5 November 2020
View from the Cotswolds
Money money money: It can’t buy you love
By Paul Branch
And then there were four…. with the passing of Nobby Stiles, very few now remain of England’s winning team from the 1966 World Cup, a sad reflection on both the passage of time and our failure to have even come close in the last 50 years to repeating that feat. Nobby made less than 30 appearances for England, scoring only once, but his ability to snuff out the opposition’s best players on the field and his little dance of sheer delight at winning the cup after extra time will stay long in the memory.
He made sure in the semi-final against Portugal that the dreaded Eusebio hardly got a kick … other than the ones inflicted on him by the diminutive Stiles. In 1968 he did the same man-marking job on Eusebio in the final of the European Cup, for Man United against Benfica. Some admirers say Nobby was not a dirty player, and I agree that his style of defending was not in the same league as say the Argentinians or Italians of that era – they of course, being swarthy foreigners, tended to commit fouls of a more underhand nature, when the referee wasn’t looking (shame that VAR wasn’t around then), whereas with Nobby there was nothing sly about his premeditated onslaughts, which you could see coming well in advance but nevertheless couldn’t be avoided. He was still greatly loved and fully deserved his status of national treasure: the midget Destroyer alongside the imperious creative cruiser that was Bobby Moore. I pity those of you who were not fortunate enough to have been around to enjoy his talents in person.
Despite a stellar football career, Nobby had to sell his winners’ medals from league championships and the two international finals. Not so financially disadvantaged and from a slightly later sporting era, we lost another icon in JJ Williams, part of the all-conquering Wales rugby XV of the 1970s and the Lions touring side that white-washed South Africa in three tests, much to the delight of the apartheid-stricken section of the spectators. After his retirement from rugby, JJ invested in an industrial paint company and died very comfortably off. To round off this week’s obituaries, Sean Connery has also died after a long and highly successful film career, and there was absolutely no need for him to sell his Oscar in order to make ends meet.
We arrive into this world penniless, and we leave it in the same pecuniary state with no means to pay the return fare. During the time available to us in between we have opportunities to accumulate wealth in many different forms. Money is an obvious one which seems to count for a lot in today’s preferred way of determining success. Then there are other currencies by which to assess the attainment of success in this life: the respect of others for how you have comported yourself along the way; your achievements in helping fellow travellers – the needy, the sick, the disadvantaged; the love you have inspired in others. Basically it all comes down to how you have made use of the talents you were born with and honed throughout your life, for the benefit of others, and if you are financially astute and have managed to accumulate shedloads of money then one of the criteria for success may indeed be how you use that wealth.
It is a given that the incredibly wealthy among us do not tend to inspire much in the way of love or compassion – this may be sheer envy, or it may be regret at what might have been. The accumulation of great wealth, if not inherited, takes some doing in terms of admirable qualities such as creativity, ingenuity, hard work, plus a modicum of luck. Our reaction to this form of success also depends on how the money was earned – illegalities usually generate opprobrium, especially if it involves drugs or trafficking, but Russian oligarchs aren’t up there either in our list of people to be admired, similarly those who ship the money out to tax havens. In the UK we seem to attract many of these, indeed some might say we encourage them by our attitudes, our standards, our laws and whether we enforce them. It’s said there is roughly £30 trillion (that’s probably got twelve zeros) nestling off-shore doing nothing. Taxing that little lot would bankroll Rishi Sunak’s attempts to solve the COVID hole in our finances many times over, rather than saddling our grandchildren with it.
The more you have the more you want, so it’s said. Yes it’s true that their wealth helps employ people in the industries of luxury goods and services where the wealthy make purchases, but offsetting that is the resultant cost to communities. In London in particular, houses of the obscenely rich have been extended in many directions, even down, in the quest for more space; green spaces and public facilities such as libraries have been sacrificed to satisfy the needs of land developers (but please, no affordable housing to spoil the view or offend the senses); and the manner in which such plans have been sanctioned by some ministers looks doubtful to say the least.
Here in the Cotswolds too we are blessed by the presence of the great and the wealthy. We have a builder/developer (personal wealth £1 billion allegedly) of huge import recently elevated to the realms of knighthood “for services to land development”…. what on earth does that mean, apart from taking the opportunity to make huge amounts of money, some of which was donated to the Conservative party? We also have an internationally renowned manufacturer of farming and building machinery (personal wealth over £4 billion) with a his’n’hers fleet of helicopters which gets the family around in some comfort, and unsurprisingly here again we see another big Tory donor. But do they really need all that money, even for an exceptionally rainy day? How much better might a good slug of it have been spent on retaining staff during lockdown rather than relying on the state-sponsored furlough scheme, on helping to avoid the need for food banks and other handouts in our otherwise rich community, or by investing their own time and influence in support of others less fortunate? And how much more would that garner real respect, appreciation and affection…. like Marcus Rashford for example?
“What are we going to do about the rich” sing The Pet Shop Boys. ABBA remind us it’s a rich man’s world. The Beatles are clear that money can’t buy you love. Nobby Stiles sold his precious medals to help his family. There’s enough of the stuff sloshing about to keep everyone happy and feed the world – so maybe all we really need is a bit more love, to help make the world go round.
