Any other business

A hot new brand, a better train service and a kinder role model for harsh times Here in Old Queen Street, we have (in our editor’s eloquent phrase) said pants to recession by launching a fistful of ‘brand extensions’ this year: our Australian edition, our online Book Club, and the soaraway monthly Spectator Business. Even in the teeth of recession, there are other potent brands out there waiting to be exploited, and the next one I’ve got my eye on is the Bullingdon Club. This Oxford University bad-boys elite, boasting David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson among its former members, has emerged this year as the new nexus of money and power.

Zero interest rates, record borrowing, printing money; the government has indicated that it is prepared to consider anything to slay the spectre of deflation. But if deflation is really such a bad thing — and I’m not convinced that, in a mild form, it is — then perhaps ministers should look at reining in a culprit whose role in promoting deflation has scarcely been mentioned: the internet. We are forever reminded about the deflationary pressures which have arisen from the huge shift of manufacturing to Asia. But what about the influence of the vast discount store that is the worldwide web? Any author hoping for a Christmas royalties bonus will already have had a foretaste of the debilitating effects of deflation.

I am old enough to remember the last slump — I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade. Most of the workers in the pot bank were women and girls, traditionally paid low wages, and now subjected to pay cuts. The men worked in the pits, if they were lucky. My mother, who came from Lancashire, and had a song for everything, used to sing: Colliery lads make gold and silver. Factory lads make brass. Who would marry a hand-loom weaver, When there’s plenty of colliery lads? In the wasteland not far from our house, there were curious piles of stones and boulders, making a lunar landscape.

At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot ‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has stuck, even though knives have replaced guns as the young criminal’s murder weapon of choice.

There’s a modern myth that food miles are bad. But measuring the carbon footprints of food items produces surprising results. We discover, for example, that bringing New Zealand lamb to our table — according to information collated by Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute — can generate fewer emissions than if the Sunday joint originated in Wales, due to higher emissions from UK feed and rearing methods. And it’s not cool to buy roses from Dutch hothouses. We should fly them in from Kenya, where they grow in the sun.

There is probably no company in the world as iconic as General Motors. As the manufacturer of Cadillacs, Buicks and Chevrolets, as well as Opels in Europe and Vauxhalls in Britain, it would be no exaggeration to describe GM as the corporation that perfected 20th-century industrial capitalism. Henry Ford created the first mass-production car 100 years ago but it was GM, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, that completed the package. Easy credit, brand segmentation, mass advertising, conspicuous consumption, built-in obsolescence: the tools of the modern multinational were hammered into shape by Sloan, then deployed to crush all opposition as the first truly global manufacturer.

My hopes for America lie less in Obama- mania, more in Vaud and the Villains Long before I became a journalist I taught myself to absorb the essence of an unfamiliar city by staying alert in the taxi from the airport: Los Angeles offers a particularly vivid first encounter. As the yellow cab barrels out of the precincts of LAX on to an angry avenue called La Brea, images and warnings crowd in. Neon signs in Korean and Spanish tell me that this is one of the planet’s most multi-ethnic conurbations. Half-crazed vagrants haunt the sidewalks, their random possessions piled in shopping trolleys. Radio ads offer a catalogue of modern American neuroses. Behind on your mortgage payments, facing foreclosure? Here’s the number of a friendly lawyer. Expecting the unexpected?