British business, drunk or suber!

Why is it that the establishment doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between criticising the behaviour o the big banks and being anti-business?  David Cameron's speech yesterday certainly didn't.

In fact, being pro-business and pro-enterprise ought to mean major criticisms of the dysfunctional banks, who are really failing to support productive business, and real action on monopoly power - because that is what UK business needs:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/02/24/to-british-business-drunk-or-sober

Why targets are on their way back, but scarier

There are two tragedies about the government's adoption of payment-by-results in public services, as I explained in an article in Local Economy just after Christmas.

First, that they will inevitably end up like targets, with a huge bureaucratic hinterland.  Second, that Whitehall seems blissfully ignorant of this - imagining that it was some new method of controlling outcomes, rather than the same old idea with knobs on.

I wrote the article after attending an internal seminar in one of the big government departments a year or so ago.  Having been told that their policies included ending targets and starting payment-by-results, I asked about the contradiction between them - and was told there wasn't one.

I worried about this for some months, wondering whether it was me who was making a mistake, and finally wrote the Local Economy article as a kind of reply.

But there is still a difference, as I predicted then:

"By the end of the targets regime, regulators found themselves prosecuting teachers and doctors for fiddling their target results.  The next step in payment-by-results will be the inevitable prosecution of charity workers and social enterprise managers for manipulating the data to speed up their long-awaited evidence-based payments – because this will not just be fiddling with definitions to look good. It will be fraud..."

Sure enough, the news today says that A4e, the huge agency involved in getting claimants back to work - and paid by 'results' - is being investigated after accusations that they may have faked the data.  Staff have been suspended.  There will be so many more stories like this in the years ahead.

I've no idea what the result will be.  I have some admiration for A4e's founder Emma Harrison for her imaginative approach to human transformation (though I don't see why anyone needs to be paid so much).  This isn't about A4e - it is about the inevitable result of the payment-by-results regime.

Next there will be safeguards and codes and rules, and ferocious auditing, and soon the whole vast infrastructure of New Labour's targets will be back. 

In the old days, I remember one voluntary organisation saying quietly at a meeting: 'If any couples come in, mark them both down as women - we haven't got enough of those'.  That kind of manipulation was sometimes the only way to survive the corrosive regime at the little lamented Government Office for London.  Under payment-by-results, it will now be fraud.  The sooner we abandon the whole idea the better.

What do we do instead?  Ah well, that's a matter for another blog.

Grooming our children to be online drones

The American philosopher Theodore Roszak was asked some time ago what he thought should be done to improve American education.  He suggested that we find out what Bill Gates thought and do the opposite.

I thought of that today when my eldest came home from a special session at primary school when everyone was asked to bring in their DS units to play maths games.  He is seven, and he doesn't have one - as his classmates pointed out rather forcefully.

There is already something of a conspiracy to get our children hooked into screens.  It has been pretty hard buying them clothes without logos for some time, but right now it is hard to buy clothes without the logos of computer games.

Meanwhile my youngest (5) is being urged by the school to log into the computer at home to hear somebody reading a story to him.  Clearly it is considered too much to ask us actually to read to our children ourselves.

I don't have anything against computer games, or supplementing lessons with online gizmos.  I'm aware that this is partly a desperate attempt by teachers to engage boys.  But then I tell myself how much they are going to be glued to screens - to the exclusion of other pursuits - and then as adults chained to screens.  I would prefer my children to experience something of the real world before they are condemned to a career as online drones.

And behind that is the real conspiracy.  They get the Super Mario pyjamas, and they buy the game, and they buy the branded breakfast cereal, and the effort to make them online drones - to prepare them for their lives of online drones - begins to weigh them down early.

Of coruse they can tell the difference between real and virtual.  They are just being groomed to find the real world dull, when it isn't.

It is our rulers who can't tell the difference.  One of my neighbours has just finished an online course in child-minding - a miserable denial of the human element, and the importance of the real, if ever there was one.  Would you entrust your child to someone who had been trained online?  Is that really a subversive thing to say?

But then, of course, the virtual world seems easier to control, doesn't it.

Pressure growing for a real bank break-up

RBS seems unlikely to be in a fit state to sell off any time soon.  The very least the Treasury should do is investigate whether it might be more profitable, or more beneficial, if it was broken up to create the regional banking infrastructure the UK economy so badly needs:

http://neweconomics.org/blog/2012/02/21/the-pressure-is-growing-for-a-real-bank-break-up

The bank's very own transaction tax

Paying money by mobile phone - it's a good idea, pioneered in Africa, in fact.  But we need to be careful about this, if the big banks are not going to increase their monopolistic strangehold over our payments system:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/16/pingit-mobile-phone-payment

Councils supporting small business? Think again

Why is it that, despite everything, local authorities still have such contempt for small shops and local entrepreneurs?  The result is a fatal addiction to big and ineffective, rather than small and local:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/02/15/still-horribly-confused-about-entrepreneurs

Saving Greece from the euro technocrats

How can we save the Greeks from complete economic shutdown, and keep them in the euro?  Answer: give them new kinds of mediums of exchange:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/02/13/how-to-save-greece-from-the-technocrats