Sweet dreams are made of this?

Not for the first time I have found my domestic routine plunged into turmoil by my neighbours. From time to time I am required by my employer to work anti-social hours, meaning I do not get to bed till sun up. It has been many decades since I routinely stumbled into bed at that hour and I still find it difficult to fall asleep at that time of day, even if I have been on the go for 20 hours or more. Given that background you can perhaps understand that I was not overjoyed to be awoken at 10 am by the vibration of the wardrobe. Either the neighbour’s garbage disposal had gone into reverse or their teenage son was taking advantage of his parent’s absence to play his latest ‘musical’ acquisition on the stereo at full throttle. I thought the current thing was to wear expensive headphones (or are they just for showboating in the street?).  Given that I possess a modest collection of vinyl of fairly diverse nature you would think I have a certain empathy with the eclectic  however, there is only so far that taste will permit me to go and sadly that does not extend to listening to what I could only describe as a group of kids clog dancing in custard  while having your head immersed in a fish tank.  Not content with bunking off school for the day I am ‘treated’ to further renditions of the same track, over and over again. Eventually he bores himself into oblivion and disappears off to the shops to see his mates. No sooner has the front door been slammed shut behind him, than the family’s odious pooch starts yapping. I wonder how they would like 300 watts of Stockhausen at 3 am? Probably enjoy it, I’m guessing – only joking, I wouldn’t inflict Stockhausen on my worst enemy.

It dawns on me that there is a thumping pain in my lower jaw. A delicate pawing with my tongue confirms my suspicions that one of my back teeth is playing up. Yup, that nerve is definitely not happy. Did you know that it is possible to estimate a person’s age purely by looking at their teeth. During the 1960’s dentists were paid according to the number of fillings they made, hence I have enough shrapnel in my mouth to make a small saucepan. For over 25 years I suffered the same dentist fervently drilling into each stain or shadow on my teeth as if his life depended on it while bemoaning the fact that dentistry is such a poorly paid profession – then the bugger has the gall to retire at the age of 45! He swans off into the sunset while I am left to ponder his handiwork and await the onset of metal fatigue.  To say my views on dentistry are somewhat tainted is an understatement, after all the film ‘Marathon Man’, with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier, was released in my mid-teens and if you can sit through the dentistry scene without wincing then my guess is that you don’t have a single nerve in your head.

It’s no good I am awake now – eventually my mind turns to the reasons why I am in this position in the first place and why it was so necessary for me to have to work through the night in the first place. My mind has still been trying to get to grips with the fallout from this week’s budget so it was not long before both strands of consciousness inter-twined with mixed consequences. Being one of  ‘the squeezed middle’ in ‘press-speak’ I don’t feel that the budget has done much to help me (has it ever?). Maybe it was the pain of the tooth but for some reason my loathing was particularly directed towards accountants – why couldn’t they go on strike for a change?  I find it hard to take any figures quoted from government sources seriously given that the economists and accountants who have invariable supplied this information have proved so incompetent in the past. Is it any wonder given that this country is so bad at maths. It seems to me  that most of the figures banded about by politicians are guesstimates, statistics which are then selectively manipulated in whichever direction desired to convey them in the best light to support your point of view – this is modern day accountancy which is very different from the number-crunching role that was the original credo for accountants.

In my youth an accountant was someone who in basic terms added up 2 columns of numbers and ensured that they balanced. Most companies had an Accounts Department which consisted of a couple of earnest looking gentlemen in Arran cardigans and Hush Puppies who beavered away in a smoke filled office surrounded by racks of dust covered ledgers. At my first job after leaving school there were 2 such senior accountants with 1 junior accountant, a trainee accountant and an account’s clerk – within 9 months the department had grown to 60 staff and to this day no one has been able to tell me why.

You could always tell when one of them was on the move because a haze of Old Holborn would waft down the corridor. I can still see their fingers stained in equal measures of nicotine and red ink when they used to hand me their paperwork. A very  different proposition from the Armani clad army of today in their £500 designer shoes.

These days the term 'creative accounting' seems to equate to anything that the company believe they can get away with. A term which the old pencil pushers took to mean switching the ledger from portrait to landscape, or at a pinch embossing the year on the front of the ledger is now an art form for misdirecting and concealing funds so complex that even an accomplished magician would find the processes hard to track.

Obviously there were other areas of accountancy besides simple book keeping but in those days things got done. People who ran departments or companies were allowed to do what was required and the accountant tied up the loose ends, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.      

If you wanted to take on a new venture you would go ahead and do it; if you felt you needed more staff you would hire them or if you needed new equipment then you would go ahead and buy it.

Remember the advert of the ‘Bank Manager in the closet’, that was my understanding of their role in life, if I need an accountant I want one in the wardrobe, not one in my face.

These days accountants rule the world, they are no longer number crunchers and hold more sway in the boardroom than many CEOs.  Their involvement in the decision making processes of many companies is quite frightening. How many projects or innovations have been scuppered at the stroke of a red pen?

It would seem that every decision from the 10 year business plan to the choice of coffee stocked in the vending machines has to be signed off by an accountant. The chances are there is some unnamed accountancy spy in your office counting the number of times people fart, while his colleagues investigate whether there is any opportunity to make these tax deductable or pass on the cost to the customer.  The fact that we are still in a global financial crisis is largely due to accountancy ‘oversights’ in the banking sector.

Accountants may understand numbers but few of them have any knowledge of the requirements of the industries they represent, or if they do, they choose to ignore the core principles and focus solely on the process of creating profit for the shareholders.

Companies now employ teams of accountants and lawyers purely to exploit loopholes in the tax system. Is it right that the likes of Starbucks, Google and Amazon should be able to avoid paying tax in certain countries because some smart-arse accountant has found a way to reduce the bills by channelling the figures through countries with a more beneficial tax system?

Accountants everywhere are trying to shave margins off the running cost of their companies, who in turn need to employ more managers to apply these decisions and ensure that targets are met. Life is not all about margins – many companies have already trimmed back their workforce to the bone during the recession yet still the accountants are looking for greater savings. You cannot get blood out of a stone. How many companies are able to provide the same level of service they were 5 years ago? Maybe 4 people could do the work of 5, but are they going to be able to provide the same level of service? Probably not. Maybe skilled workers could be replaced with cheaper, lower skilled staff – can a labourer do the job of a master craftsman? What are the skilled workers expected to do? Employers don’t want to train up new staff, they don’t want to pay for experienced staff – let’s create another ‘squeezed middle’ and see what happens when they become too expensive to employ.

How many opportunities have been passed up because the funding has not been available for investment? How many medical or technical breakthroughs have been missed because the plugs were pulled on the finances? How many jobs have been lost or careers destroyed at the stroke of a pen because it looks neater on the balance sheet? I watched a documentary recently that discussed the number of musicians and entertainers who would never have seen the light of day under present economic pressures. Would the likes of Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones ever been given a recording contract if they were starting out today? Would shows like ‘Les Miserables’ or ‘Cats’ ever been staged? You only have to look at the number and the types of films and TV that are being made today to see who is holding the purse strings.

No one is prepared to take risks any more yet the government keep harping on about ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘competition’ and ‘pioneers’. It is incredibly hard to get any new idea off the ground when it is so difficult to obtain the necessary financial support and it is so easy for predatory companies to step in and buy up a new company as soon as they feel that the competition might be threat to their share of the market. And who is normally the biggest fly in the ointment? The accountant.

The fact that we have so many ‘Science Parks’, ‘Technology Parks’ and ‘Enterprise Parks’ around the country is symptomatic of the lack of invention demonstrated by the land developers in the naming of their cash cows. Most of the Science Parks I have visited consist of a collection of empty offices, a few call centres, a double glazing company and a tyre / exhaust replacement centre, while the most enterprising thing you will find on many an Enterprise Park is a snack van selling venison and peanut butter burgers.

In this country we have teachers, doctors, nurses, and many other skilled staff leaving their professions because they can no longer tolerate the financial pressures being forced upon them. Many industries report difficulties in recruiting and retaining qualified staff, yet few employers are willing to train staff or pay for these skills. It is essential for us to maintain these skills for the future if the economy is to grow otherwise the work will disappear to other countries who have invested in the development of these skills  and we will be left with a nation of baristas, part time shop staff and call centre workers.

The problems back in 2008 should have been a wake up call for everyone but the only thing that seems to have changed is that those largely responsible for the financial turmoil through their lust for profit have learned nothing and are now even more determined to recover their losses through even greater greed.

And after all that you expect me to get out of bed? To hell with it, a couple of Nurofen for my tooth and I’ll take my chances with the neighbour’s ‘backed up disposal unit’.

Sweet dreams.