Why does Sir James Dyson want to stop people working from home? - David Behrens

I’ve just attempted to hoover the kitchen with one. After several minutes of pushing a few biscuit crumbs across the floor I pressed the button for extra suction and the battery ran out. The wretched thing is as useless as Cameron was at being Prime Minister.

So its inventor is almost the last person I’d turn to for life advice. But there is no stopping Sir James from doling it out.

First he pushed for us to leave Europe; now he wants to stop us working from home and has pronounced the Government’s plans to extend employee rights in that direction as “economically illiterate and staggeringly self-defeating”.

This is rich coming from a boss who forced 100 of his own staff to stay at home permanently four years ago by relocating their jobs to India and the Czech Republic, and whose products are now made in Singapore and Malaysia – almost anywhere but the UK.

With a fortune of some £23bn, Sir James is the second wealthiest person in the country, so it’s probably safe to assume his lifestyle is different to yours and mine. He is certainly detached from the reality facing the rest of us.

The truth is that in Britain this winter, working from home where at all possible is the only practical way of working at all. You can’t commute by train because they’re on strike; you can’t get the bus because your local service has probably been withdrawn; and you can’t drive because the roads are gridlocked and iced over. What other option is there but to sit and shiver in a house you can’t afford to heat?

And if the nub of your job is just to conduct Zoom calls with a factory foreman in Malaysia, you might as well be in your own spare room as in a cubicle on a warehouse floor with all the Christmas atmosphere of a factory turkey farm.

Yet on a theoretical level, Dyson has a point. Workers are more productive if they can interact with each other in a pleasant environment without cats and children running amok. It’s also more conducive to the time of year – you can’t have an office party in your own kitchen, especially if you only have a Dyson Stick to clean up the crumbs.

It is the invasive nature of Government that has so wound up Sir James. In no other country, he says, has he experienced such overreach by politicians telling him how to organise his business – certainly not at a time of such entrenched recession.

I don’t know if he’s noticed that the government in China, where he also operates, is not exactly hands-off in telling its citizens where to work – or indeed where to live and what to think – but among the ostensibly democratic nations Britain is more prescriptive than most and has been getting more so.

It was a trend started by New Labour at a time when presentation was considered more important than policy; when Tony Blair wanted to “own” everything about the country’s culture that people seemed to like. When he noticed that they liked pop music he appropriated the phrase Cool Britannia from the 1960s and tried to climb aboard the bandwagon of Blur and Oasis in the hope that some of the fan worship would rub off on him.

Successive Prime Ministers have continued to pursue nanny-like policies on the basis of popularity rather than practicality, and the last Prime Minister but one made it an art form.

As for the current incumbent, we don’t really know what Rishi Sunak likes; just that he wants us to think he likes the same things as we do. We enjoy working from home so he’s committed himself to enshrining our right to do so, until he changes his mind. Anything goes, so long as it makes him look good.

Yet at the same time, the more difficult political decisions are being shrugged off. The Transport Secretary is saying it’s up to the unions to improve train services in Yorkshire. The Health Secretary stands accused of refusing to discuss nurses’ pay. It’s as if the Cabinet is choosing which battles it wants to fight and picking only the easy ones.

The government of Margaret Thatcher was far more divisive, especially when it came to industrial relations, but at least she wasn’t afraid to bang heads together – even at the cost of her own popularity. She understood that what people really liked was seeing results.

As we enter a winter of discontent like the one that swept her to power, that kind of agitation is woefully absent, except from a lone billionaire who wants to take away one of the few crumbs of comfort we have left. It won’t be the only crumb a Dyson fails to get rid of this Christmas.