Uber

There is much to be faulted in Uber, which has branched out from delivering people into delivering meals, under the unappetising name UberEats. But even I, someone who can rarely bring herself to write the word ‘sharing’, as in economy, without inverted commas, am prepared to give credit where credit is due. Uber has made private door-to-door transport accessible to far more people than before. It has thus done a lot of people a favour and hugely expanded the market, harnessing new technology to do so. It has provided jobs for people who did not have them, or who prefer to work in the semi-autonomous Uber way.

You know the old designation NSIT — Not Safe in Taxis? Well, we need a new one: TSIU — Too Safe in Ubers. I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of Uber, whether the gig economy puts more money in the pocket of the taxi driver from Wembley or benefits only the San Francisco app-ocracy. I don’t have strong feelings about Ubers vs black cabs and whether the former are undercutting the latter, doing them out of their Knowledge and their livelihoods. My objections to Uber are not economic or ethical, they are romantic. Uber has killed off the back-of-the-taxi clinch. It used to be that, after a date, a party, a play, a chap could prove his mettle by striding to the kerb, raising his arm and shouting ‘Taxi!’ in a firm, strong baritone.

The new series of The Missing is surely the gloomiest television of the year. But it has nothing on the endless saga of RBS, which seems to use the same disturbing time-shift device: whenever there’s a horrible new plot twist, you have to spot whether we’re in 2008, 2011 or today. The crippled bank, still 73 per cent state-owned, has lost £2.5 billion in the first three quarters of this year, having just paid out another £425 million in ‘litigation and conduct’ costs chiefly relating to mortgage-backed securities hanky-panky in the US. Since its bailout eight years ago, it has lost considerably more than the £46 billion of taxpayers’ money that was pumped into it, and has never reported a full-year profit.

So the GMB and the two Uber drivers who thought they ought to receive holiday pay and be guaranteed the national living wage have won their case. An employment tribunal has ruled that Uber was wrong to classify them as self-employed as their contracts placed too much demand on them to work at particular times – a condition which indicates employment rather than self-employment. What the other 40,000 Uber drivers think of the case is not clear. On the one hand, having status as employees would offer them a guaranteed £7.20 an hour and paid holidays. On the other hand, it would mean paying higher National Insurance contributions and less flexibility to work when they want to. It would make it much more difficult for them to combine driving a cab with doing other work.

Showered and shaved and wearing a stiff new Paul Smith candy-stripe shirt, I took an Uber to the party. I love London and it was grand to be back and to be driven through the sunny streets by Yusef, one of the many new arrivals adding vibrancy, energy and diversity to our great city. Diversity is strength! Diversity is our greatest strength! (I used to believe that unity is strength, but I have lately recanted of this foolish and evil idea.) ‘Will you be voting in or out, Yusef?’ I said in a comradely manner, as one perplexed citizen to another. ‘I think stay in, sir,’ he said. ‘Better for the economy.’ ‘What economy?’ I said. ‘The global economy is a parasitic Ponzi scheme and the EU is already hollowed out.

Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly designed to do pretty well. Secondly, it has some quality that you might call ‘limbic appeal’. It delights or soothes our unconscious mind in ways which defy objective measurement. Much as it delusionally believes that it runs the show, the power granted to conscious reasoning within the brain is that given to a slightly colour-blind, utilitarian man when he buys a sofa with his wife. The man may have his own preferences, but he has a minimal role in the selection, involving as it does many complex factors that defy male comprehension (my wife has names for colours that seem not to exist on the visible spectrum).

I used to enjoy ‘giving feedback’ in the glory years when nobody wanted it. Now, upon completing a routine transaction, the customer is bombarded with breathless demands for response. The neurotic corporate catchphrase is ‘How was it for you?’ The world is now in feedback frenzy. Companies endlessly prod us for our views so they can brandish positive statistics at each other — or sack somebody. A new app, called Impraise, even invites workers to evaluate their own colleagues anonymously. You could spend your whole day just rating every interaction as something between poor and excellent. From Uber drivers to call-centre workers, everybody’s chasing a tick of recorded acclaim.

McDonald’s got rid of cutlery. Uber does not allow you to pre-book taxis. Amazon began by selling only books. Conventional logic would suggest that successful innovations are best when they allow you to do lots of things. Actually, if you want your innovation to change behaviour, it is often best to launch an innovation which does only one thing. It is much easier to adopt a new technology if its function is unambiguous. The device solves one simple problem, and solves it very well. If X then Y. I have never had much luck with multi-purpose kitchen devices. Although theoretically they have a plethora of different uses, their application is so vague that you end up not using them at all. You may have a microwave which also contains a grill function. Have you used it more than twice?

Actress Frances Barber has complained about her taxi driver after a night out in town, tweeting: https://twitter.com/francesbarber13/status/668598758473654272 The man had allegedly told her she was ‘disgustingly dressed’ and that ‘women should not be out at night’. This was after she had remarked about the weather being cold. That’s the problem with liberalising the taxi market to let any random person drive you around – it reduces the level of trust. As Rory Sutherland explained in this magazine a couple of years ago, trust is extremely important to capitalism and that’s why having hurdles such as the Knowledge is necessary: ‘Reciprocation, reputation and pre-commitment are the three big mechanisms which add to trust.

This podcast was sponsored by King and Wood Mallesons. Is technological change a good thing for the British economy? In this View from 22 special podcast, The Spectator's Fraser Nelson discusses the disruptive impact of new technologies with Julian David, CEO of Tech UK, Andrew Pinnington, CEO of Hailo and Rob Day, a partner at King and Wood Mallesons. What does digital innovation look like and what can businesses do, if anything, to prepare for it? How is the British economy coping with the speed of technological changes through new innovations like Uber and Airbnb? Which industries have struggled the most to cope with new innovations? And are big or small businesses most likely to suffer from disruption?

Power to the smartphones! The High Court has ruled in favour of Uber this morning after Transport for London and the taxi lobby asked it to clarify whether smartphones in private hire vehicles counted as taximeters.