Why should parents be on their own to tackle online games and social media?

This post first appeared on the Radix website...

Let's give credit where it is due. UK governments over the past decade, and perhaps most of all, those led by Tony Blair, demonstrated a kind of obsessive technophilia which meant that, the bigger a proposed solution was, and the more obsessively, blindly linked to IT, the more the government would embrace it.

Also, and linked to that, the more they would pay. But that is another story, as Rudyard Kipling would say.

As I say, let's give some credit to Theresa May's government that they have begun to row back a little from the official mantra 'Human bad, IT good'.

They have dared suggest that Facebook should be accountable for what goes on their platform, and they are absolutely right to do so.

They have not so far dared stand up to the looming monopoly power of the internet companies, particularly Amazon and Google, perhaps aware that - outside the European Union - their powers to tackle monopolies like this are that much weaker. Particularly as they are now supplicants to the Trump administration.

There seem to be no complaints from them either that Amazon is subsidised by US Mail for every package they send.

I suppose I feel that, as a parent, the mismatch of power between me and the tech companies who are supposed to serve me has never been greater. If I complain to Youtube that somebody is online bullying my child, there is usually nobody there to reply - let alone help.

If I want my school to use their pupil premium on human beings, they usually get pushed out by ipads (in fact, Apple said that their ipad profits in the coalition years had been boosted by the UK school system).

And if I fear that too much time online, playing games or on social media will undermine imagination, build aggression and promote depression, then I'll get no support from the government (or the schools, which are great pushers of the online world).

So what do parents do? Well, Judith Hodge and I have interviewed a range of parents, to write a book called Techno Tantrums: 10 strategies to deal with your children's time online - a guide book for parents, by parents, to navigate a world where they feel largely on their own. Also available in paperback and on kindle.

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The most important question for Southern Rail right now

I have been reading the brave and revolutionary book about public relations by Robert Phillips, called Trust me, PR is Dead. Considering that the author is now an ex-PR man himself, the title is a bit like the old circular contradiction All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan once told me - which so fascinated Alan Turing.

There is a fascinating passage where he was asked by one of the rail companies for advice to deal with their unpopularity.  But, as Phillips explains, all was exactly as it seemed.

"It turned out that its poor standing was well-deserved - the marketing director boasted proudly about how they shortened train lengths at peak times and lengthened them off-peak. This way they met the averages demanded of them by the regulator but paid less in fees. So what if the customers were packed like sardines? They had to get to work, so would put up and shut up - because they had to."

Phillips describes this as a disillusioning moment. As a PR consultant, he was "meant to conspire with this fraudulent idiocy". He didn't, suggesting instead that the company managers do a ceremonial bow (Japanese style, see picture) for a new National Apology Day (he didn't get the contract).

I have been thinking about this in relation to Southern Rail, and the pretence by them and the government that the short trains which cause such asphyxiation have something to do with industrial action.

They could be about trains not being in the right place, but that would apply only in chaos - and we have an emergency timetable.

Now, I have no evidence that the story in Trust Me, PR is Dead applies also to Southern. Since proposing the question in an article for the Guardian last week - and developing it in a blog on the Radix site, suggesting that people care much more about the manipulation than they do about the asphyxiation - I have downloaded screeds of in-house material about how Network rail calculates its charges.

I'm not stupid, but the whole thing is so packed with jargon and complexity that I will never penetrate its obscurity. All I can do is hope that other people will take up the question in Parliament.

On the face of it, it may be that Govia Thameslink's shadowy owners Go-Ahead are insisting that some of their losses should be clawed back from the battered passengers in this way. It could - in certain narrow economic cults - even be considered their duty to do so.

Either way, we must be told.

Meanwhile, I believe Robert Phillips is onto something with his National Apology Day proposal. It would help clear the air. This is how he puts it:

"Companies know when they have done wrong. Companies know when they have substituted the convenience of tick-box compliance for the imperative of values-led behaviour. And they know when they really should apologise - not that they do. No one needs to 'have god' to understand this. But everyone needs to have a core humanity and a very real sense of purpose and values - of what is right and what is wrong - in business, as in life."

So Charles Horton (Govia Thameslink CEO), Andrew Allner (Go-Ahead chairman) and Chris Grayling (Secretary of State) - please think about this one. Does the cap fit?

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More background on Southern in my book Cancelled!  about the whole saga.

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Was Margaret Thatcher real?

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Broke to look back at recent history to see why things were going so badly for the middle classes.

This was not, as some commentators suggested, because I had some kind of disdain for the working classes or because I thought life had been uniquely tough on the middle classes - I think nothing of the kind - but writing the book led me down some strange byways.

For example why house prices had risen so much since 1979, and how the decision was made to launch that process by abolishing the so-called 'Corset' which regulated how much money went into the mortgage market.

Reading the cabinet papers convinced me that Margaret Thatcher was a mere cipher in her own revolution, unaware what the revolutionaries - Howe and Lawson - were planning or why.

Her own rhetoric convinced her later. But at first, she had no idea beyond a vague support for homeowners. The so-called Thatcherite Revolution was misnamed. It also failed in a range of other ways to live up to its own rhetoric.

In one way in particular, as I argued in a blog on the Radix website, it failed to live up to its own convictions: it failed to provide real independence to anyone apart from the very wealthy - though the cascade of mortgage money made it seem otherwise.

This is what I wrote. What do you think?

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Towards a more civilised kind of Brexit

Ignore what you have been hearing in the last few days about Theresa May engineering a Brexit walk-out, a hard Brexit is now politically impossible - because it would mean a border with the Irish Republic, and that is anathema to the DUP.

In fact, paradoxically, the strange general election result makes it a good deal easier to negotiate a Very British Brexit, which - by coincidence - is the title of a report which sets out how by my colleagues at Radix.

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