Regular readers will know of my loathing of politicians’ slang – all that vision, drawing lines, talking tough, hard working families and so forth.  My current bête noire is ‘holding to account’.  You may ask why – shouldn’t we expect those who have important tasks to do for us be asked to justify their performance ? There follows a rant which I reserve the right not to defend when in a more sober and balanced mood.

This is just bias on my part, I guess. I spent my working life actually doing stuff – teaching classes, allocating budgets, appointing and disappointing staff, negotiating with trade unions, writing timetables, reassuring parents and employers, and so on and so forth.  I loved my work, and enjoyed the people I worked with and the students I met.  Towards the end of my career, the main negative was the mass of second-guessing visitors and inspectors that we had.  I think I counted six sets of auditors on one occasion – from the LEA, the TEC, the EU, the Funding Council and our own internal and external auditor.  The harassed Finance Director claimed – rightly – he spent more time explaining to other people how he was doing his job than actually doing his job.  And then there was the valkyrie ride of the inspectorates, which changed form every now and again but changed rules more often.  One year a college was expected to prioritise community links. The next year, it was judged on academic results and to hell with the community.  The next year it was governance – just make sure all boxes were ticked.  Then it was links with employers – to hell with governors.  Then it was safeguarding – don’t let an employer in unless s/he has child protection clearance.  No surprise that schools in the top category one year are in special measures three years later.

Bernard Shaw famously said that those who do, can, and those that can’t, teach.  Not true, actually – teaching is a difficult job.  But it may be true that those who can’t teach join the inspectorate: I certainly met some who would have been crushed by the responsibilities carried by the managers they judged.  A colleague who ran a construction college that was criticised for out-dated equipment let the inspector know, in a kind but forceful way, the (miniscule) size of his capital budget: collapse of stout party, one hopes.  And outside education, too, there are inspectorates who couldn’t run a hospital or protect a vulnerable child, but surely can make life a misery for those who can.  And they place pressure on those in the job to get a good grade in the next inspection, so that every lesson, every ward procedure, every police policy is aimed not to improve the service but to get a big tick at the next inspection, audit or assessment.

One loathsome part of the ‘hold to account’ mafia are MPs.  It’s good fun, I am sure, to second-guess those doing the work.  But when asked “er, who exactly holds you to account for the endless overspends and policy mistakes ?”, the answer comes “I am responsible to the electorate”.  This is pretty fair tosh.  Most MPs – more than two-thirds – are in seats that do not ever change hands.  In the right seat, a monkey would get elected if he had the right party label, and often does.  And elections take place every five years, and do not comment on the subtlety of policy choices.  Which bugger actually voted for PFI ?  Who approved the opening of that stupid academy ?  Who cut police numbers and froze nurses’ pay ?  Would MPs regard a system of quality assurance that took place every five years, had no criteria of excellence and ignored two-thirds of relevant employees, as “fit for purpose” in any other area of work ?

“Fit for purpose”.  Oh, lord, another cliché.

What is to be done ?  Firstly, there should be an annual assessment of MP work – visits undertaken, sessions attended, policy discussions followed up.  And then, to enrich the quality of experience they bring to the Commons, MPs, like American Presidents, might be limited in the terms that they can serve.  Thirdly, they should have a lively programme of work experience, every year, wiping bums in dementia wards, managing refuse collection, balancing a library budget, visiting a vulnerable child, cooking at an army base, patrolling a late-night motorway, serving in a late-night A&E ward.  There is a clear need for inspectors and auditors to spend a maximum of, say, five years in their job before returning to the reality of front-line delivery.

When they’ve all done all that, they can start thinking about systems for holding people to account – people doing real jobs on inadequate budgets under the cosh of corporate wise-acres.  Oh, and have you noticed how rarely those at the top of the private sector, raising prices and reducing services, are ‘held to account’.

p.s. This is not revenge from a bitter man.   The inspector who observed me as a young teacher asked if I wanted to join the inspectorate.  When a Principal, I never failed an inspection, and in fact was awarded a Grade 1 for management after my last visitation.  But I got out because I know they would get me in the end.  Like politicians (and football managers), a public service management career usually ends in failure.

It’s that time of year when the “A” level results come out. The press report this in three ways.  Firstly, leggy blondes from Hertfordshire are seen jumping for joy at the receipt of their results at a private school in Hertfordshire.  Secondly, any improvement in grades is seen as a lapse in standards (just as, in any individual school or college, a fall in grades is seen as a lapse in standards also).  And then there’s the annual panic about shortage of university places, made all the more appalling by the way that admission tutors might actually accept state school pupils (i.e. your kids and mine) ahead of private school pupils (i.e. newspaper columnists’ kids).  In a world where fee-paying schools educate about 6% of our children and take 45% of the places at Oxford and Cambridge, the question about complaints of discrimination is not “what school were they at ?”, but “which planet are they on ?”.

This got to its peak a few years ago when Tom Utley, a columnist in the Times argued that it was absurd to expand universities when we were short of plumbers and electricians.  About two weeks later, the same columnist was incandescent that Oxbridge might favour poorer pupils in its admissions process at the expense of his son.  I wrote to the paper, asking why his son couldn’t take up an apprenticeship in the construction industry in line with previous views, but it remains one of my great unpublished letters.

I would write more but I don’t need to as the ground has been magnificently covered by Dawn Foster, who points out the (surely well-known) statistic that state pupils do better in higher education than their contemporaries from private education with similar grades.  Visit it – well worth a read. The conclusion ?  Preferring state school pupils would not only contribute to a fairer society, it would provide better value for money and higher levels of skill.

Paul Krugman draws attention to the American Senator and right wing ideologue Rand Paul who complains about the evils of “running a trillion-dollar deficit every year” – which, as it happens, is not at all what is happening; the deficit is at around $600 billion and falling fast. This follows on Eric Cantor – the House majority leader – talking about “growing deficits”, when deficits are in fact shrinking.

Krugman reckons that “it’s pretty clear that Paul actually has no idea that the deficit is falling; it’s quite possible that neither does Cantor. The whole incident reminds me of 2011, when supposedly well-informed candidates like Tim Pawlenty went on about soaring government employment during a time of unprecedented cuts in the public payroll. Once you’re inside the closed conservative information loop, you know lots of things that aren’t so”.

The question is, though, what the public knows when it has this drivel driven into its brain all the time. A 1996 poll asked voters whether the deficit had increased or decreased under Clinton (it had, in fact, fallen sharply). A plurality of voters — and a heavy majority of Republicans — thought the deficit had gone up.  Krugman reckons that result would be repeated if they did it now.

OK, switch to the UK.  A new survey by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London highlights how wrong the British public can be on the make-up of the population and the scale of key social policy issues.  The top ten misperceptions are:

1. Teenage pregnancy: on average, we think teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates:  we think that 15% of girls under 16 get pregnant each year, when official figures suggest it is around 0.6%.
2. Crime: 58% do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19% lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53% lower than in 1995.  51% think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012..
3. Job-seekers allowance: 29% of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions (£4.9bn vs £74.2bn).
4. Benefit fraud: people estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates: the public think that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of £0.70 per £100.
5. Foreign aid: 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top 2-3 items government spends most money on, when it actually made up 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year.  More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education in the UK (£51.5bn).
6. Religion: we greatly overestimate the proportion of the population who are Muslims: on average we say 24%, compared with 5% in England and Wales.  And we underestimate the proportion of Christians: we estimate 34% on average, compared with the actual proportion of 59% in England and Wales.
7. Immigration and ethnicity: the public think that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13%. Even estimates that attempt to account for illegal immigration suggest a figure closer to 15%.  There are similar misperceptions on ethnicity: the average estimate is that Black and Asian people make up 30% of the population, when it is actually 11% (or 14% if we include mixed and other non-white ethnic groups).
8. Age: we think the population is much older than it actually is – the average estimate is that 36% of the population are 65+, when only 16% are.
9. Benefit bill: people are most likely to think that capping benefits at £26,000 per household will save most money from a list provided (33% pick this option), over twice the level that select raising the pension age to 66 for both men and women or stopping child benefit when someone in the household earns £50k+.  In fact, capping household benefits is estimated to save £290m, compared with £5bn for raising the pension age and £1.7bn for stopping child benefit for wealthier households.
10. Voting: we underestimate the proportion of people who voted in the last general election – our average guess is 43%, when 65% of the electorate actually did (51% of the whole population).

And there is, I suspect, a lot more.  An example : the idea that our current economic woes were caused by over-generous governments rather than imprudent bankers has now entered the popular consciousness, and it cannot be moved.  So what should be done?   I think the Labour Party at the next election should simply put up a series of posters highlighting the difference between what is being claimed to happen, and what is happening. The debt has grown, not fallen, under the Tories.  Economic recovery has been slower than almost any other comparable economy.  Taxes on the rich have been reduced.  Numbers of police and nurses have fallen.  Crime fell under Labour.  Education results improved.  Social programmes worked.  More kids went to university under Labour, whereas there are reports of falling numbers at the moment.  I know that a lie is halfway around the world before truth has its boots on, but we should at least be able to put a few trip-wires on its route.

Back in England after a delirious four weeks in the Brittany sun.  Our house has a lovely garden with plum trees (not much this year), walnut trees (lots this year) and neighbours who bring us sacks of cherries (it’s been a very good year; I even tried my first bash at cherry jam).  The lavender looks splendid, and attracts a range not just of bees, but also humming-bird hawk-moths, which are a spectacular sight.

And this year the 100^th Tour De France came through Brittany.  Brittany has a reputation for turning out great riders – including Bernard Hinault  – but we were there to cheer on Chris Froome, who responded by winning for Britain. OK, OK, he’s a Kenyan who lives in Monaco, but when people win, they are British through and through.  It was an interesting day for the non-cycling enthusiast.

We looked at the route in the local paper, and it seemed that the best place to watch was as it passed through the grounds of St-Cyr Coetquidan, the military academy (think Sandhurst or West Point) about twenty miles away.  Motto: “Ils s’instruisent pour vaincre” = “training for victory”.  The race course was marshalled by the cadets, dressed either in superb dress uniform with white plumed hats and golden epaulettes, or battle camouflage wear.  You turn up about two hours early, partly to get a view, but mostly to see the “caravane” of sponsored cars and floats that zoom ahead of the race.  It’s everything you might expect – cars sponsored by sport magazines or mobile phone companies; floats made up to look like soft drink bottle or crisp packets, with glamorous girls and boys tossing packs of sweets & snacks, plastic thumbs-up gloves or vouchers for mobile phones to the audience.   There were some cars from Yorkshire (where the Tour will start next year), and from Luxembourg (where it won’t).  The nationalised tote organisation threw out the big foam hands, Carrefour supermarket chucked the spectators lots of sun-hats, white with pink spots like the ‘King of the Mountains’ jersey. It goes on and on, and includes the most unlikely participants – such as Lutte Ouvrière, the equivalent of the Socialist Workers’ Party.  Imagine a New Orleans parade at 30 mph.

Then they disappear and you wait.  Policemen in flashy motor bikes zoom by.  The announcer tells you that the breakaway leaders will arrive in five minutes, but they don’t.  News helicopters hover overhead.  Remember, this was mid-July, and the sun baked us all.  Spectators set up their canvas beach chairs in the patches of shade that could be found.  Having obviously conducted a risk assessment, a lad in combat fatigues surreptitiously delivered cold bottles of water to the cadets in their heavy serge uniforms, who surreptitiously placed them on the grass nearby.  More cars zoom by, and more policemen.  Despite the impressive display of state force, no-one seemed interested in keeping the spectators off the road: in later stages, spectators actually ran on to slap the back of riders.

Then the leaders came, about five of them including the local boy Julien Simon, who was racing through his grand-parents’ village, and then made a self-sacrificing but crowd pleasing break.  The group seemed five minutes ahead of the peloton, and zoomed by in no time at all.  It seemed to me – on the basis of other athletic events like 10,000m or marathons – that it was all a done job.  They would win at a canter. However, in the end, of course, the peloton reeled the adventurous dashers back, and poor M. Simon paid for his boldness by ending up 120 places back.  In the final dash into St Malo, the British sprinter Mark Cavendish charged into another competitor in the final sprint, which did not help his popularity (he had urine thrown over him the next day).

It all took maybe ten minutes, after which an impressive fleet of Skoda estate cars with spare wheels and frames for the various teams on their roof racks whizzed by. And then we walked back to the car park, through the woods and heaths of the military training grounds, past the assault courses and gun emplacements hidden amongst the ferns and birches.  It wasn’t a drama, but we did it, and we are now another few centimetres into French culture.  And with the Yorkshire start that is planned, the lads are coming to see us in Sheffield next year.

I’ve recently read a book and seen a TV programme that led to a few thoughts.  The book was “Dominion” by C. J. Sansom, a counter-factual thriller about life in a Nazi-dominated London in the 1950s.  The book starts as Neville Chamberlain meets Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax (the Foreign Secretary, and a leading appeaser of Hitler) when he realises he can no longer be Prime Minister.  In the meeting, Churchill agrees to serve under Halifax, who promptly signs a peace treaty with Germany.  The impressive aspect of the book is not the plot – a rattling-along thriller, sure – but the atmosphere of a Britain under a government of fascist sympathizers.  For me, it gave a convincing picture of how collaboration and anti-semitism can seep into the daily life of a country, almost unnoticed.  The heroes who oppose the regime do so for a number of reasons – there is one card-carrying Communist – but mostly out of an understated sense of decency.

I don’t know what I would have done in such a situation.  I’m not talking about whether I would have revealed secrets under torture, or if my family were threatened (the answer is almost certainly yes).  Would I have passed food to a hidden Jewish family, as countless Dutch did ?  Or let the resistance know of train movements or troop concentrations ?  Or stepped in to prevent a dissident being dragged off by the police ?  I just don’t know.

Come a bit closer to today, and bring in my second piece of evidence, something you may feel has no place in an essay about fascism, racism and resistance.  It was a nostalgic BBC documentary about George Formby, the music hall entertainer of the 30s and 40s.  Much of the programme concerned his cheeky songs and his ukulele, with affectionate tributes from loyal fans who still meet annually.  You wouldn’t see George as a proto-Billy Bragg, but hang on a bit.   In 1946 George and his wife/manager Beryl toured South Africa shortly before formal racial apartheid was introduced, where they refused to play racially-segregated venues. According to Formby’s biographer, when George was cheered by a black audience after embracing a small black girl who had presented his wife with a box of chocolates, National Party leader Daniel François Malan (who later introduced apartheid) phoned to complain; Beryl replied “Why don’t you piss off, you horrible little man?” and was hurried on to the next plane home for her pains. George Formby as anti-racist hero ?  There’s more.

Take Petula Clarke – a child star who graduated to being a successful middle-of-the-road entertainer, but not in most people’s mind any sort of radical.  In 1968, NBC-TV invited Clark to host her own special in the U.S., and in doing so she inadvertently made television history. While singing a duet of “On the Path of Glory,” an anti-war song that she had composed, with guest Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, to the dismay of a representative from the Chrysler Corporation, the show’s sponsor, who feared that the moment would incur the wrath of Southern viewers. When he insisted that they substitute a different take, with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from each other, Clark and the executive producer of the show – her husband – refused, destroyed all other takes of the song and delivered the finished programme to NBC with the touch intact.

And then there’s Dusty Springfield – a wonderful singer but, again, not someone whose image you’d expect to see, Marley/Dylan style, on a protestor’s T-shirt.  In December 1964 Springfield’s tour of South Africa was controversially terminated, and she was deported, after she performed for an integrated audience at a theatre near Cape Town, which was against the government’s policy of racial segregation.  Her contract specifically excluded segregated performances, one of the first British artists to do so.  E. W. Swanton, not a well-known name, but once the doyen of cricket commentators, a crusty, jacket-and-tie right winger refused to cover any matches with the South African all-white team.  Tom Watson, the golfer, was also no radical – a Republican and a member of the National Rifle Association – but he resigned from his local club when he discovered Jews weren’t allowed to be members, and didn’t rejoin until the practice was ended.

None of these stances are in the same order as resistance heroism of Violette Szabo or Jean Moulin. But they show a day-to-day understanding of what is right, and a determination not to take an easy route away from it.  But they weren’t painless acts.  For example, I would guess Petula Clark was aware that her success in America was at risk from her stand.

Who do we have on the other side ?  Frank Sinatra did it his way (and collected $2m for nine days work) in Sun City, where Elton John and Queen played too.  Rod Stewart, Boney M., Status Quo played South Africa or Sun City, unworried about the fact that their careers were based on music of black origin; even the divine Linda Ronstadt could find a way to justify going.  And none of these people were under threat of torture, or protecting their family, or going along with established government policy.  They were people with a lot of money and mostly they went to South Africa to get some more. Bad behaviour doesn’t stop there.  There is the cadre of alternative comedians like Jimmy Carr who use accountants’ scams to avoid paying their share of tax, or Bono lecturing us about Third World Needs whilst dodging any tax he can. I could go on. Nicholas Parsons advertising Wonga.com; Barbara Windsor advertising on-line bingo. Strewth.

So why would some people, not known for being in any sense dissidents, behave well under pressure, whilst others, with an edgy reputation, behave badly.  Could it be that what matters is not some developed radical stance, no showy commitment to human rights, but an intangible built-in feeling of decency, of right and wrong.  I don’t know where it comes from – the family, I guess – but it seems to be what motivated Sansom’s resisters, and also Beryl Formby.

We’ve just welcomed a new grandchild into our world – hello, Robin Grace Spilman.  Which made me play around the internet looking at the most popular girls’ and boys’ names over the last century, and come across a surprise.  The name Mary was the most popular in the USA from colonial times, through the nineteenth century right up to 1946.  Then it was replaced by another name, which took first place from 1947 to 1952.  Have a few seconds, minutes or hours guessing what that name might be (you won’t get it) and then look here.

In passing, last year Mary was the 123^rd most popular name for newborn American girls, way behind Brittany, Tiffany and Melody.  Behind Jordyn and Kaitlin.  Behind London. Sigh. I guess it’s a generation thing.

Today’s post is going to have a bit of “what I did on my holidays” flavour about it.  My wife and I have just come back from an anniversary trip to Glasgow.  I’d been there once before, on business, but didn’t have the time to appreciate the city.  And appreciation is, I think, the right word, because it is a magnificent place.  It doesn’t have the royal palaces of Edinburgh, but the impressive public and private buildings bear testimony to its being ‘the second city of the Empire’ in Victorian and Edwardian days.  George Square is overwhelmingly grand,  and the Museum of Modern Art a Greek temple to culture.  Another example: a pub called the Counting House in the most magnificent former banking hall.  And just as impressive is the social and economic robustness of the city, which must have suffered some of the hardest economic damage of any UK city.  The coal mines and textiles have gone, and all but two of the shipyards too.  There was a time when Glasgow built more than 90% of the ships of the world, but only 5 of those ships are still afloat.  Many of the superb commercial buildings in the Merchant City were funded by tobacco money. Yet, with all this activity long gone, the city is lively and even, in some places, elegant.  Some reflections:

• I take no sides on the Scottish independence debate – loathe nationalism, but can’t see why any country would wish to hang on to regions/nations that want to make their own way in the world.  But Glasgow does feel a bit foreign.  When the architecture is not nodding towards Rennie Macintosh, or Greek temples, it has an almost East European feel, like Prague or Budapest.  And the accent is genuinely difficult: an example – it was the first time I can remember being unable to make out the safety instructions on the airplane tannoy.  As the old joke has it “The Italian mafia make you an offer you can’t refuse; the Glasgow mafia make you an offer you can’t understand”.  This was also true of black Glaswegians and Chinese Glaswegians.  All the people we met were, however, unanimously friendly and welcoming, taxi drivers especially so.
• Take back everything you’ve heard about Scottish food.  We had a wonderful lunch at the Number 16 restaurant in the West End – a £16 three course lunch as good as anything I can remember.  Our anniversary dinner was at the Ubiquitous Chip, which cost quite a bit more but was real top-drawer stuff.  Breakfasts were excellent.   I will never speak of deep-fried Mars Bars again.
• The hills !  No-one told me that Glasgow gave San Francisco a run for its money with all the ups and downs.  If anyone wants to reshoot the car-chase from Bullitt, they need not cross the Atlantic.  We went to see the Glasgow School of Art, Rennie Macintosh’s masterpiece, not realizing that the final ascent needed oxygen and Sherpas.  Visiting the Tenement Building was similarly demanding.  Coming down from the Cathedral to the City Centre on a snowy day would challenge Jean-Claude Killy.
• The traffic was arranged like New York – much of the city is on a grid, and whole roads are denoted as one way streets.  This no doubt speeds the traffic – though for some reason not the buses – but it does take away any intimacy from the cityscape.  If an area is not pedestrianised, it is car dominated.  I think that two-way traffic slows things down to a more human level.
• Big criticism – litter.  It is the most littered city I have visited in the UK.  Can’t see why that should be, though it may be a consequence of a system where people leave their garbage in plastic bags at the kerb-side, which is an invitation to feral cats and foxes. People don’t seem bothered – wander through the mess along Sauchiehall Street – nor do they pick up litter (I did), and you can play that sad game of spotting the piece of litter closest to a litter bin.  Interestingly, a Scottish tourist bigwig makes the exact same point in this week’s Sunday Times.
• Splendid museums and galleries.  The Transport Museum won the European Museum of the Year for 2013, and I can see why.  It was heartening to see the delight of working class Glaswegians as they saw a familiar old tram or double-decker, and I was pleased to come across the first Hillman Imp (Scottish built, of course) amid the Bentleys and locomotives.  There was even a Mini that had been through the European crash test, and a cut-and-shut Ford Escort GTi.  The Burrell Collection is rightly world famous – not over-large, and charming in its mix of exhibits.  In the British Museum, you can spend the whole day in the Egyptian sections, whereas the Burrell takes you under French medieval gateways on a trip from British domestic ware to a Stuart dining room to weapons to Chinese porcelain to a Rembrandt self-portrait in a few steps. The Kelvingrove is wonderful, as is the Hunterian.  We didn’t have time for it all, breaking my rule (see earlier post) that after three days you’ve done most of any city.
• Will we ever get into whisky ?  We visited the Pot Still and dabbled in 10 year Talisker, but maybe (even with internet guidance and – would you believe – internet tasting) life is too short to develop all our weaknesses.
• Rennie Mackintosh was a genius.  Many cities and towns oversell their sons and daughters.  Not in this case.  But he died broke, like Mozart.
• Many of the great institutions were the result of donations from the rich – not just the Burrell, for example, but also the park within which it is located.  Great university and museum buildings show the confidence and magnanimity of the era.  Are we doing this now ?  I know that there are some philanthropists, Gates, Ondaatje and Sainsbury, but when was the last city park or museum established or library saved by a hedge fund trader or bonus laden banker ?

In recent years the pay of senior managers in both private and public sector has grown quickly.  The New York Times reports that the average pay of a top 100 company Chief Executive is $14m, compared to the average US income of $40,000.  The lifetime earnings of a college graduate in the US will be about $2.3m: the CEO of Apple last year – yep, in one year – received share options worth more than $600m.  In the UK last year, in a stagnant economy the value of share options available to top executives went up 49%.  The Guardian reveals that the pay of Barclays Bank’s CEO is 75 times that of an average employee: in 1979, it was 14 times.

The argument is that we need to pay exceptional amounts of money to attract exceptional individuals, who can make all the difference to the success of companies and national bodies.  I think that’s wrong – there are countries in Scandinavia and northern Europe which have not suffered from avoiding this approach.  The argument would also have more force if the top jobs were genuinely competitive: if they were, maybe the emoluments might come down a little.   It is also obvious that not-very-good executives who fail to achieve worthwhile goals still get their mouths in the trough.  Network Rail, anyone ?  However, the argument does have a certain logic to it.

However, we learned today that the retiring Chief Executive of RBS will receive a pay-off that could be well over £5m.  Even if we believe the idea that you need megabucks to retain and recruit talent, why on earth are we being asked to pay such a sum for someone who is leaving ?  It makes no sense in either of the possible scenarios: that he is really good, and we want him to stay (= don’t bribe him to go, then) or he is not very good and we want him to go (= he is not the top talent we want to recruit and retain).

Short post today, drawing attention to a recent piece of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into ‘the culture of worklessness’.  I am sure you’ve heard that there are families where no-one has worked for three generations, where welfare-dependency is a way of life.  Well, the Foundation looked into this and found out that it is … er … just not true.  The number of unemployed people whose parents are unemployed is pretty small, and the number whose grandparents haven’t worked is vanishingly tiny.  Where parents are unemployed, the children are determined to make a success of life and are strongly committed to a work ethic.  Middle class people with jobs sometimes delight in creating a nether world of their own imaginations, populated by a (right-wing view) shiftless or (left-wing view) powerless and victimised working class.  I remember being assured by an earnest community education worker in a Sheffield council estate that “no-one in that road has a job”, when the obvious social problem seemed to me the way that the new Mondeos and Escort vans were chewing up the grass verge.

So the culture of worklessness is not the problem.  Neither, as Jonathan Portes points out in an LRB review, is immigration.  Neither is over-generous welfare, as Seamus Milne shows in a recent op-ed piece in the Guardian.  The Rowntree report concludes that the best way to counter unemployment is to provide jobs.  But I think we knew that.