carry on consulting

ooh, you are an awful industrial model - but i like you

As promised, an end (for now) to the “Britain, land of consultants” series, with my silly theory about what might have gone wrong.  I think we have to go back to when it all seemed to start going wrong – the 1970s, and so I will base this analysis on what I regard as the canonical text of British industrial malaise, which is to say the movie “Carry On At Your Convenience”

I absolutely do not recommend watching this film, of course – even by the woeful standards of the “Carry On” franchise it’s really awful.  But one of the big mission statements of this newsletter is my firmly held belief – “Take Jokes Seriously And Metaphors Literally, You Will Be Surprised At What You Discover”.

In this case (the Wikipedia summary is more or less enough), what we have is the common perception of the state of British class politics and industrial relations, as seen by someone who was intelligent enough to write a screenplay, but with no economic training, and seemingly no real interest in the subject other than their need for a broadly recognisable premise upon which to hang a simple romcom plot and a supply of ribald remarks and toilet gags seemingly bought by the kilogram from the lowest cost supplier.

Which paradoxically makes it interesting – as a barely-satirical statement of how things were seen to be at the time, it’s completely unmediated and consequently in my view surprisingly accurate when you ignore almost everything except the bare bones of the plot.

And those bare bones are – it’s a toilet factory called “W.C. Boggs” (yep). It is struggling with bank debt, and union militancy.  It has a big order from a Gulf state (oil sheikhs were a deus ex machina then too).  But the owner, Mr Boggs, would literally rather go bankrupt than allow his factory to produce anything as continental and hedonistic as a bidet.

Then various high jinks happen; the union shop steward turns out to be a love rival of the owner’s son, who is of a new generation and less class conscious.  Everyone goes on a works day out where they all get drunk together, and Mr Boggs senior is persuaded to move with the times.  Etc etc blah.

In my view, although I cannot emphasise enough that as a piece of film-making it is literally without merit, as a piece of economic analysis it’s distinctly better than workmanlike.  The massive hack who wrote it had pretty much correctly identified all the problems affecting British industry at the time.  We have sclerotic management who refuse to consider new products or technology.  There’s a militant union which seems to be promoting the personal projects of its leader as much as the interests of its members.  Everybody utterly refuses to communicate across class lines and regards it as thrillingly transgressive to consider doing so.  There’s no money and hard currency export markets are the only hope.  Very few political manifestoes of the period saw things anything like as clearly.

What’s unrealistic, of course, is that in the majority of British firms, there was not a shy but loyal secretary who could persuade the stuffy owner, nor yet an adventurous buxom factory worker whose break-up with the shop steward ended up solving the industrial relations problem, or a feckless but lovable heir to bring everyone together. There were just a load of social structures that had grown up, which might once have been useful but which, in the environment around them, prevented any progress to a solution.

Can you blame the real-life equivalents of the Charles Hawtrey character for thinking “nah, stuff this for a lark, I’m going to quit and start a sanitaryware design consultancy, I can convert a room into a studio in the Old Rectory”?

I think this might be the root of the British miscellaneous professional services sector – it’s the collective result of a series of individual solutions to an underlying institutional problem.