At the age of 72, Tom Jones appeared on television last night, singing a superb set of songs; the show was followed by a retrospective of previous appearances and concerts, back to a 1964 BBC Wales interview with the very young man, fresh off the construction site.  Whatever one thinks of him, there can be no doubt that he has a wonderful voice.  Even seeing him pumping out the early hits with a full-throated, unreserved roar was truly exciting.  Which makes me contribute to a running debate about pop voices.

The point is that the quality of the voice has little to do with the merit of the artist.  There are people who are gifted with a great voice and deliver great material – Nat King Cole, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse.  Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra worked their wonderful way through the American songbook. However, there is no necessary connect.  Michael Bolton has a much better vocal technique than Bob Dylan, but other comparisons would be ridiculous.  Mick Jagger and David Bowie have made a massive contribution to popular culture, but judged on vocal terms alone, they get by, but not a lot more.  If you look on YouTube at the Stones performing Gimme Shelter, the delivery of Lisa Fisher is much stronger than the man with the child-bearing lips.  In fact anyone who has attended a few concerts knows that the backing singers are usually wonderful, but few of them make it to the top (though some crawl onto the lower divisions, like Valerie Carter or Jennifer Warnes).  Some superb singers – Celine Dion, Dusty Springfield, Brook Benton – deliver a lot of mediocre material that the A&R man seems to have picked for them alongside the classics.  And then there are iconic pop singers with more interesting material that have voices that are distinctive rather than magnificent – Van Morrison, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Dolly Parton.  Madonna, Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry are OK, but in terms of sheer voice, not a patch on Linda Ronstadt at full throttle (beg, borrow or steal a copy of her 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind – and she was just as good live).

Not sure where this leaves the debate, apart from showing how few contemporary voices I know. I am sure the issue will go on, the important thing being getting pleasure from lots of aspects of a performance, not just the perceived importance of the act. When I was young and trendy I went to see the Flying Burrito Brothers, who were a big thing at the time.  I didn’t rate them, but the warm-up artist was an unknown Barbara Dickson, who was as uncool then as she is now, and she was wonderful.

Lawks a mercy !  I didn’t start blogging to agree with Michael Gove but there is one part of today’s announcement of the reform of GCSEs that appeals to me – which is the limiting of an individual subject examination to just one exam board.  Education ministers need little encouragement before telling us about the lessons from other countries, but I don’t know of a single other country that has a clutch of individual privately owned examination boards providing the core qualifications for the state education system.

Looking around the world, there seem to be two models.  One is the continental system – where the state sets the exams.  This has the enormous advantage of cutting out the two layers of bureaucracy that we have (and pay for) in Ofqual and the examination boards: main disadvantage is that when something goes wrong, there is only one person to get the blame, namely the Minister.  You can see why politicians would not like this.  How much better it is for them to demand an immediate enquiry into someone else’s cock-up rather than take responsibility for their own.  The other system is one where the schools and colleges themselves can set the examinations, as long as they have passed quality criteria.  I think this is what happens in the USA.  Not without problems – obviously of ensuring comparability, and also of pressure on teachers to inflate grades. But it involves the staff in the assessment, and gives inspection a purpose besides telling people off.

I would guess both of these systems are substantially cheaper than the UK one.  When I was a Principal we spent more – much more – on examination fees than we did on libraries.  I recall annual letters from well paid Chief Executives at their swish central London addresses telling me that, regrettably, owing to rising costs, the price of examination entries was going up this year … oh, and our teachers would have to take more responsibility for grading.

Not sure about the motivation for all this – the idea that because more people pass these days, standards must have fallen. Well, more people climb Everest these days, but I understand it is the same height it ever was.  It is possible for people to get better at things. On the other hand, I remember being very happy with an above average 75% pass rate at “A” level in my Wakefield College department in the 1980s.  Figure is now in the high nineties, so something has happened.  For what it’s worth, I think exams are easier to pass not because the content is simpler but because the structure is less baffling: students are clearer about what they need to know, and how to get a pass mark.  Ben Goldacre did an article about this topic on his Bad Science web-site that is still worth a read, even if it comes to no very clear conclusion.  For a more passionate and principled analysis of the GCSE kerfuffle, read Michael Rosen’s blog.

Much to be thought about, then, before leaping one way or another.  But it’s almost worth the present spat to see a Conservative Minister tell us that competition and choice have reduced standards, and we need to go back to planning.

Ironic, huh ?

The archery and shooting teams were not the only Olympians to be obsessed with hitting targets.  We now learn that Charles Van Commenee, the head coach of the GB athletics team, has resigned his post because he did not hit the medal targets he was set by his bosses.  Now, the guy may have been good or bad, or even tired and eager to go, but to sack him for failing to attain targets seems a dumb thing to do.

I can see that targets are useful statements of expected standards of performance when the attainment of them is within the control of those asked to deliver.  Production targets for a factory are a good example, and so are infection rates in a hospital ward.  But isn’t it a bit silly for Olympic teams to set ‘targets’ for the number of medals they wish to win ?  An individual contestant might aim to achieve a faster run, higher jump or longer throw this season, for that is within their power.  But the ability to win medals is different: it depends not just on the performance of our competitors, but also on the skill and fitness – and funding, and coaching – of their rivals in the other teams, something which is entirely beyond the control of our coaches.  How do we view it when someone hits a personal best time, but fails to secure the desired medal ?  Or gets a medal because their sub-par score is better than rivals’ similarly weak performances (I am pleased a Brit won the long jump gold medal, but his 8.31m leap and just about matches the 1962 world record and is a full two feet short of the current one) ?

Targets, goals, performance indicators: I suspect what we have here is the spread of dumb MBA thinking that, having polluted our manufacturing, government and banking sectors, is now moving on to ruin the management of our sports teams.  One factor that was noticeable was the growth of ‘plastic Brits’ – athletes from abroad, some of whom had actually represented other countries,  who were signed to the British team at short notice to bolster our medal chances.  Why do the hard work of developing UK citizens when you can fly in an American to jump your hurdles for you ?  In passing, the performance of these imports was almost universally poor.  I also notice that funding was attached only to teams and athletes who had good chances of reaching a medal – not those who could develop the knowledge and appreciation of their sport, or represent the country well.

I have written elsewhere about the way that setting targets can pollute information.  At least medals are a simple and understandable – and un-fiddleable – statistic.  This isn’t true elsewhere.  There is a rich literature on how schools and colleges can fiddle their figures.  Police forces are notorious for reclassifying crimes so their crime rates and clear-up statistics look good.  In the Soviet Union, planning targets led to routine game-playing that has been widely reported.  I warmed to a recent letter to the Times which said that he would not shun hospitals with high reported death or infection rates, as they would be the ones which did not distort their figures in order to please their masters.  This is all well known – named Goodhart’s Law after the academic who brought it to public attention.  As soon as you make someone’s promotion, or salary, or dismissal, dependent on management information, that information becomes useless.

Come back, Charles, there’s nothing to forgive.

I have threatened several times to write a piece on the National Debt, so here goes. I think part of the problem with thinking about this topic is simply the word Debt.  Funny we’ve never thought up anything better.  Politicians and industrialists are very savvy when it comes to creating the right word.  Ministers never increase spending, they always raise investment.  Firms don’t put up prices, they announce a revised tariff.  To point this out is not whimsical humour: many public debates are warped by the phrases chosen.  What would people think of genetically modified plants* if they were described as ‘scientific agriculture’ rather than ‘Frankenstein Foods’?  How would we react to local discretion in public services if it was described as neighbourhood choice rather than postcode prescribing ?  You get my point.  Not that there’s much wrong with being frank.  The National Debt does indeed involve one group of people owing money to another group of people, but then so does your mortgage.  No-one calls that the family liability.  To look at another linguistic master-stroke, cards that increase your debts are actually called credit cards, as if spending money you haven’t got establishes you as a financially sound person.

Enough with my obsession with political English, and into the jungle. To start with, let’s consider what are we talking about. The National Debt is the amount of money owed by the British government to people or institutions (companies and banks) within its borders or abroad.  So, first fallacy – it isn’t what we owe foreigners, though some of it is indeed owed to foreigners.  The amount owed to foreigners is the external debt, the larger amount owed to British residents is called the internal debt.  About two-thirds of the National Debt is internal – that is, it is money we owe to ourselves.  How does that happen ?  Well, the government issues bonds which are certificates that pay a certain level of interest until they ‘mature’ (come up for repayment).  Short term government debt – repayable in three months – comes in the form of Treasury Bills, which are sold below face value, the difference between the purchase price and the maturity price showing the interest you get.  There are other ways the National Debt is funded – you may own part of it in the form of a Premium Bond, for example.

Why do we have a National Debt ?  Economists generally mark our National Debt as starting in 1694, when a group of Scottish merchants set up the Bank of England with a £1m loan to the government to fight the latest war.  Economics textbooks tell you that governments borrow for capital spending, like a company or a family: “it makes good sense to spread the cost of a new airport or hospital over a period of years, so all the people who benefit from them pay for them” I said in my majestic 1988 masterwork Approaching Economics.  In fact, until the last fifty years or so, the history of the National Debt has been the history of our wars.  The diagram below shows that in 1945 our National Debt came to more than twice our national income (the total value of the whole economy’s output).  Remember this when you are told that we have to make historic cuts in welfare entitlements to solve the debt problem.  We established the welfare state and the National Health Service with a National Debt proportionately three times bigger than we have right now.

Oh, and attempts to cut the National Debt by raising taxes and reducing government spending are rarely effective.  If you do that (you may have heard of ‘austerity’, which has been tried many times, and never worked), then people have less to spend, reducing the growth of the economy, reducing the tax take and requiring higher social security spending. Cutting capital spending makes the economy less efficient, again reducing the ability to grow the economy and raise more taxable income.  But I think I’ve said that elsewhere. “Many times” as they used to sigh in ‘Round The Horne’, “many, many times”.

Footnote from the future (added May 2020):

I speak many times in my blogs about the vampire beliefs that arise from the grave when you think they’re dead.  Laffer curve, wealth creators, directing students to courses the economy needs, things like that.  Sadly the ‘burden of the national debt’ is now shuffling out of the crypt.  The Covid19 pandemic that necessitated shut-down of many industries, labour subsidies and higher social security spending meant the government raised its spending at a time when its receipts were falling.  Indeed, some of the anti-recession measures involved cancelling or delaying tax payments. And so, and so … we get the newspaper columnists saying we’ll have to pay this all back, so we need higher taxes and government cuts when the pandemic ebbs.  No, we bloody won’t.  I’ll include a few of the rebuttals here, and hope it goes away. It won’t, but I can hope.

I enjoy Twitter – not so much sending tweets as getting them.  It’s often the best way to enjoy public events – whether the Eurovision song contest or the closing ceremony of the Olympics.  I’m not sure it can claim to create a sense of community, because people tend to choose tweeters of similar views/nationality/class for their daily input.  Nevertheless, it gets you into news events, and often alerts the world to abuses or idiocies.

And sometimes you get great wisdom in short packages.  Just yesterday I saw a retweet from someone who calls himself Kurt Vonnegut (surely not a spirit message from the real one, who died in 2007) – “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance”.  This rang a bell with me after a life in public administration under the rule of people who prefer reform and restructuring to the hard work of doing a proper job. Structural reform is so much easier and quicker than doing it right: think how easy it is for a politician to change the funding or governance systems of schools, rather than improve teaching (which is the only proven way to raise standards).

This is reflected in the way that politicians have been quick to adopt the empty emotional language – vision, passion, obsession – of the MBA graduate.  Orwell was onto this – in the 1940s he was mocking people who were promising ‘radical transformation’. The promise of change is pretty seductive – witness the 2008 Obama campaign (‘change you can believe in’) and Francois Hollande’s 2012 campaign – but I reckon what most people actually want is not restructuring, but the current system run better and more cheaply.  This has been backed up in a recent poll reported on the BBC website on 25^th August.  Running things better is undramatic work that requires competence rather than vision. As one Victorian aristo said – “Reform ? Reform ? As if things aren’t bad enough already !”.

Footnote – This logic works in sport too.  Journalists who tried to find out the secret of the all-conquering GB Olympic cycling team were rather baffled to be told that the secret was in remorseless incremental improvement.  I think they were looking for a whole lot of drivel about vision and passion and obsession with excellence: what they got were details of how pedal weights could be reduced.  Passion is what the England football team got under its least successful manager, Kevin Keegan: results immediately improved when he was replaced by a dull Swedish technocrat.

Having had to wrestle with difficult choices in my working life – what to recommend for Manchester’s post 16 system, how to organise the development of educational policy in the UK, what changes might release the potential of IT for adult learning – I now get asked a really difficult question by an American friend.  What are Steely Dan’s best three albums ?

This is not the sort of dilemma that should be sprung on a man without notice.  I might need post traumatic counselling.  I mean, obviously you include Can’t Buy a Thrill and Countdown to Ecstasy but then … what … ?  I suggested Aja, because it is a more developed jazz-rock piece, but The Royal Scam is pretty wonderful (Haitian Divorce and all that).  Pretzel Logic ?  Katy Lied ? Both better than almost anything else recorded as rock music in that period, but suffering by comparison.  A lovely comment from the anonymous American – that the Dan make better use of the spaces between the notes than anyone else.  Yep, and the notes are pretty good.  I’m went to Newcastle to see a Dan tribute band (Nearly Dan) a few years ago.  They were excellent – and the gig was acres and oceans better than some self-expressive indie band doing their own stuff. No-one complains that the LPO playing Mozart is derivative, do they ?

OK, some footnotes.  Firstly, the view that the seventies was full of empty melodic kitsch that had to be livened up by the punk explosion.  Well, I guess I’m showing my age, but I prefer the insights of Jackson Browne to John Lydon any day: just compare the lyrics, almost embarrassing.  Minority view, I know: popular culture is constantly in one of the stages of revolt into style (George Melly’s insight), but that doesn’t mean that the revolting bits are always superior to the styled stuff.  I just worry that the ideas that are delivered unchallenged in journalists’ copy/BBC2 documentaries by people who grew up in the 70s becomes the received historic view. Mercifully, the great Danny Baker is on my side on this (not that he knows).

Just a brief note today.  I enjoy Twitter – not so much sending tweets as getting them.  It’s often the best way to enjoy public events – whether the Eurovision song contest or the closing ceremony of the Olympics.  I’m not sure it can claim to create a sense of community, because people tend to choose tweeters of similar views/nationality/class for their daily input.  Nevertheless, it gets you into news events, and often alerts the world to abuses or idiocies.

And sometimes you get great wisdom in short packages.  Just yesterday someone retweeted a note from someone who calls himself Kurt Vonnegut (surely not a spirit message from the real one, who died in 2007) – “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance”.  This rang a bell with me after a life in public administration under the rule of people who want reform and restructuring.  Structural reform is easier than doing it right: think how easy it is for a politician to change the funding or governance systems of schools, rather than improve the teaching (which is the only proven way to raise standards).  Orwell was onto this – in the 1940s he was mocking people who were promising ‘radical transformation’.  The promise of change is so seductive – witness the 2008 Obama campaign (‘change you can believe in’) and Francois Hollande’s 2012 campaign – when I reckon what most people actually want is not restructuring, but the current system run better and more cheaply.  Which requires competence rather than vision. The Guardian’s subscription service promises to “Open Up To New Ideas”, when what I want is honest journalism without an agenda.  As one Victorian aristo said – “Reform ? Reform ? As if things aren’t bad enough already !”.

The Second World War exercises an extraordinary hold over my generation, despite the fact that we were born too late to have any part in it.  Being a baby-boomer meant growing up in a post-war world: my dad would dig the potatoes in the garden whilst wearing his RAF fatigues.  The image that was given was a heroic one – Britain stands alone, never in the field of human conflict, and all that) – with particular credit to Churchill’s strategic insights.  The explanation for victory was two-fold.  Firstly, heroism (our fellows were braver than theirs – cockneys in the Blitz, Kenneth More and Jack Hawkins). Second, equipment (our stuff was better than their stuff – Spitfires and Mustangs, Enigma, bouncing bombs and Mulberry harbours).

The problem that you face as an adult who does a bit of reading is that these explanations aren’t true.  For whatever reason, Axis forces seem to have been as brave as ours – indeed, according to some historians, they were more effective, being experienced professional soldiers against a citizen army.  No-one who hasn’t faced enemy bullets and bombs is in a position to feel superior, but modern histories about the conduct of Allied troops in Singapore, on the beaches of Dunkirk or the sands of Tobruk do not give a wholly positive message.  And as for equipment, the Japanese had the best fighter at the beginning of the war (the Mitsubishi Zero) and (in the Me 262) the Germans had the best one at the end.  German tanks were very much superior to British and US ones. And there is a good book to be written about Churchill’s mistakes.  He came into the job with bad decisions on the Dardanelles in the First World War and the Gold Standard in the twenties on the record, and in the Second World War added new mistakes, from Norway and Greece onwards to invading Italy the laughably un-soft underbelly of Europe.

So how did we come out of it OK ?

The reason I write this is because I have been reading some books and looking at TV documentaries over the New Year break.  A documentary about Malta revealed that one convoy of four ships got through to Valletta from Alexandria, but was not unloaded for a day, during which time the German air force sunk them all whilst at anchor in Grand Harbour.  So the next convoy was organised much better, and unloaded without delay.  Mark Urban’s documentary about tank warfare revealed that allied tanks in Normandy were very much inferior to the German Panzers and Tigers, but losses were replaced within 36 hours.  The Wehrmacht got few replacements, and after great delay.  In the Pacific air war, the Japanese Zero was beaten by the introduction of the Grumman Hellcat, which was a slightly better plane but produced in vast quantities (12,000 in three years).   And the Battle of the Atlantic was won – yes, by devices like the hedgehog depth-charge thrower, HF/DF and the Enigma intercepts – but mostly by better training and tactics, pioneered by sailors like Walker.  Mulberry harbours unloaded relatively little onto Normandy beaches, and the bouncing bomb was only used on one raid.

Why does this matter ?  Well, apart from knowing the truth, which is a better basis for future action (e.g. it is generally wise to enter a war on the understanding the enemy is as brave as you are), it suggests that it is organisation and resources that matter.  Even in peace time, public policy based on the idea that leadership and technology will sort things out, without attention to skills, organisation and resources, is likely to fail.

This is an amateur view.  If you want a more expert one – who gives a bit more credit to leadership but agrees about resources and organisation – read Richard Overy.

I have voted in every election for which I have been eligible – which means, since the 1966 General Election.  I canvassed for the 1964 General Election, but in those days 18 year olds couldn’t vote.  In this week’s elections for Police Commissioner, for the first time, I spoiled my ballot paper.

This wasn’t because of a deep satisfaction with the performance of the police.  Philip Collins wrote an article in today’s Times arguing that we needed commissioners because of the lamentable performance of police forces.  Well, the performance is indeed disappointing,  How come we have falling detection and clear-up rates – and widespread dissatisfaction by victims to police reaction to crime – at a time when we have more police officers than ever, and when technology such as DNA fingerprinting and computer databanks should be making it easier to catch crooks ?

My disagreement is how to change this situation.  The current government – and, to be fair, the one before it, and the one before that – believe that the way to improve the performance of public bodies is structural change.  You want better education ? Well, let’s change the ownership of schools, and alter the membership of the governing body.  Improved health outcomes ?  The answer is plainly to alter the purchaser-provider relationships within the health service.  More effective weapons procurement ?  Let’s reform the bodies that buy arms with more private sector involvement.  Troubled by lax immigration control, dead-beat dads or poor financial standards ? Set up a new agency.

The problem with all this is, in the words of one grizzled American professor, “everyone knows none of that shit works”.  The way to do things better is, er, to do things better.  Education is improved by better teaching and learning.  The only time this has been tried in my professional life – the “Success For All” initiative in further education colleges – success rates rose by about 50%, before the government reverted to its default position, reliance on ‘choice and competition’.  Health care improves when new methods and practices are introduced.  And I suspect that the way to cut crime lies in improving the competence and training of police personnel.

My experience is that structural change diverts the attention away from doing the job better.  It’s difficult to improve performance without clear lines of accountability, and these don’t happen when the person or body in charge is constantly changing – or constantly responding to the latest idiotic enthusiasm from above.  Four of our five children work in public bodies, and they are all being reorganized at the moment.  Of course restructuring is sometimes needed, to cut costs or clarify responsibilities.  The creation of specialized stroke and child heart hospitals has improved outcomes – but only because it led to things being done better.  I did plenty of restructuring myself in my last job, to unify a merged institution and save money.  However, the actual performance of the institution didn’t start to improve for a couple of years afterwards, after people had got to grips with their new job.

Could commissioners deliver this better practice that is the only route to success ?  No.  They are non-experts, and they will be looking for the next election that will maintain their £80,000 job.  They will learn and spout all the politicians newspeak that we have heard for years – “I’m not just talking tough”, “We’re sending out a clear message”, “my pledge to you is”, “we have set challenging targets” “that’s why I am today announcing an new initiative” and all the other rotting fruit from the compost heap of the English Language.  Photo-opportunities will be created, with our hero opening another (short-lived) initiative.  Like a maniacal football club chairman, they will look to sack those who don’t deliver ‘on’ (ugh) their ambitions, or hit their performance indicators, even if there are good reasons not to.  It is striking that the elections took place on the day that we learned that the Kent Constabulary has been routinely fiddling its returns to hit its targets for clear-up and detection rates.  No wonder turnout was so low, and (judging from radio interviews) so well informed.  Many voters stayed away because it was a cold November day, or they didn’t know the candidates, or they disagreed with the politicization of a public function, but a fair minority abstained because they thought the idea was stupid.  I think they are right.

New agencies or commissioners to bark orders are not needed.  The fact is that everybody knows what is wanted.  Better results in schools.  Lower infection rates in hospitals.  Less crime and higher clear-up rates for police forces.  More skilled apprentices.  Less drug addiction.  Cheaper fares and fewer cancelled trains.  More affordable housing.  Lower re-offending rates after prison.  It is really, honestly, not difficult to list what we want to happen.  The difficult bit is actually doing it – making it happen.  This is a matter of professional competence.

* quotation from anonymous Victorian aristocrat