Another country

When being über-cool backfires

Being über-cool can backfire, says Carla Carlisle

NEARLY 20 years ago (November 5, 1998), I wrote a column for these pages inspired by Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy. Will, a smug consumer-aesthete, fills out a magazine questionnaire in search of the ‘cool’ profile of its readers. Will is ‘Ultra Cool’: he’s slept with a woman he hardly knew (5 points), spent more than £300 on a jacket (5 points) and eaten at a restaurant that serves polenta and shaved Parmesan (3 points).

The questionnaire prompted my own cool inventory. Despite a horizon of wheat fields, far from Will’s edgy world, I felt pretty cool. Heck, I owned a restaurant that served polenta with shaved Parmesan (5 points), although my customers preferred potatoes (deduct 3 points.)

Reading it now, Will doesn’t sound so cool. In two decades we have created a digital universe that makes his world seem as quaint as Antiques Roadshow. I wrote that column on an Apricot word processor and faxed it to COUNTRY LIFE. I’m writing this column on an Apple laptop, my fourth Apple computer. I have an Apple iphone (my third phone, my second iphone) and a 12-year-old ipad. All this Apple stuff would have got me lots of cool points when being an Apple person made you a member of the counter-culture.

Now, more people have iphones than toothbrushes and the citizens of the world are spellbound by their small screen. The only element of counter-culture is Apple’s, which cunningly registers its headquarters in low-tax countries (Ireland: corporate tax rate 12.5%) and pays miniscule tax (UK: 19%) in any country where its gargantuan profits are made. But, hey, thanks to Apple and iphones, we have Airbnb!

I stayed in an Airbnb (5 points) in Copenhagen found by my son and daughterin-law. I kept quiet about the half-empty shampoo bottles in the shower, the clean but un-ironed sheets and the pillows that had shared many heads before mine. Instead, I dwelt on how authentic it felt to be in a capital city in a real neighbourhood (5 points). This was two years before Airbnb began to take over city centres, with landlords buying up flats, filling them with IKEA furniture and avoiding those pesky health-and-safety regulations imposed on B&BS and hotels.

London now has 40,000 listings on the site and Airbnb has come a long way from the days of the micro-entrepreneur sharing a flat for the weekend. It’s also deprived the market of valuable property regulated for short-let properties. Like Apple, Airbnb’s profits generated from the UK are not taxed here, but in Ireland, as are their profits from Paris and Amsterdam.

Then there is Uber. I admit I’ve made many Uber journeys with my son who, like most twenty-somethings, has an account. There have been times when, searching for a black cab, I’ve been grateful for him reaching for his iphone and an Uber arriving in minutes. In Copenhagen, we went everywhere by Uber and it felt like magic.

Problem is, it doesn’t feel so cool when you learn that there are now 40,000 Uber drivers licensed in London, clogging the streets there and in villages near Heathrow and Stansted, where they wait for calls from passengers walking into arrivals. Or that each Uber driver is listed as a separate business, which means Uber is not liable to pay VAT and the drivers receive no benefits. Passengers pay fares directly to the driver, who automatically hands over a commission fee that appears in the company’s Dutch accounts. In 2016, Uber’s turnover in the UK was more than £23 million. They paid tax of £411,000.

Shall I go on? I remember thinking that Amazon was a miraculous gift to country folk. I was euphoric as I greedily ordered books and videos at midnight. Then, my favourite mail-order book company, A Common Reader, went out of business. Much-loved bookshops disappeared. A favourite country-- clothing shop shut. You could count the empty shop fronts in market towns—shops that paid rents and rates and employed staff, but couldn’t compete with Amazon. The price we pay for cheap and fast is high indeed, Amazon’s not so much: a £37 million tax bill on sales of £7 billion in 2016.

‘We’re wired to believe that faster and cheaper is wonderful, not that it exploits workers

‘These monsters can’t be put back in the cauldron because we can’t imagine life without them

How do I know all these figures? I Googled them, of course. Good old Google, life raft of the baby boomers with fading memories. Can’t remember which character in Shakespeare says ‘Base is the slave that pays’? Google it! Want to get to Avignon by train? Google it! But don’t Google Google’s tax payments in the UK because it will depress you.

Nobody wants to think that all the cool things that make our lives easier have backfired and have become like Frankenstein’s monster. We’re wired to believe that easier, faster and cheaper is wonderful, not that it exploits workers and erodes the tax base that pays for life-saving healthcare, education, public transport and good roads—things more important than iphones and discount books.

Even when our democratic institutions are threatened (that means you, Facebook) and Twitter in the wrong hands could trigger a war, our outrage is hazy. These monsters can’t be put back in the cauldron because now we can’t imagine life without them. They also can’t live without us, which means we have to match their highly paid lawyers and accountants and make companies pay tax in the country where they make their big bucks. We should regulate them as fiercely as they regulate us.

PS: It’s Pistol in Henry V who says ‘Base is the slave that pays’. Thanks for that, Google, but I don’t think it’s a cool company motto. Deduct 5 points.