sales staff. In any event, the result was brutal, and in the decade commencing in 1986 fully ten thousand financial services firms went out of business. From the politician’s viewpoint it might have seemed that the sacrifice of such a ‘small’ lamb gave great political gains without actually damaging the wider public interest. After all, the same financial products would still be available from the same financial services companies, the only difference being that the financial advisors dealing with the public would now be ‘accountable’ employees. Events have shown the error of such thinking, for at the turn of the century the financial services industry bathes in a sea of blood, as companies cannibalize each other for a bigger piece of a shrinking market. The efforts of these companies are now almost exclusively directed towards the five million people who hold capital of fifty thousand pounds or more—not including their domestic properties, to the detriment of those of more modest means.

The death throes of the small ‘grocers’ of the financial services industry lay as a backdrop to our own problems. Unfortunately, it was an interactive backdrop, for not only did it impose punitive increases in our costs, it pervaded the atmosphere of the industry and distorted all planning for the future. It was about this time that Chris first became ill, and it is arguable that the additional stresses imposed upon us by the regulators contributed significantly to that illness.