Week 30 2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 Once again – Public Sector to the Rescue!

   Why on earth, I wonder, is the present government so obsessed with the idea that ‘the private sector’ can always perform more economically and efficiently than ‘the public sector’?  Public authorities, they believe, should no longer actually provide the services for which they are responsible (refuse collection and disposal, maintenance of public buildings, parks and recreational facilities, care of the disabled and elderly, highway maintenance, catering and routine cleaning of schools and hospitals to name but a few)  but merely ‘facilitate’ them. All these services must be put out to competitive tender and given to the contractor who undertakes to perform them at the lowest cost.

The government is continually trying to extend the field of the private sector further (into the provision of health, policing and educational services, for instance) and to reduce that of public authorities.

This devalues or undervalues the loyalty that long-serving staff feel towards an employer who treats them fairly and respects their expertise and experience. It undervalues too the pride that permanent employees take in making sure that their canteen or staff restaurant provides the very best meals in the most welcoming atmosphere, that their ward is the cleanest and neatest in the hospital, that their park is always safe and welcoming to visitors, or that the service that they render the public is the very best of which they are capable.

The prime motive of private contractors is not to give the best possible service but to maximise profits by giving as little as they can get away with, for as much as they can get. Cost effectiveness, profitability, productivity, the three persone of Mammon’s unholy trinity, are the only criteria of the market place – and of the economic jungle.

            Over and over again we have seen the results of this.   Private enterprise has failed to set or mark examination papers efficiently or in the time required.  Private contractors have failed to pay out badly needed grants on time.  Public money poured into banks has been squandered, and call centres have been located in distant lands and staffed with people who can barely speak English – for no other reason than that their labour is cheap and they are prepared to put up with appalling living and working conditions.  The private sector was unable to cope with the effects of the nation-wide foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.   The public sector (the army) was called in to help clear up the mess.

            The latest example of this, and the one with the potential to produce the most catastrophic results, is of G4S the private contractors employed to ensure security at the 2012 Olympic Games that are about to begin.  Many people, it seems, had been well aware of the inadequacies of this private organisation but the Home Secretary remained blissfully ignorant until the last moment.  Then, just days before the Olympic Games were due to begin, she called on the public sector – war-weary troops from a government-depleted army many of whom were denied their well-earned leave  - to step into the breach and, as Houseman put it in quite a different context, 'save the sum of things for pay’.  For army pay, of course, not for the millions of pounds that private sector entrepreneurs G4S had been expecting.

            In Manchester and other urban areas accommodating Olympic athletes or otherwise associated with the Olympics, where G4S claimed to have recruited and trained sufficient private security staff, only a fraction of those needed reported for duty when required*.   Their place too has had to be taken by the public sector, by already hard-pressed police officers (also from government-depleted forces) working overtime to remedy private sector failure.

There are already plans to privatise some aspects of police work.  No-one, as far as I know, has yet thought of privatising the armed forces. It wouldn’t surprise me though to learn that there are those who are wondering if re-introducing 17^th century style privateering might prove to be a cost-effective way of strengthening our government-depleted Royal Navy!

*It was interesting to hear Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary and Minister in charge of the Olympics, making excuses for G4S on tv. He didn’t feel that there was anything particularly surprising or specially reprehensible in a private contractor promising a hundred trained operatives when required and then supplying only twenty or thirty.  This was, of course, the same Jeremy Hunt who hadn't noticed that his principal adviser was virtually on kissing terms with News International.

Preventing an Olympic terrorist attack!

          A warship in the Thames, anti-aircraft defences on the flat roofs of high buildings in the vicinity of the stadium, fighter aircraft patrolling the skies, thousands of troops on patrol – I am not at all sure that if I lived in London, particularly in the stadium area, I would be sleeping more easily in my bed in the knowledge of all the precautions against terrorist attack that are being taken.

            We are told that if an unknown plane approached the Olympic zone and refused to obey orders to change course ‘lethal force’ would be used against it; it would be either shot down or blown up.  And what, one wonders, would happen to the bits of the suspect plane?  We haven’t yet, as far as I know, perfected a means of vaporising them so we can only assume that they would fall on the buildings and people below, also possibly with lethal force!

             I think that if I were the commander of a terrorist gang, intent on having maximum ill-effect at the time of the Olympic Games, I’d give East London and all other Olympic venues a complete miss.   I would think that, with all eyes and all counter-terrorism measures concentrated on the games, this would be the best moment to strike at  quite different but prestigious targets in East Anglia, the Midlands or the North.

 Britain’s railway termini and airports, armed forces bases and depots, and our power stations might well be considered vulnerable.  I hope therefore that, in the concern about the protection of the Olympic Stadium and facilities in London, the defences of these possible targets have not been forgotten.

The Chilcot Enquiry

             The Leveson Enquiry, the revelations of jiggery pokery (I don’t recall ever before using that expression in a blog, but I can’t think of a better one!) in the world of finance, and the failures of G4S, have all but driven the Chilcot Enquiry out of our minds.   This, you’ll recall, was into the causes and conduct of the Iraq War and its aftermath, and ran from 2009 till February 2011.   I understand that the Chilcot Committee’s report is now almost complete and that it runs to two million words.  For those like me who can’t even imagine what two million words look like, it is roughly twice as long at Tolstoy’s mammoth historical novel War and Peace!

            It had been confidently expected that the report would be published this summer. We now learn though that this will be delayed for at least a year because of a dispute about the inclusion of just a few thousand words!  It is unfortunate that these are the words that many of us are particularly eager to read.

            I am not greatly interested in the conduct of the war or even about the mismanagement of its aftermath.   I do know that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and autocratic dictator with many innocent deaths on his conscience.  I am  quite sure though that he had no time at all for Al Qaeda, nor had they any time for him.  Consequently he had played no part whatsoever in the 9/11 terror attacks on the USA.

            Furthermore I was sure that at the time of our invasion of Iraq he had no weapons of mass destruction, and I am convinced that Tony Blair and George Bush Junior were well aware of this too. Yet a majority of MPs and a large section of the national press were persuaded to support the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks on the USA and that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that threatened Britain.

            How did this mass deception happen?   It resulted in thousands of deaths and many thousands more damaged lives, the almost total destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, a boost in the recruitment of volunteers for terrorist organisations, and the beginning of ethnic and sectarian acts of terror and violence that still continue  (to this very week in fact!)

            I think it likely that emails and recorded conversations between the American President, George W. Bush and Tony Blair the British Prime Minister during the weeks immediately prior to the invasion may help to throw light on the matter.   A record of these exists and has been seen by the Chilcot Enquiry Committee.  It had been intended to publish them with the final report – but the all-powerful Cabinet Office has objected. It is thought that public access to those emails and the records of those conversations might harm USA/UK relations and inhibit the future sharing of intelligence information.  Tough luck!   If USA/UK good relations depend upon the British electorate continuing in ignorance of a conspiracy of deception, then those good relations are hardly worth having.  Nor is it of any value to us to be permitted to share lies and carefully selected half-truths.

            If for no other reason that Tony Blair is now our ‘special peace envoy’ in the Middle East (it was rather like making one of the Kray brothers a Chief Constable!) we are surely entitled to know what he was discussing with George Bush immediately before he persuaded a majority of MPs to support the invasion of Iraq in our name.

Week 29 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

An Ageing Population!

          As a nonagenarian I have a direct interest in the government’s plans to meet the needs of an ageing population.  I don’t really feel that I have so far been a very great burden on the state or the local authority.  I have cavity wall infilling to my bungalow, double glazing, a solar panel to augment my gas hot water and central heating system and an electric mobility scooter to give me mobility, all at my own expense.  I did take advantage of a government grant to have my roof space properly insulated and Essex County Council Social Services have provided me with a handrail to help me make my way safely from my front door to my front garden path.

            My age and disabilities have obtained for me the lower rate of attendance allowance which helps with cleaning the bungalow, keeping the garden tidy and keeping my mobility scooter ‘on the road’.  And that is about it.  I am thankful that I have as yet needed neither domiciliary care nor residential care in a care home – and I very much hope that I never need either.

            That kind of care is expensive and the great debate among the politicians is how much they can expect old people to pay towards its cost.  Currently they have produced a plan for the future that could justifiably be called Much ado about Nothing, or at least about very little!  There must, so they are agreed, be a ‘ceiling’ to the amount the old person receiving care can be expected to pay towards its cost – but it’ll be another couple of years (just after the next General Election perhaps?) before they decide where that ‘ceiling’ should be.  Well, I am 91 and it doesn’t seem very likely that they’ll make up their minds in time for me to cheer……or otherwise!  

            One thing that has been resented by many old and disabled people has been the need to sell the family home, into which a lifetime’s savings may have been poured, to meet the cost of residential care.   The government has come up with a brilliant (well, they clearly think so) ground-breaking scheme to make this unnecessary.   Local authorities will now be required to make loans of the cost of care to care-home residents who apply for them.  These loans, plus reasonable interest, will be repayable only after the borrower’s death, and will be a charge on his or her estate.  Thus, say the government, care home residents will no longer need to sell their homes to pay the cost of care.

             I can see how the government and the care homes might benefit from such a scheme.  The money for care starts to come in directly the loan is approved without any tedious and uncertain business of selling the family home.  For the life of me though, I can’t see any advantage whatsoever for the old person involved.

            Why is it that most of us are so reluctant to sell our homes even when it is quite obvious that we’ll never be able to live in them independently again?  It is because those homes represent the greater part of our life’s savings.  We’d like to be able to pass them on to our heirs when the time comes.  This may be a thoroughly unreasonable, antisocial and irresponsible desire but it is surely a very natural and understandable one.

It is a desire that the government’s scheme does nothing to satisfy.  Our homes will still have to be sold when we die to repay those loans and – in addition - our heirs will have the extra burden of the interest payments that have accrued in the meantime.  They will be worse off than they would have been if the family home had been sold directly the old person had entered the care home.

            Finally – and I have only just learned this – like so many of the government’s brilliant new initiatives, there’s nothing new or ground-breaking about it.  Such a scheme already exists with just one difference; it provides that loans made by local authorities to pay care home fees and repayable only on the death of the home resident are interest free!

And the rest of us!

          The rest of us oldies – the ones who have managed to keep out of care homes and don’t need social services care in our homes – needn’t think that we are going to escape the attention of those posh boys who don’t know the price of milk. Perhaps it is fortunate that in the nature of things, none of us will have to put up with that attention for very long!

            A Conservative MP, and I’d be surprised if he is alone in this, has drawn attention to the benefits that we get for no other reason than the date on our birth certificates.  Free bus passes, free prescriptions, cut price (though not by much!) rail fares, generous winter fuel allowances; they should all be abolished or means tested.  In an ideal world, he says, it would be wonderful to be able to have all these universal benefits but, in the present economic climate, the country simply can’t afford them.   Funny thing though – he didn’t explain how it is that we can afford to cut the level of income tax for the wealthiest members of our society, those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year!

            We don’t live in an ideal world.  We never have done so and we never will – but that shouldn’t deter us from striving for one.  Even in an imperfect world it is astonishing what can be afforded when it is really needed.  In 1939, for example, the world was even less perfect than it is today.  Yet the government managed to afford millions of pounds every week for six years, in pursuit of the war.  Thousands of young men and women couldn’t afford to interrupt their early careers for six or seven years to help destroy Nazism and Fascism.  Yet we managed it.  Is it so unreasonable to expect that those of us who have survived and have paid (without either evasion or avoidance!) our taxes for over half a century and are still paying them, but  are now very old, should expect a share of the comforts of civilised life without having first to prove that we are desperately poor and in dire need?

            MPs who seek to means-test or withdraw the benefits of the old should remember that there is one privilege enjoyed by everyone over the age of eighteen and by rich and poor alike.  That is the right to vote in parliamentary and local elections.  Statistics indicate that we oldies are far more likely to exercise that right than those in younger age groups – and universally permitted postal voting now makes it easy for even the most disabled of us to do so.  If I were an ambitious member of parliament, or hoped to become one, I would think twice, and then again, before provoking the wrath of a large, and growing, number of electors!                                          

           

 What the Council costs us!

            Leafing through the back pages of a copy of the daily Gazette a few weeks ago I found, among the adverts for used cars and lonely hearts, an official notice from Tendring Council ‘Members’ Allowances 2012/2013’ setting out the annual cash allowances received by each councillor.   It made fascinating reading.

            Every councillor gets a basic allowance of £4,962 a year.  On top of that the Council Chairman gets £6,070 and Vice-Chairman £2,140.  That’s reasonable enough.  They both have ceremonial and hospitality responsibilities and need a bit extra.

            Then we get the political (or, as they put it, ‘Special Responsibility’) allowances, all in addition to the basic allowance.  The Leader of the Council (the leader of the majority political grouping; much more important nowadays than the mere Chairman) gets an extra £17,862 and his deputy £10,494.  Cabinet Members (that’s the little clique of members of the majority group who actually make all the executive decisions) also each get an extra £10,494.  Opposition Group Leaders get a lump sum allowance of £1,473 plus £174 for each member of their group.

            Then come the Chairmen of the eight committees.  The Chairmen of the Planning Committee and of the Licensing Committee each get £6,072, the Chairman of the Audit Committee £4,467, the Chairmen of the Corporate Management; the Community, Leadership and Partnership Committee; the Service Development and Delivery Committee; and the Human Resources Committee each get £3,573.  Then there’s the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Committee and the Chairman of Licensing Sub-Committees.  They each get £1,965.

            A footnote explains that, ‘in addition to the above, a Dependent and Childcare Allowance continues to be made available to those members who are eligible.’   

            Local government has changed a great deal since my early years in the service when, certainly in the smaller authorities, party membership was simply an indication of a councillor’s general political outlook – not an expectation that, on every issue, there would be a ‘party line’ that all members were expected to follow.  Those were the days when councillors were motivated solely by public spirit and received no payment beyond their out-of-pocket expenses. 

            It seems to me that we are getting into the era of the ‘career local politician’ in a local government that has adopted (or had forced upon it) most of the nastier features of that lot at Westminster!

Week 28 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise’

            That is, of course, unless you are a national of some other country, living in the UK and wishing to acquire British citizenship. Citizenship is a valuable and valued possession and I think it quite right that every British citizen should have at least some acquaintance with our customs, our traditions and our culture.  This could, as the government suggests, include some knowledge of Shakespeare and his works, of such historical characters as Florence Nightingale, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington and of past events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar.   My only reservation about requiring would-be British Citizens to acquire this knowledge of British culture, history and geography is the feeling that such a requirement, like charity, should begin at home.  In my childhood and, I think, until after the 1960s, most British citizens would have had at least some acquaintance with the events and people mentioned above.   I am by no means certain that that is so today.  

            I have not reached this conclusion as a result of careful research but simply by casually watching and listening to bits of some of the popular quiz shows on tv. I assume (perhaps rashly) that those prepared to take part in such a quiz consider themselves to be pretty knowledgeable.  From this I have learned that there is widespread encyclopaedic knowledge of world-wide sporting events (particularly football), and of ‘pop and rock groups’ and their performances; and an astonishing ignorance of practically everything else.  Quiz contestants confess that they ‘didn’t do’ history, or geography,  or English literature at school (or found them ‘boring’!) – and don’t seem to have picked up anything about these matters from radio or tv, or from general reading, since.

            My tv viewing preferences are far from being mainly scholarly or intellectual.  I am, for instance, a regular follower of Casualty on Saturday evenings.  It is preceded by the National Lottery Draw, with which is a popular quiz programme, In it to Win it.  I often therefore find myself inadvertently watching the last ten minutes or so of this programme.  One evening a month or so ago I switched on to hear the ‘quizmaster’ saying to a so-far successful contestant.

            ‘This is your final question.  Get it right and you go home with a cheque for £26,000.  Get it wrong – and you go home with nothing.

            ‘This is it.  On one side of the Straits of Dover is the English Channel.  What is the name of the Sea on the other side: Is it The Baltic Sea? The North Sea? or the Mediterranean Sea?’

            To my amazement the contestant was dismayed.  ‘Oh dear’, he said, ‘I never was much good at Geography’.  He scratched his head, pondered for a few minutes and then said, ‘I think it must be the Mediterranean’. 

While native-born Brits display that degree of ignorance about our country, it seems a little harsh to deny British citizenship to someone born and brought up in Karachi, Budapest, or Little Rock, who confuses Florence Nightingale with Lady Godiva or Elizabeth Fry with Boadicea.

Dangerous Liaisons

          Everybody is shocked and dismayed at the revelation of widespread corruption and fraud in the hallowed world of The City.  Everybody (except, of course, those directly involved) insists that there must be a full public enquiry to find out what went wrong and to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.  What’s more it is generally agreed that it must be thorough and that evidence should be given under oath so that if subsequently it were to be established that witnesses had strayed from the truth, they could be prosecuted for perjury.

            There was profound disagreement though about how this enquiry is to be conducted.  Ed Miliband wanted it to be a transparently independent enquiry (like the Leveson Enquiry into the activities of the Press) presided over by a judge.  Prime Minister David Cameron however and as was to be expected his view prevailed, insisted that what the public want is an enquiry that can be conducted speedily and efficiently, and conclude with firm recommendations that can be swiftly implemented – quite unlike  the Leveson Enquiry.

            I am not at all sure that on this matter the Prime Minister has correctly gauged the public mood.   Surely most of us would like to see a thorough rather than a rapid probing of ‘the City’s’ little secrets and would prefer it to be conducted by a politically-independent judge. The MPs’ expenses scandal has left us with as little trust in professional politicians as in professional money-changers.

            To me one of the most fascinating aspects of the Leveson Enquiry so far has been to see top politicians squirming  as they tried to answer embarrassing questions about the closeness of their relationships with Rupert Murdoch and his entourage (I bet David Cameron will never again sign off a letter, email, text or even a birthday card to anyone at all with L.O..L.)  It confirmed my suspicions that, although there was never any formal agreement to do so, political leaders did bend the policies of their parties to please their media friends and, by so doing, ensure friendly and positive press headlines.

            Had the Enquiry been conducted by MPs, however carefully chosen, I don’t believe for one moment that we would have had those revelations.  Conservative MPs certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take part in the embarrassment  of those on whom any possible future advancement would depend.  Opposition MPs would have been cautious – thinking, ‘It could be me being questioned next time!’

            I would like there to be a similar probing of close friendships between leading MPs and influential leaders of The City’ – the Chairmen and Chief Executives of  Banks and of similar prestigious financial institutions.   I think we might well be given a few surprises.

            This is unlikely to happen if a parliamentary committee is to preside. We had a preview of this in the ‘grilling’ given to the former Chief Executive of Barclays Bank when he appeared before a Parliamentary Committee.  All that emerged was that the former Chief Executive dearly loved Barclays for whom he had worked for many years; that he had suspected that other Banks might be metaphorically ‘cooking the books’ but that it had never occurred to him for one moment that his own bank might be doing the same thing.   He would never have got away with that had Lord Leveson been questioning him!

The Taliban’s ‘Fifth Column’

            When, during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, the Fascist General Mola was besieging Republican-held Madrid, he claimed that he had four columns of troops outside the city and a further clandestine ‘fifth column’ of sympathisers inside. Thus was born the expression fifth columnist to describe the unknown enemy within.

I thought of this when I learned of the latest ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan.  Three young British soldiers had been shot by an Afghan.  At first we were told that it was by a man wearing Afghan police uniform, giving the impression that he could have been a member of the Taliban who had stolen the uniform.  Later it was revealed that the culprit was, in fact, a genuine Afghan police officer who had been recruited two years earlier and had been trained (presumably this had included perfecting his marksmanship!) by us.

            I can imagine nothing worse for a soldier on active service than to be never quite sure that you won’t unexpectedly be shot in the back by someone whom you had helped train and whom you were expected to regard as an honoured and trusted comrade. Afghan soldiers and police officers who turn their weapons on those who have trained them are, so we are assured, only a tiny minority. No doubt - but for every one who summons up the courage and resolution to act in this way, there are probably a score who would do the same if they could summon up that resolve – or who are waiting for the right moment.   What’s more, I am quite sure that for every active Afghan mutineer there are thousands of Afghan civilians who would never dream of actively revolting against NATO forces, but who equally would never consider handing over one of their compatriots and co-religionists, whatever crimes he may have committed, to the justice of the foreign infidels.

            I have little doubt that a week before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in northern India in 1857 every junior officer in the East India Company’s army would have sworn that, whatever might be the case elsewhere, the men under his command were unswervingly loyal to the Company and to the Crown.  But, of course, they weren’t.  Hindu and Muslim native soldiers were united in believing that they owed a higher loyalty to their culture and their faith.   

            We have to face the fact that many, perhaps most, Afghans have a very different mind-set from our own.  A clear example of these different values was given us some months ago when some American soldiers thoughtlessly but accidentally, burned some copies of the Koran along with other discarded paper.  A week or so later a single American soldier ran amok, entered an Afghan village at night, and deliberately shot a number of innocent civilians, including women and children.  The accidental book burning provoked violent anti-NATO demonstrations all over Afghanistan, and the murder of NATO soldiers.  The deliberate murder of civilians was followed only by local protests and, as far as I can recall, there were no violent reprisals.

            It is time we realized that training indigenous armies and police forces and supplying them with weapons, does nothing to prevent those weapons and that training being used against us.   Some of the Argentinian army officers involved in the invasion of the Falklands, had been trained at Sandhurst.  The Taliban today are finding that the killing skills that our Intelligence Services and those of the Americans instilled in the ‘gallant Mojihadin’ a generation ago to kill the Soviet foreign infidels, are now being found to be equally effective at killing foreign infidels from NATO.

            When French NATO soldiers were shot by those they had helped to train, the French Government promptly withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.  My only reservation about our government taking the same course, is concern about the fate of Afghans who have been foolish enough to accept western values when they lose our protection.  There was a little-publicised bloodbath of ‘collaborators’ when Soviet troops withdrew.  I very much fear that our withdrawal would be the prelude to another slaughter of the innocents.  But that, I think, is bound to happen whether we withdraw early or ‘according to plan’ in a year or two’s time.

Danegeld?

          I learn from a tv news bulletin that there is international agreement to donate billions of pounds (mainly from the UK, Germany and Japan) to the Afghan Government ‘for development’, to buy their  loyalty when our troops are withdrawn.  Let’s hope it works.  I am reminded of a piece of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren, about King Ethelred’s attempt,  at the end of the first millennium, to buy off marauding Danes.

‘The Danes rampage throughout the land’, said poor King Ethelred.

‘No-one is ever safe from them, not even home in bed.

They’re worse than football hooligans, they’re worse than lager-louts,

And we’re not much good at fighting them.  We’ve lost the last three bouts!

I’ve heard that Norsemen can be bribed. I think that what I’ll do

Is scour the land for golden coins and find out if it’s true’

‘You there, the Danish leader! – yes it’s you I am addressing.

Let’s get this deal sewn up today – and let’s have no more messing.

Just take these three large bags of gold and sail away to Denmark.

First sign here, on the dotted line.  You can’t? Well, make a pen-mark.

‘Why, thank-you and God bless you sir. You’ve no more cause to fear.

We’ll sail away this very day;

See you again – next year!

  

Week 27 2012 3rd July 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Education, Education, Education’

            The above three words were an indication of the important priorities of one of Tony Blair’s governments.  I remember that, on an official visit to Moscow, he even managed to introduce this slogan into a Russian tv programme.  However the educational standard of a great many school leavers of recent years suggest that not many people took those three words very seriously.

            A regular blog reader who is founder and managing director of a small but flourishing business (the kind of business man that David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues hold up to us as a shining example) is unimpressed with the educational ‘progress’ of the past forty years.   Commenting on my recent blog about the Education Secretary’s suggestions for the future direction of primary education, and his more recent proposal that the GCSE school leaving exams should be abolished and the more-demanding ‘O’ Level GCE exams restored, he says that although he isn’t an admirer of Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, he does think that it would be a good thing if all the ‘advances in education’ that have been made since the 1960s (when he was at school!) could be reversed.

            He had recently seen an ‘O’ level examination maths exam paper from the 1960s and had had an opportunity to compare it with a GCSE paper set last year.  The 1960s questions were as challenging (simultaneous equations and the like) as he remembered them but those set last year were trivial in the extreme.   Here are a couple of them ‘Write this number in words – 1,234’ and ‘A worker was paid £5.20 per hour, he did four hours work. What should he be paid?’

            And that was for an exam at the end of five years of secondary education.  One would really expect an intelligent eleven year old to answer them correctly!  If I had found those maths questions on my maths school leaving examination in 1937 I’d have been quite sure that they were ‘trick questions’ and would have wasted valuable exam time trying to work out the catch!

            No wonder, says my correspondent, that a 40 percent pass rate has risen to 60 percent (I’m only surprised that it isn’t even higher!) and that bright children regularly get as many as ten Grade 1 passes and make a mockery of the whole system!

            Nor, he says, is it only in maths that children are unchallenged. He is an IT consultant and creator and supplier of specialised software. He says, ‘I have had enormous pressure to include a spell checker in our database system. This is because young people today make no effort to spell correctly.  They just type any old thing and expect to see red lines under the errors!  We have also been asked to ‘convert’ automatically names and addresses entered to capitalised first letters because staff aren’t used to doing that any more (well, you wouldn’t when you text, would you?). I notice that whenever they enter a new address they do it all in lower case!

            Nowadays, so my correspondent claims, it is possible to get right through University without ever even learning to speak properly!  Such young people are at a huge disadvantage in the world of business and are left totally without self-confidence in any professional or representational situation.

Hitting the Target

          When I was a little boy of eight or nine I joined what we then called ‘the Wolf Cubs’.   They were the junior branch of the Scout Movement and are nowadays, I think, called Cub Scouts.  The ‘Wolf Cubs’ were based on Kipling’s Jungle Book, passages from which were often read at our Meetings.  Each group was called ‘a pack’ (I was in the 11^th Ipswich, St. Thomas’ Church pack) and it was led by Akela, in our case a very earnest and enthusiastic lady called Miss Eva Hack, in her early thirties, wearing a scout uniform with a khaki skirt.  Ladies didn’t wear slacks, and were even less likely to wear shorts, in those days.

            At the beginning of each meeting Akela would call out ‘Pack! Pack! Pack! To which we would shout ‘Pack!’ and gather in a circle, with her in the middle, for a ‘grand howl’.   We would then, as I remember it, recite the Cub Promise:  ‘I promise to do my best; to do my duty to God and the King, and to try to do someone a good turn every day’. Akela would then solemnly say ‘Dyb, Dyb, Dyb’. We would reply ‘We’ll Dob, Dob, Dob, Akela!’ and leap into the air.  The grand howl was over and the meeting could begin!

            Akela’s thrice repeated Dyb was an acronym of Do Your Best and our, also thrice repeated, reply was assuring her that we would Do Our Best!

Ernest Hall the Wolf Cub. Circa  1929/’30  

It really was good advice and it is advice that, throughout my life, I have tried hard to follow.  I haven’t always succeeded and my best hasn’t always been a very good best but, on the whole, if I have thought that something was worth doing, then I’ve really put my heart and soul into it.  This blog, for instance, I usually complete several days before publication on the web.  Then I read it through again and again, altering a word here and a phrase there until I feel that the grammar and syntax are as good as I can get them.

            Similarly when I was Tendring Council’s PRO or, earlier, Clacton’s Housing Manager I really put everything I had into the job.  I rarely took my full holiday entitlement, and certainly never watched the clock or took the odd day off with an imaginary malady.

            Joy and satisfaction in one’s job isn’t required these days.  It’s no good getting too interested in it and attached to it anyway.  We’re constantly being told that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’.  The work force has to be flexible.  You may be made redundant tomorrow and have to train for some quite different occupation to meet the demands of ‘the Market’.

            Nowadays it is assumed that nobody works for job satisfaction – money is everybody’s principal, if not sole, motivation.   To spur us on and make sure that we keep our noses to the grindstone we are given, usually by ‘human resources management’ experts, ‘targets’ that we are expected to meet. Salesmen have a fixed target of successful sales.  A receptionist at a busy office might be expected to deal efficiently with a certain number of visitors per hour; Casualties brought into a hospital accident and emergencies department shouldn’t have to wait more than, say an hour, for attention and should be discharged or passed on to another hospital department within three hours.  Social Workers are expected to deal with a fixed number of cases every week.  Schools are expected to get a given number of good GCSE passes.

            The target can be used as a threat.  ‘The government is making it easier to sack unprofitable workers and if you can’t reach the target I’ll have to look for others who can’.  It can also discourage staff from working beyond the target.  ‘If we do that they’ll simply raise the target – and then we’ll be in dead trouble when we’re really busy’.

            At the other end of the income scale, managers regularly reach and pass targets that they themselves may have set, thereby ‘earning’ enormous bonuses on top of their already inflated salaries;  bribes to persuade them to ‘do their best’, something that was once taken for granted.

            Hit that target!   That’s today’s message – and never mind how many corners you have to cut, how many dodgy deals you may need to strike and how much human tragedy you may cause (that’s just ‘collateral damage’) on the way.

            I reckon that if there were wolfcub packs today as there were in the 1930s Akela would no longer urge her flock to DYB! DYB! DYB! and expect to be answered, ‘We’ll DOB! DOB! DOB!’ but RYT! RYT! RYT! (reach your target, reach your target, reach your target) and be answered,  ‘We’ll ROT, ROT, ROT’ ( We’ll Reach our target, Reach our target, Reach our target).

            How very appropriate!

 Integrity in 'the City'? - Don't Bank on it!

          Last week I commented on the revelation of incompetence that inconvenienced – at the very least – thousands of bank customers.

           

This week there have been much more serious revelations;  of banking dishonesty, directly affecting Barclays (I reckon that the bank’s 17^th century Quaker founders must be turning in their graves!) but suspected of involving other national banks as well.   There are demands for a public enquiry on the lines of the Leveson Enquiry into press misconduct, and demands for criminal prosecution.  The response, so far, of Barclays Chief Executive that he won’t be accepting his usual few-million pounds bonus demonstrates how little he understands the scale of public anger*.

            What we are seeing is evidence of widespread dishonesty and corruption in  ‘the City’, a field of commercial activity that has been regarded, by politicians at least, with awe and respect.  This is where self-made billionaires are engaged in activities that ordinary mortals can’t hope to understand but upon which, so we have been told, the UK’s prosperity depends.  Its most favoured denizens aren’t just ‘millionaires’ in the sense that their assets are worth in excess of a million pounds. Their annual incomes are in excess of a million – and, of course, that’s before they collect their annual million-pounds-plus bonuses!

  Because ‘it might harm the city’ David Cameron has distanced us from our mainland European partners and vetoed legislation that might narrow the gap between rich and poor.  The denizens of ‘the City’ were among the principal beneficiaries of George Osborne’s ill-fated Budget.  One provision in that Budget that has remained unscathed is the iniquitous reduction in the upper rate of income tax, affecting only those with an income in excess of £150,000 pounds a year!

One thinks of the Conservative Party as being the natural champions of ‘The City’ and, of course, its finances are as reliant on ‘City’ donations as the Labour Party is dependent on those of Trade Unions.  However, as Conservative spokesmen have not been slow to point out, New Labour was no less blind to the machinations of high finance.  A New Labour Government helped to free the Financial Sector from some of the tiresome regulations that were hampering its activities.

I have remarked before in this blog that, just as Ramsey MacDonald betrayed Labour’s principles because he allowed himself to become dazzled by Duchesses Tony Blair and his colleagues were blinded by billionaires!

Not everyone was blind though.  The supporters of the Occupy Movement who protested on the steps of St Paul’s (remember the Mail’s scathing comments about them) – and in Wall Street, New York; the Red Square, Moscow and a score of other world-wide venues, may not have known quite what it was that they wanted. They did know exactly what they didn’t want though – an immoral and unfair economic system manipulated by a handful of self-serving greedy and powerful people, which penalises the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, and pours wealth into the laps of the already wealthy.  May the Occupy Movement’s cause prosper!

*Late News (2nd July 2012)  Yesterday Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, informed his colleagues that he would be leading the Bank's reconstruction, made necessary by the current scandal.    Today - under pressure - he has resigned his post.  Those worried in case he'll become another of those 'benefit scroungers' the rest of us have to support, can be reassured.  I have just heard on Radio 4 that he'll probably get a golden handshake of between £20 and £30 million!  That'll be a relief to Daily Mail readers.