Thank Heaven for the distractions at home

After painful and bitter experience of trying to be a normal working human being, homo sapiens officiosus I have to fess that I just canna do it.

Robert Crampton's apologia in the Times was useful reading. To me homeworking is not the facility to do what you want with your daily browsing, Youtubing, Facebooking Spotify without IT department restrictions or the puritanical imperative to be seen to be hard at it, regardless of whatever is really going on. It's just the why do so many of us restrict our lives as wage slaves operating on terms that don't favour flexibility, fun or freedom. Probably because it's stable, regular and without the dread fear of trying to freelance your way out of a black hole in a bid to create abundance...

But all the same, the trouble with home working is that once reacquainted with what passes for the real world of work it's too late. You've seen through the curtian of looking good at all times. Futzing around on the PC isn't good. Internet addiction and the homeworker are bedfellows as is the propensity to be distracted but this is true of the work office also. It's just that you have co-workers to judge you. Homeworkers have to be more true to themselves and their inner environment.

So working through a list of civil service departments, agencies, quangos and public corporations (but only after my morning plough through the Politics Home and Epolitix newsletters) and the dread of a huge OJEU trawl of government tenders is hard going.

I can't tell you how wonderful it feels to be invited by the wonderful Dr Tuppy Owens the inspiration and leader for 30 years of the most remarkable charity ever the Outsiders to do some publicity research of top notch amusement value. Watch this space or come to the Troxy at Limehouse on February 10th 2010.

Wise Spending - A Guide to UK Public Sector Insurgency

This year HMG plan to spread out £620 billion in expenditure

Going through an audit and doomsday type update of central and local government organisations for Stone Tiger it's not hard to see why.

What can be quantified, no matter how ghastly, can be seemingly controlled.

So what have I learned. Well although English local government has seen early evidence of amalgamation with district shire councils being absorbed in Cornwall, Shropshire and Northumberland, in central government it's a different story.

Although the quango cull seems to have begun, much civil service function has been hived off to areas that can be kept clear of overall head count. However, it's not hard to see through the smoke and mirrors (a phrase deriving from the early days of the Ghost Train, precursor of carnival and theme park rides the world over).

We can still find our dear old friend The British Potato Council hidden with the other food levy boards inside the Russian doll which is the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board.

Although raised for obvious sniggers, this is a serious point for those losing concentration at the back of the room.

Especially given today's news that Lord Voldemort's desires for the New Labour Government to launch an insurgency operation agains the behemothic state sector it has developed and grown by the expedient of throwing countless millions in the Comprehensive Spending Reviews from 2000 onwards. (Goya's unsettling image of Saturn devouring his children comes to mind at this juncture.....)

Indeed, although we are protected by not one but two audit bodies in the shape of the NAO and Audit Commission, parallels with the aftermath of Iraq in 2003 are quite promising. And here I would draw your attention to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's account of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

One gets the feeling that back in these safe shores we've seen a fair few shytery Custer Battles type outfits in the consultancy and outsourcing industries palling up to win contracts that couldn't or shouldn't have been delivered. It's not the process of outsourcing that is largely at stake, but the need for the activity to be managed and ordered by or on behalf of the state in the first instance that has to be questioned.

Just think about everyone suddenly getting present to the post-Soham rationale for creating the Independent Safeguarding Authority...

Now the 'bonfire of quangos' has become such a lifeless trope promised by every contender to power. It simply never happens. The machine don't give a damn.

But with fiscal deficit looming, Whitehall delaying all it can until safely in pre-election purdah maybe there is some hope.

If only the people of this country could be liberated to smash, take back or destroy the wasteful apparatus of state machinery, in the wilful spirit of the liberated Iraqi people in spring 2003.

Do you think what I'm thinking?

Brown's is the new Black Dog

We learn of the Prime Minister's state of mental health in good time for the prolonged run up to the party conference season. And it's not an edifying national conversation.

The political class is merely a reflection of the environment in the same way our financiers and footballers are. A cursory glance at what the press deigns to publish into their behaviour as human being is a fearful record. In this we would see a world of deep, dark psychopathological symptoms running the whole gamut from city high flyers driven to infanticide to the captain of the South Africa bound England football team publicly urinating in lap-dancing joints.

But money, celebrity and power are involved and wielded. So in this case our common perception is that such people are successfully operating on a plane far beyond any ordinary level. And because of this fact we don't consider the immense anger, greed and stupidity exhibited when things don't go wrong.. We follow the money and the power because this is the true measure of success and failure in the reality that society has agreed.

That a politician of Gordon Brown's standing and experience should be suffering from profound depression is understandable. His own demeanour would have pre-disposed him to such suffering in any profession. But given a lifetime's heavy politicking, the incessant demands of the job, how could a post-holder not but exist in a state of perpetual jet lag and chronic circadian dysrhythmia?

Maybe in such cases it's best to be a dreamer. Last week on the Today programme there was a debate between Max Hastings and Dr Nigel Knight argued as to the effectiveness of Churchill as war leader.

Of course, but don't say it out loud, in time of war paranoid schizophrenia is nationalised. Having lived an inner fantasy life in which he saw himself as coming to the rescue of the nation, Churchill was well rehearsed for his final hour in 1940. And good thing too. What the time demanded was that England took action and fought, no matter what. The rational course then would have been a version of surrender and therefore lunacy.

In a famous essay psychologist Anthony Storr described the inner life of Churchill. In Storr’s view, “it is probable that England owed her survival in 1940 to this inner world of make-believe. The kind of inspiration with which Churchill sustained the nation is not based on judgment, but on an irrational conviction independent of factual reality. Only a man convinced that he had an heroic mission, who believed that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, he could yet triumph, and who could identify himself with a nation's destiny could have conveyed his inspiration to others."

Orwell had it when he said: “In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

Maybe, for the time being, the nation has the Prime Minister it deserves?

What that war picture from Afghanistan means to me

I have a son, a seven year old called Josh who lives very happily in a town called Surprise, Arizona.

Like all parents or those who care deeply for someone in their life, the thought of seeing your children suffer or face harm is indescribable and unimaginable. The parents of Josh Bernard have witnessed the AP image of their son's death broadcast around the US press and the world.

Lance Corporal Bernard, aged 21 was hit in the leg by a Rocket Propelled Grenade. Lying on his side in great agony and unable to breathe, his assault rifle stands useless within his grasp; one leg has been blown clean off and the mangled remains of another emerging from a patch of red gore. We see two fellow soldiers in blurred action attending to him.

Understandably, Lance Corporal Bernard's family did not wish this harrowing picture to feature on the AP Wire.

However, I am glad that the image has been used. Not in the sense that it bolsters argument for or against the continued involvement of NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Like all great pictorial documenation the judgment of the camera is simple. The truth is self-evident and before our eyes. Human beings in the twenty first century should not be committed to inflicting such suffering upon each other.

Josh Bernard was in the words of his father a shy, humble, unassuming young man with strong values of service and personal honour. Although the use of this picture has caused additional grief to their family, I hope that in time they will see or derive some personal benefit from sharing their loss with the wider world and the Josh they knew and loved.

Where does this leave me on the other side of the Atlantic? In heartfelt honesty, I would like my son to grow up in a world where young American men don't have to travel vast distances to kill and be killed by other young men.

Auden wrote : "To ask the hard question is easy"; never more so than in the globalised, intrinsically interconnected world of instant communications, information and response of today.

The responsibility lies on all of us to consider and take action as individuals, communities, and societies. Wherever we are, whatever our circumstances and background, what am I doing, and what are we doing for the sake of contributing to a peaceful world?

The 20th century and the first disastrous early years of this century have sign-posted where the answers won't come from. If we don't know the answers, we certainly know the dead ends.

The solution won't be more politics and more money, no matter how they are painted, where they claim to derive from or what hopes they are sold on.

The answer lies in our hearts if we did but know it.

Retreads - Why The Public Sector Buys Dud Stuff

Have just read the Joseph Rowntree report Database State

It's a brilliant piece of research into how we fell into the a public sector surveillance quagmire and holds out a rope to haul the state clear out of the mire.

Database State gives a short yet full analysis into central government's obsession in recent years with investing in IT programmes that rely on holding, storing and in many cases mismanaging our sensitive personal information.

It also recommends, using a simple traffic light system (red, green amber) based on compliance with international standards on privacy, anonymity and respect for human rights which among our existing national systems should be scrapped, changed or left alone.

So we could say it was the Blairs that funked it - being dined down the river by the IT lobby in that crepuscular interval after the dotcom crash and before Iraq. This was about the time they got to grips with the fact they were meant to be in control of events as well as the reporting of them. I remember seeing David Blunkett and his Home Office officials being dined by ID card lobbyits in Gran Paradiso that unlikely outpost of Italian charm south of Victoria Station on Wilton Road. And lo it came to pass...

But enlightenment has come. And the true nature of all government phenomena comes down to this. If you want to know how to sell to the public sector, just look to what has proved a recent palpable failure in the private sector and pizazz - flog it for all it's worth! Because THEY WILL BUY IT. THEY WILL IMPLEMENT IT. ON A NATIONAL SCALE. AND THE TAXPAYER WILL FUND IT. Yes, you see my dears. We all win in the end!


"Britain is greatly afflicted by government naivety in purchasing. Many departments outsourced too much of their IT in the 1980s, and now do not have people with the skills to manage complex procurements. One noticeable effect is that the UK public sector always appears to get sold whatever technology or methodology is just going out of fashion in the private sector: business process re-engineering, which was popular in business in the 1980s, arrived in government in the 1990s (contributing among other things to the London Ambulance Service disaster); PKI was the big fashion in the late 1990s but vanished with the collapse of Baltimore in 2000, only to resurrect itself phoenix-like as the identity management programme; and customer relationship management, which private firms are now starting to see through, is selling well in Whitehall and local government. Again and again, the state gets palmed off with private-sector retreads." (page 46, Database State)

So if this is the ultimate reality of public sector purchasing, what duds from the commercial world can we expect to see making the headlines in three or four years time? Answers on a postcard please!

Quangomania

So it's time for David Cameron and the Conservatives to spell out just how they'll deal with the steaming quagmire of public finances they expect to inherit it a year or two's time.

In the medieval world, the concept of a 'damnosa hereditas' or accursed legacy was well established. Why aspire to wear the heavy crown king when you could enjoy your wealth and leisure with some other chump serving as the political vegetable.

King Dave's approach to tackling public debt was heralded in the Independent's piece on Quangos. Essentially there's nothing much new to report to Quangophiles.

Cabinet Office aren't printing the full list of bodies in a single easy to digest publication but claim there are only 790 on the block compared to 857 in 1997 . We now think they are spending/wasting £35 billion of hard earned tax payers cash. We're not entirely sure what they all do to justify their existence. But the good news is that the British Potato Council is still levying benigthed farmers to pay for national chip week - the highlight of the national culinary calendar.

Dan Lewis from the Economic Research Council is right in saying these should be a 'tremendous reform opportunity' for an incoming administration. In business speak they are low-hanging fruit but in the past they have demonstrated the persistent and resistant powers of a leyandii bush.

The trick will be to arrive with a comprehensive and plan to determine which functions can be outsourced, privatised or abolished and what if anything needs to be created in their place. Sharing this with the transition teams would be helpful.

On the vexed issues of public sector salaries which Cameron touched upon maybe a ceiling to be set, especially with so many public officials earning more than the Prime Minister. Either that or double the P.M.'s basic. Try that if you like

Hat-tip to Raheem for the cheeky pay slip of Ofcom's Ed Richards- worth every penny of £417,581.

A slandrous headline. But we salute it's indefatigability!

George Galloway stoned in Egypt

Apparently some noisome Egyptian youthful ruffians threw shards and rubble at his mini-bus. Respect and nuff said!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5872129.ece