Paddy Briggs is a British author and former Shell executive who transitioned into writing and journalism after a 40-year career in the oil industry. Educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and holding a degree in Business Studies, he has authored several books, including biographies and analyses of social and political issues.

Career and Writing

Briggs spent 37 years at Shell, where he led the company’s global service station rebranding initiative, described as “the world’s largest re-imaging programme” . In 2010, he was elected as a member-nominated trustee of the Shell Contributory Pension Fund, one of Britain’s largest pension schemes. This role sparked his interest in pensions, leading him to write monthly articles for the specialist publication Pensions Age for six years .

His published works include:

John Shepherd: The Loyal Cavalier (2009): A biography of the West Indies and Kent cricketer. Jumeira Jane (2001): A collection of comic verse published in Dubai. The Tragedy of Corrib (2011): An analysis of the controversial natural gas project in County Mayo, Ireland, focusing on the management and community relations aspects . Look Where You’re Going (2018): A biography of Alan Pickering, a blind pension expert and racehorse owner, highlighting his contributions to occupational pensions and his personal achievements .

Briggs also contributes to political commentary, having written articles for Byline Times on topics such as Brexit and the Conservative Party .

For more information on his work, you can visit his personal blog: Paddy’s Blogs in a Crazy World.

Mindful of Margaret Thatcher’s belief that “…if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” I do think Mrs Badenoch’s problems are personal. She is a very inexperienced politician who hasn’t learned the dark arts, and she doesn’t seem to realise it.

Thatcher had a voice coach to modify her rather phoney accent which sounded like she’d tried hard to leave Grantham, and overcompensated. Badenoch’s way of speaking is similarly odd. She has described herself as “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant” though more recently she has played down her solidly Nigerian background – certainly her way of speaking shows no sign of it.

Badenoch’s achievements are considerable and admirable but they are entirely personal and driven, not political. Her views are off the shelf Centre-Right (more Right than Centre) and I cannot recall that she’s ever said anything original or interesting.

As she herself acknowledges Badenoch’s identity is unconventional for a British politician (as was that of her predecessor). But unlike Sunak she seems unable to persuade that in a multicultural society coming from left field can be turned into an advantage. She is also, in public anyway, utterly humourless. When the Prime Minister is not a barrel of laughs it’s a shame her manner is full of snide not sparkle.

I saw the recent TV programme about the rebuilding of Notre Dame after the horrendous fire. The attention to detail was extraordinary. They attempted, and seemingly succeeded, to exactly replace everything destroyed with a precise replica. It was an astonishing achievement technically but also a defiant one emotionally.

I remember the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral and feeling an overwhelming sense of failure. The Luftwaffe had won, the building they burned to the ground was gone forever except for a few memorial bits left. The new Cathedral bore no resemblance to its predecessor. Like it or not it wasn’t a confident “We will not be beaten” statement. It was “You won”.

Making a judgement about what to preserve/replace and what to demolish is subjective. Fortunately we didn’t have to make it with St Paul’s Cathedral which miraculously survived the Blitz. Would we have rebuilt it stone for stone? Coventry suggests perhaps not.

We are all guardians of the past and creators of the future, with architecture especially but also in a myriad of the daily decisions we make. We cannot learn from the past if we destroy it and we cannot influence the future if we forget that in part we are responsible for how it evolves in the decisions we make today.

“My vision of Britain in decades to come is of a proud, independent, prosperous country, able to work with friends and partners across the world from a position of mutual strength.” Keir Starmer

Sir Keir has effectively here defined the rationale of the European Union. The people who bleated on about “Sovereignty” are the same people who now are running “Reform” or voting for it. They were wrong then and they’re wrong now. Countries are interdependent and that has to be formally recognised and membership of the EU is the way to do it.

Similarly Starmer’s waving of the red flag at “Immigration” without even acknowledging in passing the value that the Windrush generation, and countless others, have brought to our shores.

Starmer’s challenge is to counter Reform not by imitating them but by eloquently explaining why this toxic bunch of unprincipled and prejudiced carpetbaggers is morally, practically and historically wrong for Britain. We are not Trumpland. He should say so.

My wife and I recently visited Northern Cyprus for a week’s holiday. This blog summarises what we saw and our conclusions.

Background

Northern Cyprus or to give it its preferred name The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus  is a long standing oddity among nation states. Mainly because the rest of the world, Turkey aside, doesn’t recognise it as a state at all. Technically Cyprus is not divided and the whole island is part of the Republic of Cyprus a legitimate national entity, member of the United Nations and of the European Union. In reality, however, the island is divided between the Turkish north and the much larger Greek south.

Cyprus was a united entity effectively as a British Colony for eighty years but rumbling below the surface in those times were two intractable problems. Many Greek  Cypriots wanted “Enosis” – to be united with what they saw as their mother country Greece. Understandably this was not something the Turkish Cypriots wanted one little bit! And that was the other problem. Whilst Greeks and Turks lived together mostly amicably they were different culturally, linguistically and in religion. Whilst the Turks certainly didn’t want to be governed from Athens they weren’t that keen on post colonial independence dominated by Greek Cypriots either.

It was the “Enosis” threat that materialised first in the early 1950s. The British did not handle the armed uprising by EOKA well and the heavy-handed response to what was seen, not unreasonably, as terrorism was counter productive. It was a messy process of withdrawal from Empire. Not the only one of course.

Post colonial Cyprus

A post colonial Cypriot Republic was declared in 1960. This was unstable. Enosis hadn’t disappeared and the Turks concern about Greek domination was justified . The coup in 1967 which brought the “Colonels” to power in Athens escalated the Greek demands for Enosis both in Athens and on the island. 

On 15 July 1974, the Greek military junta carried out a coup d’état in Cyprus, to unite the island with Greece. This coup ousted president Makarios III. In response to the coup, five days later, on 20 July 1974, the Turkish army invaded the island. However the rationale for this invasion was rejected by the United Nations and the international community, and that rejection remains in force today.

The Republic of Cyprus has de jure sovereignty over the entire island. However, the Republic of Cyprus is de facto partitioned into two main parts: the area under the effective control of the Republic, in the south and west and comprising about 59% of the island’s area, and the north, administered by the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, covering about 36% of the island’s area. The international community considers the northern part of the island to be territory of the Republic of Cyprus occupied by Turkish forces. The occupation is viewed as illegal under international law  – that is it amounts to illegal occupation of EU territory since Cyprus became a member of the European Union in 2004. 

Northern Cyprus today

Despite its pariah status as an illegal entity Northern Cyprus has a viable and peaceful existence as a sort of disconnected province of Turkey. At the end of our recent holiday President Erdogan of Turkey visited the island and reaffirmed Turkey’s commitment to northern Cyprus. He declared Turkey and Turkish Cypriots the “rightful owners” of the region and vowed their presence would persist “for centuries.”

Nicosia is now one of the few divided capital cities in the world. Comparisons can be made, of course, with the once divided Berlin and the division of Germany which endured for over forty years after World War II. My impression, albeit after a very brief visit, is that Cyprus is different. Although Germany was divided ultimately the German people, despite political division, remained culturally one nation. Post 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, reunification progressed remarkably smoothly. 

The divide in Cyprus is different. There is not a homogeneous Cypriot culture – Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are different. The languages and the religions of the Turks and the Greeks are not the same! This does not mean they can’t get on of course. Lawrence Durrell in his masterly “Bitter Lemons” described how in Kyrenia and his village of Belapais there was an amused and peaceful accommodation between Greek and Turk. But my impression is that that spirit of tolerance has largely disappeared. That does not anticipate conflict, just that the logic for a united Cyprus is idealistic, but impractical.

The movement of Turkish Cypriots north and Greek Cypriots south after 1974 reaffirmed the division of the island. And reaffirmed that the island is practically and culturally divided. The forces for separation are much stronger than the forces for unification. A united federal Cyprus looks like a pipe dream. 

The North struggles to an extent because it is not recognised internationally. This harms its economy and the freedom of its people. But tourism and, remarkably, the presence of many tertiary education establishments (which attract students from around the world) do make the “region” viable – it’s certainly a fascinating and historic place to visit. 

The logical solution is to negotiate a settlement that recognises the sovereignty of Northern Cyprus, not as a province of Turkey but with close links to it. On the island there would be freedom of movement across the territory and, no doubt, many shared entities like airports and infrastructure. But neither community would rule the other. That would require both structure and goodwill. Possible ? I really don’t know! 

Defined benefit (DB) (also known as final salary) pension schemes, which provide a guaranteed, inflation-linked income for life that’s linked to your salary and length of service, used to be the norm in the private sector. They were so expensive to run that they have all but disappeared — and so have the generous employer contributions that went with them.” Joanna Noble on The Times today

The best way to see a DB scheme was that it was deferred salary. Employees forwent some of their income in order to build pension rights for the future. They were not especially “expensive to run” and those costs were paid for not by the employer anyway, but out of the Assets of the ring-fenced Pension Fund.

The switch to Defined Contribution (DC) was primarily driven by Employers’ wish to reduce their funding of pensions. In fact the quantum of those contributions was a relatively modest cost burden for a well run and profitable company. And ironically, as companies moved away from proper pension funding for all, they started paying their directors and senior executives astronomically higher remuneration. One law for the rich…!

Most auto-enrolment is linked to a DC scheme and in truth these vehicles are not pension schemes at all. They are savings schemes which for the retiree offer benefits which are orders of magnitude less beneficial than the DB scheme they replaced. Private Sector employees could not organise to fight the decline of DB. Unlike in the Public Sector where a form of DB is still the norm thanks to the Unions!

The decline of decent retirement pensions in the private sector is one of the scandals of modern times and successive governments did nothing to stop it. Today’s Private Sector employees can work for forty years or more with no guarantees as to what their DC scheme will give them. That will depend on the buoyancy of the scheme’s investments on the date of their retirement.

COVID-19 was unprecedented and for a while we all floundered. But private enterprise in the form of the huge pharmaceutical corporations backed by anxious governments and NGOs and academia won the battle both with preventative enforced measures and with vaccine development. Not, of course, without tragic deaths everywhere along the way. Transnational cooperation was key.

Where COVID was a grotesque and avoidable accident Donald-25 resulted from enough American voters in a flawed electoral system falling for the second time for an insane Snake Oil salesman. It defies belief. And the checks and balances supposedly present in the US Constitution have catastrophically failed.

Once again transnational cooperation is essential. The West (the non American part of it) should cooperate solidly with China to tackle a common economic enemy. This will require a “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” imperative not dissimilar to that of Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin. Messy and uncomfortable for sure, but essential.

The Trans issue got out of hand didn’t it? I remember meeting Jan Morris in Hong Kong back in the late 1980s. She signed her book for me and many others. The fact that she had needed to present herself as a woman after decades of being a man seemed uncontroversial and unremarkable. But biologically (and despite surgery) she remained male. Her biology wasn’t changed because it couldn’t be, though physically and psychologically she presented as a woman, and was accepted as one.

I’m not suggesting Ms Morris as a model just saying that if we accept the shorthand that sex and gender are different things, as I’m sure she did, with goodwill such changes can be accommodated and become unremarkable. But the goodwill has to be on both sides of the debate.

For the population at large we should unquestionably accept that a tiny minority of people is uncomfortable with the gender assigned to them at birth and decide to present themselves as of the opposite gender – i.e. they become “trans”. But these people do not change their biological sex any more than Jan Morris did. This places an obligation on them to accept that they are different. And to behave, especially in public, in a sensitive way. It’s not hard to define what that means is it ?

To “Make America Great Again” , a four word slogan clearly based on formulaic Advertising catch lines, includes within it some fundamental assumptions which are presumably taken for granted by Trump supporters who wear the caps, but are surprisingly unchallenged by his opponents.

The first is the action verb “Make”. It’s a transitive verb which Webster defines as “to bring into being by forming, shaping, or altering material. It is aspirational but it’s unclear whether it’s instructional or a promise. If the former Trump is telling Americans what to do. If it’s a promise Trump is saying he can be relied upon to help them do it. It’s probably a bit of both. Almost, but not quite, a call to work together for change.

The reason it’s ambivalent is the central dilemma of Trump’s personality. He’s no team player! In this he resembles at the extreme Vladimir Putin and the totalitarian European dictators of the Twentieth century. But also determined and often single-minded democrats like Margaret Thatcher. And, of course , the democrats in name only of today like Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban.

This confusion of responsibility lies at the heart of Trump’s persona. If he wants Americans to “make” change – to “bring it into being” – he has to say more than that it’s a good idea. He has to explain what change means and how it can be done. This he singularly fails to do. And this is in no small way because he cannot define what “Great” actually means.

“Great” is a shorthand of perfectionist status, but if it’s to be more than a subjective gut feel it needs quantification. Here the view from outside is crucial. We are truly what we are perceived to be by others. So America cannot by this criterion be “Great” just because (say) the majority of Americans think it is. Foreigners need to think so as well!

And “greatness” itself is problematic. There are many areas in which a nation can be “great”, and they are sometimes contradictory. By any measure China is economically great. But in another judgment area, human rights, they certainly are not.

For America it’s like a seesaw. Tariffs, for example, may help push up the balance of trade but simultaneously also increase inflation – let alone damage international relations and America’s standing in the world. Collateral damage if you like.

Then there is the fourth word “Again “. This is unequivocal – America was once “Great”, no longer is and we must return to the time of greatness. But when was America great ? What are the judgment criteria? Again Trump offers no explanation. He may be nostalgically looking back to the 1950s when superficially the country was getting richer and consolidating its preeminence in the world. There is a clear racial and wealth undertone here. The American dream was to benefit from the consumer explosion . “The Affluent Society” as JK Galbraith called it in 1958. But that was a “WASP” (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) cohort which excluded those who couldn’t tick all those demographic boxes.

But 2025 is not 1958, and there is no going back. America is far more diverse. The middle class is strong and comfortable and in some cases aspires to move up to very wealthy indeed segment. But in the boondocks it’s different. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, and yet 37.9 million (11.5%) of its residents live in poverty. And racial divisions very much remain. Overt discrimination has mostly gone – Rosa Parks made her bus protest in 1955, and Martin Luther King led his march on Washington in 1963. But more recent events which led to the “Black Lives Matter” movement show that a divide remains. And Healthcare, despite improvements under Obama, is the ultimate divider. To get acceptable healthcare you need insurance and that costs roughly $12,000 per year on average. Half of US workers earn less than $50,000 so in the order of 25% or more of their income goes in healthcare. If they insure at all.

Trump’s White House is overwhelmingly white, male and rich. To them there can be little understanding of the needs of the average American and none at all of the substantial underclass. American society is very stratified. In the MAGA cult there is no understanding of poverty – in the circles they move in and the places they live in they don’t see it.

The European Welfare State model is scorned by Trump’s advisors – Stephen Moore his economic advisor has said  “I’ve always said that Britain has to decide — do you want to go towards the European socialist model or do you want to go towards the US free market?” That Europe is “Socialist” will come as a surprise to most Europeans! That we all live in countries where nobody goes bankrupt if they need a cancer operation and that we generally look after those in need is a source of pride, but we are essentially neoliberal mixed economies not socialist ones.

Moore’s comment is revealing in that it is ignorant as well as elitist. But that applies to Trump and the rest of his team as well. The Tariff debacle could have been avoided if proper consultations had taken place. The great American colleges like Yale or Harvard are well stuffed with clever economists in the Berkeley tradition of Galbraith. I’m sure they modelled what Trump was doing and saw the disaster ahead.

MAGA is about the need for change and that should unite its critics and supporters alike. Bernie Sanders, the nearest American politics gets to genuine Socialism, has said “In 1863, at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln dreamed of a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ In 2024, in Mar-a-Lago, Trump is planning a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class and for the billionaire class,” 

So yes America needs change but Musk and his other billionaire friends can surely look after themselves. The nearly 40 million Americans living in poverty and the 25 million without any health insurance are rather more deserving of politicians’ attention. Address that and you really could “Make America Great”.

When I was gainfully employed by a nasty big oil company we had lots of smart people and even more smart consultants who analysed things. And economists (Vince Cable was one of them; very good. William Hague another, likewise. Oh and Liz Truss – can’t win ‘em all). My oblique point is that if the high priced help needed advice there was no shortage of it. Despite this we didn’t always get it right but in general we weren’t too arrogant to ask for help when we needed it. Happy days.

My point, of course, is that if the President across the Pond needed advice on (say) tariffs there’d be a long queue of smart people from Harvard, or Yale or Princeton to offer it. They might just have told him that his Tariff plan dreamed up with (who? Elon Musk) had its potential downsides.

But (and it’s a big one) in the land of the Orange charmer it’s a bit pansy to ask for advice. And you don’t need to anyway because you didn’t get where you are today without knowing everything. Ask Dizzy Lizzie.