Britannia Unhinged
Paul McNamara is an investment director at GAM Investments
There’s a fellow called Telfer who makes more pork pies than anybody else in the bloody world, old boy. So the Americans went and asked him how he did it — incentive schemes, graduated bonuses, productivity scales, vacation benefits, you know the kind of thing. “No,” he kept saying, “no, I never do anything like that, no, I just let ‘em turn the bloody things out as best they can. Oh, now I come to think of it, there is just one thing — every so often I goes down to the yard and I bawls, ‘Faster, you fuckers!’”
Terry-Thomas, as quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
As far as the authors of Britannia Unchained are concerned, it appears that this is not so much an amusing anecdote as a prescription for what ails Britain.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Paul McNamara
