HP sauce and why globalisation stinks

The English factory making HP sauce is closing. This is bad. It's a disaster.

Firstly, cards on the table, HP sauce is quite a passion of mine. It is the respected granddaddy of the condiment family. I imagine HP sitting in the corner, on his rocking chair, with the young pretenders such as tabasco, ketchup, barbecue sauce, excitedly crowding around at his feet begging him to tell them once more about that time he took a Hun trench single-handedly after all his mates were slaughtered in no man’s land.

He may be advancing in years, but you just know that HP could still handle himself if some punks wanted to make some trouble on the last train home. The message is clear to all who look upon his sleek frame and majestic label: don’t mess, unless you want your candy-ass handed to you on a silver platter.

Imagine my delight when I came to Canada and found HP is venerated as highly here as in its homeland. In North America though, they use it as a 'steak sauce' which is fine, but really HP is at its best on sausages and bacon.

Anyway, this is not about HP per se. It is a parable of modern economics. It’s that thing called globalisation again. The G-word has for the last decade or so been an excuse dolled-out by any government (the real G-word) who wishes to disguise its incompetence, gutlessness, lack of ideas, or, sometimes, plain old corruption. Exactly when did our elected leaders collectively decide to just throw-up their hands and chorus “sorry, not our fault…it’s globalisation ya know”?

Aside from physical laws, mankind can create his own world. Politics and Economics are known as social sciences for a reason. Globalisation is not a law of nature. After listening to zealots like Thomas Friedman, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is not only an inevitability, it’s actually ordained by the gods. In his next book, I wouldn’t be surprised if Friedman showed us some ancient carvings from a Mayan temple showing what looks suspiciously like a graph of foreign direct investment in Thailand for the years 1996-2006.

Globalisation is not a process. It is a policy. That means it can be reversed, and any moderately powerful state could happily refrain from joining in the fun and go about its own business merrily, or make its own little club of like-minded peeps. In my silly little brain, the old concept of sovereignty actually means something. Combined with democracy, it means that we can elect and dismiss the people who make our laws and reign over our realm. Pah! Surely this is hopelessly naïve you shout (I heard it), globalisation is here to stay and we must learn to live with it. I disagree. Never ever ever ever trust anyone – especially a politician or, worse, an economist – who says anything is inevitable.

Just as politicians can do something about it, it’s up to us to change as well. Some big multinational just bought-out your favourite local brewery, closed it down, and moved production elsewhere? Simple – never drink that beer or any other from that company ever again.

If capitalism works, then in response to rampant globalisation, we should surely see small, local businesses filling the gap in consumer preferences. But the fear of many (and the hope of many too) is that our brand of capitalism doesn’t work at all. Consumers don’t choose, they are told what they like. How else can you explain the popularity of (to carry-on the beer metaphor) something like Budweiser?

Finally, for those yet to be convinced of my side of the argument consider the old Churchill quote. To paraphrase the drugged-up old manic depressive, couldn’t our embracing of global capitalism be likened to feeding the alligator in the hope it will eat us last?

Let me be clearer. Remember the old missive about 'first they came' for so-and-so and when they came for me no one was left to speak up? Well, they already came for the coal-miners, the steel-workers, the workers in the myriad little factories making simple products (like HP sauce), and even the workers in the big factories making important modern industrial stuff like cars, trucks and ships.

So what will happen when they come for the lawyers, the accountants, the software engineers, the consultants, or the creative media types? When we can get our taxes done in Bangalore for $30 rather $300, or have a lawyer in Shanghai prepare the legal side of our property purchase for $100 rather than a $1000? It’s already happening; see here.

We were sold the idea that to thrive we should just dump smelly, lumpen concepts such as making things, and embrace an economy where we sell each other pensions and really expensive coffee. But when the ‘developing’ world starts getting seriously into services, after taking all the manufacturing, what do we do next? Keep selling the same piece of land to each other for the thousandth time? Or maybe create another ‘junk bond’ style financial instrument to pretend that we’re doing something? How about just dispensing sage advice to those up and coming Chinese and Indian chaps, surely they would pay handsomely for that? Or…er…we could go fishing…

It’s fine for the rich like Friedman to chatter on about how exciting this shiny new world is, because they don’t live in it (by the way, I wonder what first attracted Friedman to his billionaire wife?). Just like the suburban middle classes who just looooove coming into the city to eat at that delightful ‘ethnic’ restaurant, and chat about how woooonderful multiculturalism is, the real consequences of all this are borne by the poor and unrepresented.

So, farewell HP. Mark my words, once we jump onto that slippery slope, there’s no turning back. Next time it might be something you care about...like your job...