The political parties seem to be so spooked by UKIP that they have lost leave of their senses.  Two recent news stories as evidence.

There is a proposal that the UK pay an additional £1.7bn  into the European Union budget.  This is because budget contributions are based upon national income, and the UK’s national income has been underestimated (and others overestimated) in the recent past.  This has produced outrage from all political parties.  How dare these foreign johnnies do something so dastardly ?  Well, I’ll tell you.  Ask yourself two questions.  Firstly, should contributions to international bodies be based on income, or not ?  Should Luxemburg pay the same as Germany, Greece the same as the UK, or not ?  The answer, I would have thought, is obvious.  The second question – when we find that the income figures have changed, should we change them or keep them as they were, knowing they are inaccurate.  Again, the answer seems bleedin’ obvious to me.  EU subscription should be based on ability to pay, and should change as circumstances change.  Why is no British politician saying this, choosing instead to join a Dutch auction of Europhobia ?

Secondly, we are asked to be outraged that European Union nationals working in the UK can claim family benefits for children who remain in their own country.  The sum is £30m – heavens above, that’s  .001% of the cost of one new aircraft carrier.  But stand back a moment and think.  Workers pay into the national coffers of the country they work in.  Why shouldn’t they get any due benefits paid from the same source ?  Or am I missing something ?

Answer – yes, I am missing the fact that MPs fear they might lose their jobs to a swivel eyed loon at the next election, and so they have to generate false fury at anything – no matter how rational – that might benefit a foreigner.  For evidence as to how far this idiocy has penetrated the British psyche, see below, and weep.

I was interested to see that the viewing figures for Newsnight, the BBC’s evening current affairs programme, are falling.  This is thought to be because the news is so appalling – Ebola, Gaza, Ukraine, ISIS, austerity & the rich, UKIP, the demonization of immigrants and the attack on the poor and the rest – that no-one would want to go to bed with that stuff in their mind.  I’ve tended to steer clear of newspapers for that reason.  As a recent commentator pointed out, it is not just the awfulness of the events, it is the fact that we are powerless to do anything about them.

Another reason to shy away from bad news is that it seems so random, so disconnected.  But in many ways, in my view, it isn’t.  Let me take three recent stories, in themselves minor when compared to Syria or West Africa.  One is the mess at Tesco, where the profits of the business have been wildly overstated by financial skullduggery – basically, bringing receipts forward and pushing payments back.  This seems a brainless activity, not least because it plainly cannot be repeated – you can’t book in receipts years ahead, or refuse to pay suppliers forever.  Why, then, did it happen ?  Well, no-one seems to know, and cleverer people than me are being paid several thousand quid a day to be on the case, but here’s my guess.  The managers involved were set profit targets that had to be hit, and ‘incentivised’ to high heaven to hit them.

Second story.  Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, has a column in the Sunday Times where he answers readers’ queries.  Being the Sunday Times, the queries often concern selective or private schools, but this week a parent described her horror and fascination that secondary schools were now visiting primary schools to make a sales pitch for their brightest kids to come to their establishment.  Mr Woodhead professes revulsion at this practice.  Surely, he writes, schools should stand on their reputation for excellence, not glitzy come-ons.  Well, Chris old lad, you were in charge when the whole regime of targets an league tables came to town.  What did you think would happen when head teachers and schools were judged on their results, unencumbered by considerations of location, context or intake ?  Choice certainly exists at age 11 – but it is generally the desirable secondary school that has the choice, and the parents and children who have to accept the decisions.  Targets and indicators, indicators and targets.

And then we have the attack on the NHS in Wales.  A note of explanation.  Running health care is a devolved matter – so that the national administrations in Wales and Scotland have some say in how it is organised.  The English NHS – or rather, the senior managers and politicians who decide these things – have brought more private providers and market systems into the provision of health care.  Welsh government has chosen a path which involves more planning and a reliance on public service.  The result has been – what a bloody surprise – a concentrated attack on the performance of the Welsh system by right wing politicians and press in England.  Why, they ask, are death rates in hospital higher than in England ?  The answer they seek is that there are not enough competitive pressures and market disciplines.  But a recent article that smells like truth to me points out that Wales is a country with worse health than the UK because it has more heavy industry, more poverty, more unemployment.  Compare it with the North East of England, not with the English average.  And what’s more, the Welsh government does not judge hospitals by their death rates, knowing that to do so will encourage them to send people home to die, and to avoid risky patients.  English hospitals have targets and indicators, indicators and targets, and so they play the game that will enable their managers to boast of hitting them, whatever the effect on patients.  A measured assessment of the Welsh performance suggests it is on the right track, and that England has much to learn from it; indeed, in some areas, is learning from it.

I am sure that there are bad hospitals and poor doctors in Wales, just as there are in England and (to judge by the Ebola stories from the USA) in Texas.  But the way to improve them is by better practice, not more statistics.  A thoughtful policeman made the same point recently about police targets – work out how to do things, don’t bellow at those that (apparently) can’t.

So, three stories, all linked by the adoption of the modern management religion of targets and indicators.  There is a very substantial literature now that shows this stuff doesn’t work, and encourages what is called ‘gaming’ – behaviour that makes the institution or individual look good without actually improving or achieving anything very much.  Problems – like falling sales at Tesco – will be hidden rather than confronted.  Important challenges – like improving the education of the average child – will be ducked.  What is worse, judging performance by numbers alone starts to pervert the very numbers you rely on to assess quality or volumes.  Judge police regions on the trends in crime, and serious offences will be downgraded to trivial, and others ignored or mis-categorised.    You end up not knowing what is going on at all.  This has been known for years – its most popular formulation is in the form of Goodhart’s Law, which states that ‘any observed statistical regularity will collapse once it is used for control purposes’.  Or, more simply, use numbers for targets and they lose touch with reality.  Goodhart wrote in 1975. Takes a while to learn things, doesn’t it ?

Here’s a clip of Jackson Browne – still the best singer-songwriter of our generation, despite what appears to be a visit to the Mickey Rourke Clinic for plastic surgery.

And while we are on the ‘whatever happened to the West Coast generation’ theme, how sad that Linda Ronstadt has recently announced that she’s got Parkinson’s Disease.  Time therefore to look through YouTube which has hundreds of stellar performances, like this.

Just in case you feel my constant rants against austerity are the ramblings of a deluded person, here are a couple of references.  The first – those revolutionaries at the Financial Times reporting what those Trotskyite wild men at the International Monetary Fund are advising – shows that public investment would actually pay for itself.  The second – written by economist Ben Chu, and published in that icon of ultra-leftism the London  Evening Standard – shows how there is no urgency at all to make further cuts in the public budget.

Which makes one ask – what the hell is the Labour Party doing, trying to play Osborne Lite rather than  challenging the coalition’s cruel economic illiteracy ?

Last September I wrote about the Party Conferences.  Party Conferences used to be a big thing, as members voted on the policies that were to be adopted the next time that they were in government.  That seems a long time ago.  These days, conferences are Nuremburg Rally Lite – there is never a debate, and the main purpose is to look adoring as the leader (should one say Leader ?) makes the closing speech.  The only discussion is at side-shows sponsored by big business.  What the hell is the Labour Party doing accepting money from Barclays Bank, or inviting the IEA, for discussion of economic policies ?  We have even seen members of the audience dragged out by bouncers and held by the police for heckling the platform.  The idea, post-Mandelson, is that parties are not associations of like minded people aiming to develop and implement policy, they are fan clubs with as much influence on the leadership as Take That’s fan club has on Gary Barlow’s tax affairs.

In a digital age there must be better ways of making policy than getting a thousand activists into a big room and listening to speeches from the chosen few, but having policy decided by Oxbridge chums picking the most plausible think-tank report is not one of them.  Nor, I suspect, is the use of focus groups.  What is needed is committees of activists who are specialists in the chosen field interrogating the evidence, which is why the speeches of the party leaders are so disappointing.

Cameron offered us the expected stuff, reading his electoral bribes from teleprompt screens.  Ed Miliband tried to mimic Cameron’s old party trick of wandering round the stage and apparently speaking extempore. As a result he actually forgot chunks of his speech.  As a number of commentators have said, it is difficult to choose between a leader who lies about the deficit and a one who doesn’t mention it.

My point is rather different, which is that none of the party leaders use modern means of communication.  Any manager briefing his staff on the direction the company is taking, or new opportunities and threats, or trends in sales or quality, would use PowerPoint or something similar.  Stand up comedians have been using it for years, and theatre productions too.   My 8 year old grandson took a PowerPoint presentation on a memory stick to school, and it was uploaded by another 8 year old.  Why can’t political leaders use the basic grammar of modern communication ?  Think of the Miliband speech with inserts and diagrams to show how the National Debt has risen, how our growth is lower than our competitors, the deteriorating living standards of 99% of the population as against the rich, to show what has happened to police or nurse numbers, to local government budgets. It would not only be more persuasive – it would be impossible to forget chunks.  And talking an audience through the facts, and explaining the conclusions you draw from the facts, is actually more human and appealing than staring ahead or prowling around the stage like an SAS platoon commander enthusing the troops the day before the attack.

Heavens above, it might even create the idea that policy depends on evidence.

Footnote: President Obama used diagrams to support his case in an interview in February 2015.  The reaction of the opposition – “it was like a Scientology recruitment film”.  You despair sometimes, don’t you ?

After some wanderings about Scotland and France, I return to something I know about, but which may be too boring for others to follow, namely the planning of technical education.  There’s a distant connection with the Scots farrago, though, for what made my heart sink was a councillor from Manchester saying that regions wanted to regain powers from Westminster (fine so far) including further education (also fine so far) so that they could more closely supervise the work of technical colleges to make them fit the needs of local industry and (the example chosen) reduce the number of hairdressing students and increase the number of engineering students.

This, like crime in a multi-story car park, is wrong on so many levels (thank you, Tim Vine).

Firstly, it cannot be done.  Are students who want to enrol for drama or hairdressing or animal care to be told “there’s no places for you, you’ll have to do engineering”? What will they do ?  Shout yippee and pick up a soldering iron ?  No, they will find another institution that will offer what they want, or drop out of education altogether.  The idea that a college can magic engineering students out of the ether is fanciful.  If the demand was there for science and engineering places, it would have been very much to the college’s financial advantage to provide courses that meet it, not only now but for the past thirty years.  The idea that colleges have turned away students eager to study technology is a fanciful nonsense.  I remember being a senior lecturer in a Manchester college that converted its engineering block to general and business studies, due to lack of students.

James Paice MP was the minister who told the conference of the Association of Colleges to shut down all this media studies nonsense and open engineering courses.  I was a Principal in south London at the time, and in my borough the last major engineering plant and apprenticeship scheme  – Post Office electronics – had shut down.  We were, however, surrounded by expanding media companies – the National Theatre, Carlton TV, the National Film Museum, Brixton Academy, the Roxy cinema complex, plus a major private producer of training videos, and many more.  I suspect the Minister’s problem was that media studies was fun and it was what young people wanted to do, and so must be shut down.  Proper education is boring.  This attitude echoes the hostility of the establishment planners to the art colleges, which have energised the creative sector – fashion, digital art, music – where this country has such a competitive advantage.

Secondly, the idea that the state knows what skills will be in demand in five or ten years is not true.  In the 70s, there was exasperation that American university students  wanted to study software engineering not hardware electronics.  They were right and, as the last of computer manufacturing left for Asia, the ‘experts’ were wrong.  Please note that the decisions made by those students was the same as the one made by IBM.  The idea is in any case a curious one for neoliberal marketeers to adopt.  They have condemned state planning for years.  Technical training seems to be the only area where they think it’s a cracking idea.  In fact, student demand for technical education responds well to market signals.  I visited Leeds College of Building when the newspapers were full of news of plumbers earning a fortune.  There were queues for plumbing courses quite literally round the block.

Thirdly, the idea that there is a skills gap, that there are loads of jobs that could be filled if only people had the right qualification, is tosh.  If that were true, then the relation between vacancies and unemployment (the Beveridge curve, for economic nerds) would have shifted, and it hasn’t.  If scarcity existed, wages for semi-skilled and skilled engineers and technologists would be rising sharply as employers competed for them.  In fact, wages have been flat or worse for the past ten years, especially in engineering.  Manchester is a fine place, but it has suffered badly from de-industrialization and the loss of manufacturing jobs.  I would be gob-smacked if there were not many unemployed people in that city with experience and qualifications in engineering manufacture.  My son-in-law is an experienced engineering worker, but following the closure of the manufacturers where he worked, he now works for a supermarket.  The reason there is unemployment is that there are not enough jobs, and that is due to a lack of effective demand (or excess savings – same thing).

I think the main reason for my outrage is not the economic nonsense, but the casual and unthinking class distinction from a member of the Labour Party.  The idea seems to be that university students, the Jessicas and Julians of this word, can choose anything they like.  Classical literature. Archaeology.  Astronomy.  Study what you like, forget about the needs of the economy.  But if you are a working class kid, leaving school at 16 to look for a vocational programme, you are not to have that choice.  You are a drone, and you will only be able to do whatever some government Gradgrind wants to make available for you.

 

 

Hi, everybody ! Back from my holidays in beautiful sunny Brittany.  The more often I go to France, the less I believe the stuff in the UK press about how France is a basket case, and we must undertake every nonsensical austerian policy in order to avoid the dreadful fate that our Gallic neighbours are enduring.

Just for the record, where we live in France is not the richest nor the poorest area of the country.  Our neighbours are not rich, but have an astonishingly high standard of life.  The roads are well maintained.  I cannot remember coming across a single pot-hole in the 6,800 hectares of the Departement of Morbihan, or anywhere else for that matter.  The police seem to be invisible but effective.  The public spaces are clean, and there are still libraries, and swimming pools, and leisure centres.  Your local doctor can see you now.  The farms are prosperous and well managed.  Ditches and verges are scrupulously maintained.  Local produce – walnuts and plums, cherries and tomatoes, and, yes, apple brandy – is shared between neighbours, even English neighbours like us.  Industry and retailing are organised into clean and effective zones, with good access and parking.  Cycle paths follow former rail lines for miles and miles.  The town centre is spotless, apart from one piece of obscene graffiti, in (inevitably) English.  There is no public drunkenness, and virtually no begging. The work of school teachers is respected and reinforced.  Local democracy works – we know the mayor, and members of the council, in a way we do not in England.  This may be because there is still a lively local and regional press, as opposed to tired free-sheets we endure in the UK.  Artistic events (including excellent opera) are brought to our small market town, whose population of 9,000 or so – the size of Ledbury, or Cockermouth, or Shanklin, or Worsley – would not put it in the top 600 UK towns.  If this is failure, let me have more of it.

The numbers also suggest France is not the worst economy in Europe, not by a long chalk.  Some bits need sorting – some labour laws are daft – but the motivation is a respect for labour. Productivity – output per worker – is much higher than the UK.  So why does France get such a consistently bad press ?  This is a question asked by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman here.  His conclusion is pretty much the same as mine:

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that it’s political: France has a big government and a generous welfare state, which free-market ideology says should lead to economic disaster. So disaster is what gets reported, even if it’s not what the numbers say.

Whilst we were sunning ourselves in a Breton garden, the attention of the British media has been focused on the Scottish referendum.  I start from the view that no nation should try to hang on to people who calmly decide they want to be in another organisation: if the Kurds don’t want to be part of Turkey or Iran, why should they be ?  I also have Scottish blood – which in my case means a great-grandfather that my sister loved, but who died before I was born.  However, both of my regular readers will know by now of my contempt for nationalism, and particularly the extraordinary attempt by the “Yes” camp in Scotland to blame all the nation’s ills – whether financial failure or industrial decline, foreign policy adventurism or privatization,  inequality or political corruption – on “Westminster”.  As if no Scottish MP ever claimed expenses, or voted for the Iraq war.  As if Gordon Brown and Fred Goodwin were innocent in the financial crash.  What has been almost as pathetic has been the response of the “No” campaign, who have concentrated on the economic case against independence.

Now, I think the economic case against separation is formidable.  The idea of customs posts and immigration controls between Berwick and Carlisle appears ludicrous, but, er, that’s what it would mean, as the newly independent Scotland will not be allowed into the EU for at least five years.  To demand independence whilst asking to be dependent on another country’s financial policies (as the Nationalists appear to do, with their desire to hold on to the £ sterling) is bizarre.  To expect the English taxpayer to bankroll troubled Scottish banks is wishful thinking.  Work permits for Scottish workers in London ?  Silly objection, eh ?  Well, explain carefully why that would not be a consequence of independence.

But the point is that any divorce is about hearts as much as heads.  This is why the relentless emphasis by the No campaign on money has been so weak.  Think of it like a separation between two people.  As the disgruntled and disaffected wife/husband heads for the door, what effect will it have if the abandoned partner shouts “You needn’t expect any money from me” ?   Not much, in my view – and quite a bit less than “the kids will be desolate” or “we can work out our problems – tell me what they are for you – please let’s talk”.  Many “Yes” voters are repelled by inequalities, disgusted by attacks on public services, see no reason why we should be run by Etonians.  These are not at base financial issues.   I guess it is a sign of the Toryisation of modern Britain, the neo-liberal corporatism that dominates every debate, that Cameron and co cannot see that the Scottish voter may want to consider other things beside the size of their wallets.

Footnote: it’s ironic that it was Gordon Brown who realised this, and made a speech that many think was influential in swinging the voters away from separation.

This is a ramble, and it is one of the few occasions when I am glad I am not in charge of anything.

I forget who it was who, when asked why she wore black, said “I’m in mourning for the world”.  Edith Sitwell ?  Anyway, we should all be wearing black for such an appalling world.  It is chilling to note that the full awfulness of what is happening in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Central African Republic (more deaths than anywhere) and so on, is occurring on the anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.  We never bloody learn, do we, and some features (the idea that military power, or bombing, or police brutality can cow a civilian population into submission) didn’t work even on the Germans in 1945.  This latter idea is usually semi-racist.  “Our folk are indomitable” goes the argument “but if we dump a few more bombs on Dresden or Coventry, Tokyo or Guernica, Gaza or Aleppo, the other lot’s moral fibre will crumble”.

I once had a brief Twitter exchange with the Times columnist David Aaronovitch.  Mr Aaronovitch is a man of liberal instincts, of Blairite hue (still defends the Iraq War, which is at least consistent).  I just asked, inside the 140 characters, whether he ever had sneaking sympathy for the CIA men whose careers involved keeping unpleasant dictators in power because whatever replaced them was likely to be far worse.  He replied ‘no’, with insufficient consideration in my view.  There used to be an allegedly worldly wise expression that said “if you are right wing before you are twenty, you lack a heart; if you are left wing after forty, you lack a brain”.  Well, I guess I’m in the brain-lacking bunch; on social affairs, I remain a man of the left.  But maybe different rules apply for internal and external politics.  The interventionists now are right wingers, from Oliver North to George Bush and all stops in between.   In respect of these gents, I think you can say that if you leap into overseas military interventions after the age of forty, you are flying in the face of experience.  Police actions like Sierra Leone, OK.  Expelling invaders, like the First Gulf War, fine.  But Afghanistan (especially after arming the mujahidin for twenty years) ?  Whoever thought that was a good idea ?  And weren’t the messes of Egypt and Libya totally predictable ?

I’ve just finished “A Scandalous Man”, a decent beach-read book by the journalist Gavin Esler.  It’s based around the secrets of the Thatcher/Reagan years, with a touch of Oliver North, lots of Middle Eastern politics, some sex and not a few clichés.  One of the tired old intelligence guys revealed that the CIA was minded to blow up the plane that flew Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Iran in 1979: “think how many lives would have been saved” is the argument.  I leave that with your tender consciences.

What to do about Gaza ?  Don’t know.  I find it hard to believe that the amount of destruction is necessary.  Israeli sources say they’re retaliating against rocket fire, and so they are, but times change.  Modern equipment can say precisely where a rocket is fired from (that is, after all, a commonplace in war); it is plainly possible to target that area with a drone and take out the guilty.  Which would imply rather more precision than we are seeing from Israel.  On the other hand, much of the logic used in discourse is pretty flawed.  People contrast the number of Palestinians killed in the fray with the much lower number of Israelis.  But, er if the morality of a cause was determined by how many civilian victims dies, then remember the western allies killed over 1m Germans in air raid, against about 60,000 Britons.  Disproportionate, eh ?  I also note the thunderous silence of Arab governments about Hamas.  And those who decry collective punishment against a population are often the same ones who demand academic boycotts or trade disinvestment of Israel, which kill no-one but are about as collective as you can get.

The argument against the scale of Israel’s response is not that it is immoral, or a war crime (a term which has rather expanded its use since Oradour-sur-Glaine and Lidice), but that it is ill-advised.  At some point, Israel and Palestine will have to sit down and deliver a durable peace.  That will not be possible for as long as each side regards the others as murderous thugs.

One hundred years ago, the First World War started, leading to the deaths of nearly 40 million people*, and setting off events that led to the Bolshevik Revolution, the present day Middle East and ultimately Hitler and the Second World War.  It was a historical cataclysm.  Humanity had experience of wars of stunning dreadfulness before, of course.  The Thirty Years War, the Dutch Revolt, you name ‘em.   But these were localized.  WW1 caused suffering the world over – vast losses in East Africa, for example – to presage the genuine world-wideness of the Second World War. The Spanish ‘flu pandemic, helped by starvation and exhaustion, killed another 50 million.

So how does George Osborne commemorate the event in today’s Financial Times ? With an article praising the civil servants and bankers who worked in London to preserve the financial system.  At first, I thought this was an extract from the Onion, but no.  Our Chancellor genuinely thinks he is naming the hidden heroes of the Great War.  You couldn’t, as they say, make it up.

*including my great uncle Frederick Daly, of the Canadian Infantry, killed in 1917 and buried near Arras.