Essentially, it’s all our fault ..
Posted by maesgwyn in Philosophy, Politics - UK, Zeitgeist on June 12th, 2009
Jean-Paul Sartre had it right, though it’s not my intention to appease the cheese-eating surrender monkeys - after all, most of their philosophy is predicated upon the idea that smoking Gauloises is hip. And so is eating compost, mes amis (I speak as one who once lost his sense of taste for 24 hours after smoking trop de French fags … but that’s another story). But good ole JPS (note: cigarette related witticism) said that existence preceded essence and unless you’re a God-botherer, what’s to argue about? Our souls, our selves, are the product of our inherited nature and our experience. ‘Inherited nature’, of course, comes a little before experience in the dictionary of character acquisition but don’t assume you’d end up with much of a personality if you grew up in a barrel - rather we’re talking about the subtle spin your instincts and of course your hormones give to (and here I invent a new philosophical term) wh’appen.
Wh’appen is what shapes you, brothers, and that’s the problem with the new ruling class. The tea-leaf politicians ranted about so eloquently on this site - the bankers and traders - the spin-doctors and other plunderers of the public purse are doing what they were brought up to do - programmed to do. Empowered by the rise of education as a means to advancement (instead of heredity or trade), the former ’middle’ class scooped the jackpot and assumed they deserved it. This they did because the mechanics of getting and spending formed the milieu of their upbringing. The old rich never counted their money - perhaps they weren’t clever enough. But we - ‘cos it’s us, you and me I’m talking about - we were selected, by scholarship and exhibition, tested by examination, honed by university and finally ejected into a world run by our near-peers with the mandate to fill our boots. Our parents had carefully costed their lives; not parsimoniously because they too lived in a time of rising plenty but with that attention to detail that comes from having, in Harold Macmillan’s words, never had it so good. We took that careful accountancy and applied it to the business of making some serious money - as we applied, too, our trained intellects to the same task. Small wonder then, that the complexity of late 20th century financial instruments exceeded anything that had gone before. The clever piggies were taking their turn at the trough.
But the clever piggies lacked insouciance, they lacked a piratical swagger, they lacked a sense of fun. They, above all, had been raised to know the value of money. In the South of England for almost thirty years now the standard topic of dinner party conversation has been the price of things - houses above all, because house price speculation was (is?) a monster source of yet more dosh. The piggies love their houses. And then their cars, their white goods, their furniture …
It’s not an accident that one of my contemporaries at a ‘great’ University was once the highest claimer of expenses among his cadre of Labour MPs. He was a very clever piggy. But I would maintain that he also had, at least to begin with, a genuine sense of obligation, a wish to do his duty for the toiling masses …. except there are, when you look, no toiling masses. Only the uneducated failures upon whom the system which manifestly rewards the deserving (ie, us) has pronounced its verdict. So the piggy shrugs his porcine shoulders and leaves the great unwashed to its drug dealing and drive by shootings, and concentrates once and for all upon that most excellent of causes, himself. And in this he is enabled to go forward without the pricking of conscience, because he has been formed to expect the world’s bounty; to cost it, quantify and enjoy it soullessly, his essence being that of the money changers in the temple, quite unworthy of Paradise.
TUPE or not TUPE?
Posted by taff in Organisations, Zeitgeist on June 10th, 2009
TUPE is a UK legal framework governing what happens when an organisation transfers some of its employees into the employ of another. This kind of thing happens a lot when, for example, a big bank decides to concentrate on its ‘core values’ and outsource part or all of its IT function. Often, as part of the deal, the outsourcer will pick up, or ‘TUPE’ the bank’s IT staff. Where TUPE comes in is that it offers transferred staff some protected employment rights – their new employer cannot offer them poorer terms and conditions than those provided by their original employer. The devil is in the detail, of course, and the new employer has many techniques available to degrade its new employees’ terms and conditions over time – to make them cheaper, which of course is what all this is about
But actually, TUPE is not what this article is about – not directly. In their ever-increasing search for reduced costs, many, many large businesses are handing over supposedly ‘non core’ business functions to third-party suppliers, who also frequently pick up some ‘non core’ staff via TUPE. But think, for a moment, how this is leaving the businesses themselves. Leaner and meaner, no doubt – but also more homogeneous – stuffed to the gills now with just ‘core’ people. Underneath all this short-term money-juggling, there lurks a tragedy
Every company needs its core people, but it also benefits from its mavericks, the people without MBAs who are possibly specialists in support services or have other competencies – like IT, or cleaning. By stripping out such folks via TUPE, an organisation sterilises its gene pool, increasing the probability that ‘rising through the ranks’ simply means replacing one faceless bureaucrat with his or her genetic twin. When times are changing, adding a little spice to the organisational mix – maybe by promoting a capable specialist manager into a more senior general management role – can revitalise a tired and failing organisation. But the outsourced organisation has already eliminated many of these potential outliers – the outsourced organisation has killed too many of its babies.
Lest we forget.
Posted by taff in Organisations, Politics - UK, Zeitgeist on May 20th, 2009
John Prescott - “Every expense was entirely consistent within the rules of the House of Commons on claiming expenses at the time.”
A spokesman for Mr [Shaun] Woodward - “Mr Woodward’s allowance claims are published every year and they are within the rules and guidelines.”
Caroline Flint - “At each stage I sought advice from the House of Commons, and never sought to make personal gains from public funds.”
Margaret Beckett - “… gardening bills were submitted by mistake because sometimes things are done in a rush, at the last minute, when you’re busy.”
Alistair Darling - “The claims were made within House of Commons rules which were designed to reflect the fact that MPs have to meet the cost of living in two places.”
A spokesman for David Miliband - “At every stage, David Miliband followed the procedures and rules as laid out by the parliamentary authorities.”
A spokesman for Miss [Hazel] Blears - “All Hazel Blears’ claims for allowances are in line with the rules, and have been approved by the fees office. To do her job as MP for Salford, she has to have accommodation in London to be near the House of Commons. This accommodation includes a bed with a mattress, blankets and pillows, and a television.” John Mann - “Capital gains tax is going to come back and haunt some people, there is no question. I tell you what - any Labour MP who isn’t paying capital gains tax should not be a Labour MP. Tax avoidance in the Labour Party is unacceptable, whatever the system. People need to be honest with themselves and honest with the country. If capital gains tax needs paying, pay it.” She announces that she would be paying £13332 to HM Revenue and Customs to cover capital gains tax on a London flat she sold.
Lord Mandelson - “The work done was necessary maintenance. All claims made were reasonable and submitted consistent with Parliamentary rules.”
Jack Straw (in writing) - “Sorry for that … accountancy does not appear to be my strongest suit”.
The item not accepted by the Fees Office was claimed in error and is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the only two occasions in the last twelve years when my expenses claims have been queried by them.”
A spokesman for Mr [Keith] Vaz - “Stanmore is not central London. Like many MPs, he has a flat in central London that is close to the House of Commons.”
She added that Mr Vaz had changed the designation of his second home “for personal reasons”, and that his London flat “was not available for his use between May 2007 and May 2008″. “Mr Vaz’s claims have always been in accordance with the spirit and rules of the Green Book,” she said. “If they were not within the rules the claims would not have been paid.”
Phil Hope said that he had to have “somewhere to live in London in order to carry out my duties in Parliament and for which these costs have been incurred. I have acted with the full approval of the fees office to whom those claims were submitted and have acted entirely within the rules laid down by Parliament.” Then on the 15th May, he announced that he would write a cheque for the money he received to refurbish a two-bedroom flat in south London.
A spokesman for Greg Barker - “All claims made since 2001 have been entirely legitimate and within the rules and approved by the fees office. His main home, against which he has never claimed expenses, remains in the constituency.”
Margaret Moran failed to comment.
Harriet Harman - “MPs make the claim under the system and under the system it’s for the House of Commons fees office to decide whether it comes within the rules.”
Stephen Byers - “All of the expenses I have received are within the rules and have been approved by the House of Commons authorities.”
John Reid - was unavailable for comment.
David Willetts - “… the Commons authorities were right to reject his claims for a shed base and dog pen.”
Chris Grayling - “A second home enables me to meet those commitments. I have always been entirely open to my constituents about this.”
“The fees office informed me the rules had changed and I fully accepted their judgement. Therefore, no claim was made.”
George Osborne, explaining why he claimed more than £400 for the cost of a chauffeur to take him from Cheshire, where he has his constituency home, to London - “[I had attended] a constituency function in the evening and had to be in London very early the next morning”.
Alan Duncan - “Everything I have claimed has been legitimate and approved by the fees office.” Later - “The whole House of Commons, I think, has to apologise for the mess that has arisen. These allowances cannot continue like this.” David Cameron then ordered him to repay more than £5000 in gardening costs.
Andrew Lansley, - “the work carried out on his cottage was required to maintain the exterior of the property and was within the rules”. It might have been, but it didn’t stop David Cameron telling him to repay £2600 claimed for home improvements.
Michael Gove - “The items were bought from a mainstream retailer and when I was informed that they fell outside the range of allowable items I accepted that ruling without complaint.” On 15th May, The Telegraph reported that after being ordered to do so by David Cameron, Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary will repay £7,000 in furniture expenses.
David Heathcote-Amory - “I confirm that I claimed for gardening costs for my second home, and these were paid by the fees office.”
Michael Spicer - “It would have been more accurate if I had defined this item as ‘maintenance’ rather than gardening.”
Douglas Hogg - the man who thought the taxpayers should pay for cleaning his moat: “Turning to my own ACA claims; they were the subject of prior consultation with the fees office and I therefore hope and believe that they comply with both the letter and the spirit of the rules.”
Bob Marshall Andrews - “technically this expenditure should probably have been split” between his second home and office expenses.”
… to be continued.
Rotten.
Posted by taff in Politics - UK on May 15th, 2009
Dear oh dear oh dear. Caught with their hands in the sweet jar again.
Non UK readers deserve a quick explanation. Under some rather new legislation called the Freedom of Information Act, government authorities were asked to reveal MPs’ (Members of Parliament) expense reports. They cried and they kicked and they clawed, but eventually, they had to shamefacedly show what they had in their sticky hands. It turns out that many MPs, under the pretext of remaining ‘within the rules’ (… a recurring leitmotif of this saga) had been claiming for rather more than they were strictly entitled to. Rather more than could decently be described as wholly and necessarily part of the job. Things like chandeliers, repairs to a moat, and refunds of mortgage payments that never existed. That kind of thing.
Naturally, in the middle of a recession, Joe Public isn’t too happy about all this, and ordinary peoples’ opinions of politicians (never high) has sunk to an all-time low. It’s been horrifying to see slimeballs squirming under interview as they attempt to explain that their recent discovery of an ‘administrative error’ - sometimes resulting in a repayment of taxpayers’ money - had nothing to do with the potential disclosure of their claim in the UK media. For others, chanting ‘It was all within the rules’ seemed to offer some succour. Poor things.
‘It was all within the rules’ is not a million miles away from ‘I was only following orders’ … and we know what lies at the end of that particular idealogical cul-de-sac.
Talent. The cause of the global financial meltdown.
Posted by taff in Economy, Organisations, TV on April 22nd, 2009
I remember listening to Lee - the ultimate winner - in last year’s UK series of The Apprentice. He was debriefing one of the members of his team and screaming at her “If you don’t perform, you’re out of here. You’ve just got to perform!” Strangely, Lee wouldn’t (or couldn’t) decompose perform into one or more less complex goals to help her see the wood for the trees. ‘Performing’ it seemed, was the only result that mattered, if you couldn’t do it you were out, but he certainly wasn’t going to take the time to explain how to do it. Lee’s behaviour came with a whiff of bullshit because I don’t believe he knew enough about the problem space and its dynamics to be able to help his team member tackle it - he knew what results he wanted (… in this case, he simply wanted to win), but not how to get them - he didn’t have a clue.
I have a worrying suspicion that the same sort of phenomenon is very much alive across the world’s economies today. In today’s business ghetto-speak, people who get results have talent. Pressed into service in the corporate world, talent becomes a ruthless obsession with exceeding short-term targets - usually financial - combined with a disregard for doing what’s right but can’t be diced and sliced into an accountant’s spreadsheet - a disregard for what can’t be measured easily. In 2002, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker (still online) in which he eloquently questioned this notion of talent - immediately in the wake of the Enron debacle, he wasn’t short of source material. In the words of one former Enron manager commenting as his company hired McKinsey to identify new talent: “They were always around. They were looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box itself that needed fixing.”
Thirty years ago I attended a management training course where it was explained that part of the art of good management was the ability to divide your attention appropriately between three arenas - the group, the task and the individual - with most smarts being awarded when you could do it in just the right proportions for the job at hand.
All this is in the past. So what light can a year-old UK TV reality show, a New Yorker article from 2002 and a fossilised management training course shine upon the global economic crisis? No doubt the people who came up with the idea of securitising bad debts were regarded as talented. No doubt even, that the people who took bundles of bad debts and securitised the bundles themselves were thought to be talented. And the evidence shows that the short–term results were impressive - that these people performed. There’s nothing wrong, they say, with packaging up heterogeneous home mortgages into uniform securities that can be exchanged and loaned by banks. But however much you stir it, a bucket of shit is still a bucket of shit. The evidence also indicates - although the jury is still out - that many of the very senior decision makers hadn’t a clue what was inside the poison pills their subordinates were so productively concocting. They were like Lee in The Apprentice - they knew what results they wanted, but didn’t know (or didn’t care) how they were achieved. They were blind to everything except their aspirations as individuals within their intoxicating corporate cultures. Well, the whole world has come to care how those results were achieved, because by winning, a high-priesthood elite of financial goons and technocrats has set the global economy back for at least a decade. Talent. What a waste of a word.
The world’s box needs fixing.
What’s in a wiggle?
Posted by taff in Amazing things on April 18th, 2009
I think it’s truly amazing that if you stick a long wire up into the air, and wiggle a voltage along its length, it can send music to people hundreds of miles away. And this isn’t even a modern miracle - it was a miracle way before I was born. Better still, it’s not even a miracle of man’s invention (… and there are zillions of those) - it’s more a miracle of man’s discovery (electromagetic waves have existed since the universe was very young).
Culture at the speed of light
Posted by taff in TV, Technology, Zeitgeist on April 17th, 2009
I’ve just finished looping that video for what seems like forever on Youtube. Yes, that video. Like everyone, I’ve been uplifted, astonished and emotionally discombobulated by the wonderful Susan Boyle.
Seeking relief from an overdose of tear-induced dehydration, I decided to retreat into the words of one of my favourite technology writers - Robert X. Cringely. For over ten years, he wrote (among other things) an online column for PBS in the USA. More recently, he’s gone wild and set up his own independent blog-format online column here. For all this time he’s had the inside track on some of the world’s key technology scoops, an uncanny ability to identify startups before they go stratospheric, and the journalistic freedom to paint the world as he sees it. Bob Cringely has met and interviewed the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and the network-centric world we now inhabit. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are the everyday players on the real-world stage Bob sets up around himself.
Imagine my surprise as I scuttled from the mawkish indulgence of Youtube to catch up with the latest technology opinions in Bob’s latest column. Yes, even Bob Cringely is blogging about Susan Boyle! Do read it - it’s a great column, one I wish I could have written myself except for the fact that Bob had the idea first, and is a much better writer.
The point is - only technology and the Internet can make it possible for Bob to be even aware of a dumpy spinster from Scotland who competed in the first round of a UK TV talent show.
Culture at the speed of light. What next?
Aliens in our midst?
Posted by taff in Movie moments, Politics - UK on April 16th, 2009
I really liked the aliens in The Fifth Element. Most of the time they were able to disguise their hideous faces and pass themselves as perfectly nondescript human beings. They were able to walk among us. But every so often, some angry alien racial trait made them lose control and reverse-blip back into their natural slavering monstrous forms.
Here in the UK, something similar has been going on. We’re in the post-coital afterglow of a tragic government scandal. A senior government special advisor (… known as a spad in the trade) accidentally fumbled some of his most creative emails into unintended hands. They were published, and the rest is history. Did the emails reveal that loyal labour brainiacs had formulated a robust and compelling response to the global financial crisis? No. Did they identify fatal flaws in the Tory opposition’s policies? No. Instead, they formed the core of a cunningly-crafted plan to spread dirty stories about opposing politicians in a labour party blog. They purported to reveal that various public figures were infected by STDs, had consorted with prostitutes, had been having sex with other public figures (… this one involved a carpet), and had been involved with commercial interests that stood to benefit from government decisions.
Forget that we’re in the midst of a deep recession. Forget that the naughtiest of a veritable playground full of very naughty special advisors was being paid a six-figure salary out of taxpayer’s money to come up with this stuff. Forget even that the culprit reported directly to Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. What frightens me is that I think we’ve just had a movie moment. Just like the aliens in The Fifth Element, we’ve had an accidental glimpse of the UK establishment with its trousers down - a moment of unguarded truth. Soon, they will regain their composure, cover their private parts and move on. Soon, they will be able to walk among us once again.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Afterthought: The term spad has another meaning. In British railway terminology it stands for Signal Passed At Danger - a very unwelcome event when an out-of-control train travels outside approved boundaries into possible danger. Do you think the two usages could be, by any chance, related?
A first movie-moment
Posted by taff in Movie moments on April 16th, 2009
Setting up this blog, I searched for the precise point where I needed to insert the Google analytics tracking script. Magic, I found it. Right above it, the developer had left a teasing comment that - in a way that might become clear as the blog develops - provides a theme for the whole experiment.
The comment said “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?”.