Posts Tagged ‘middle classes’

Camerong

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

My initial reaction to the party leaders’ debate last week was that Brown was slightly better than expected, Cameron poorer and Clegg seemed to be rather unjustifiably pleased with himself. Seems I was more critical of Clegg than the media reports most of the public have been.

The Clegg bandwagon is clearly ludicrous: he’s in a position, unlike the other two, of never really being held accountable for what he says. He’s blandness personified, which if often an appealing attribute as it lets other people project their thoughts and values on to him.

However, as mentioned in a previous post, Cameron deserves something more severe than the sentence for treason if he fails to dislodge the unelected Gordon Brown. What does it need to unsettle this government — yesterday had inflation looking as if it might get out of control and today with the announcement of an approximately 2.5m unemployed figure. This government provides so many open goals it’s untrue — the airspace fiasco is just the latest in a string of incompetencies.

What seems to be clear is that the Tory campaign is in trouble — all down to the debate. I can say what I like about Gordon Brown but I’ll have to admit he has tenacity and a weird determination to cling on. The problem with Cameron is that he needs to look like he has some passion to do the job but instead he’s been acting as if he’s waiting to be carried into 10 Downing Street on a donkey. I’m hoping, just for the sake of the election, that he shows a bit of spark in the next debate.

There’s something quite disengenuous about the popular presentation of Cameron, not really helped by his demeanour and his amazingly stupid decision to stuff his cabinet with so many other old Etonians, like George Liability Osborne. In many ways Cameron is just an honest manifestation of what we already have — that the country is dominated by a wealthy elite educated at the top public schools. At least he’s not a fraud trying to cover up his priveleged past. Look at how Clegg and Harman (both Westminster), Blair (Fettes), Balls (Nottingham), Darling (somewhere in Scotland) and so on try not to draw attention to their expensive educations. In fact the contempt that the media tries to generate for Cameron is probably a result of some inter-public school inverse snobbery.

Yet Cameron has the air of someone who seems to think he’s been born to lord it over the non-Etonians and that if he happens to fail in removing Brown then it’s not much of a big deal — he’s not going to be struggling to pay the mortgage. That’s not something that could be said of the last two Conservative prime ministers.

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Eruption of Naked Vested Interests?

Monday, April 19th, 2010

The ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano has had a transformative effective on some aspects of life. For the first time in probably seventy years or so the skies have been almost completely quiet and as nature intended. The vast majority of northern Europe’s population will never have experienced life without the intrusion of aircraft noise or the despoliation of blue skies with vapour trails.

I guess the magnitude of the effect depends on where one lives — those near other sources of noise, such as busy roads, won’t notice much difference nor will those who live a long  distance from airports and away from flight paths. Here it’s been noticeable as we tend to get low-flying take-offs from Luton in the summer when they have to keep to low altitude to avoid the increased traffic coming to and from Heathrow. In the winter the planes seem to be able to climb more quickly. We also have a lot of activity associated with the Bovingdon stack for Heathrow but, as these planes are circling and their engines idling, that doesn’t create so much noise. Nevertheless, we’re experiencing an alternative that is completely unexpected and people will be much more aware of the environmental costs when flights do eventually resume. I would expect the relative tranquility over West London will now put paid to any thoughts of a third Heathrow runway.

The response of the airline industry to the crisis has been completely self-serving and casts the managements in an appalling light. When they thought the ban was very transient, they were reasonably happy to shut down their operations and many have left their passengers abroad in appalling conditions — with little regard for their welfare or even legal obligations in providing food and accommodation. British Airways, bmi and Ryanair have consistently extended their own cessation of operations beyond the NATS deadlines. BA decided to cancel all its flights for today when NATS had only announced a closure of airspace until one in the morning (it’s now been extended to 1 am tomorrow). Theoretically, airspace could have been opened and the airlines would not have started their operations up until it suited them.

Now the closure of airspace has extended to several days the airlines have changed tune and seem to be more motivated by their bottom lines than any other consideration. Sending up one or two of their own planes seems to be nothing more than a sick publicity stunt designed to undermine the credibility of the air traffic regulators. The point about this cloud is that it’s not homogenous. There are concentrations of ash that can’t be forecast. A hundred planes could go up and fly through it without too much trouble but one may hit a concentrated plume of ash that would bring it down. Naturally, if the airlines manage to pressure the regulators into opening up airspace and a disaster occurred then they would be first to pass the buck on to the air traffic control authorities who declared the skies safe. They are basically putting pressure on someone else to take responsibility for a decision that may cost thousands of people their lives — which is despicable. The pressuring of the safety authorities by the airlines makes me question their overall commitment to safety and makes me glad that aviation is such a heavily regulated industry — it needs to be with such unprincipled sharks for management.

Another effect is to remind everyone who takes the Internet and mass air travel for granted that the world is a bigger place than it seems. When people take long haul holidays they really are going a long way away from home and it’s perhaps not a bad thing that we all realise that globalisation in its various guises depends on some very tenuous and fragile links: some big, expensive, vulnerable machines (there can’t have been more than a few thousand long-haul jets ever been manufactured) and perhaps a few hundred cables and a few dozen satellites to carry communication. It only took a ship’s anchor to cut through the main cable that links India with Europe a couple of years ago.

There are some genuinely distressing cases of suffering caused by the cessation of air travel, such as the people waiting for bone marrow transplants. However, most of the consequences should give us cause for thought — do we really need to cause so much environmental damage to bring green beans and baby corn to our supermarkets, especially as these products use up so much water in the developing countries that grow them? There will be a lot of manufacturing supply chains disrupted — high value items like computer processors are flown from the Far East to Europe and North America on a just-in-time basis. No-one should feel any sympathy for the companies whose business models have been disrupted by this — it’s a risk of doing business that way. They’ve made a lot of money by not having working capital invested in stock and it’s no bad thing that they are reminded of the inherent recklessness of just-in-time and lean manufacturing. Unfortunately it’s likely that workers in manufacturing industries might get laid off due to parts shortages but this isn’t due to the volcano — it’s down to their spiv managements and those who feed the destructive demands of global capital — the bankers and management consultants.

And is it really so important that the elite athletes can’t make the London Marathon for a year or that Liverpool might have to go on a train to a football match? Or that Mylie Cyrus can’t make her film premiere in London? (Actually, the increasingly hysterical ‘something must be done’ tone of the news reports seems to reflect the frustrations of the journalists themselves who can’t fly off on jollies and are being forced to slum it on the trains or on the motorways.)

It’s tempting to think that this volcano is some sort of Gaia response from the planet to stick two fingers up at globalisation and global capital through its dependence on aviation. Those not completely in thrall to global capital might want to look back on the last few days and consider whether things always have to be the way we’ve come to accept them.

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Lord Adonis — The Meek Face of Totalitarianism

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

According to the Sunday Telegraph, New Labour, in the hopefully unlikely eventuality that their pernicious blight be cast over the country again from May, is to abolish the House of Lords. One good thing about this is that they will presumably have to get rid from elected office their unelected legions of cronies, faceless bureaucrats and, of course, that barely human specimen of meretricious mendacity — Mandelson. (Maybe they will create a loophole by allowing the undead to continue to serve in unelected office?).

After this week I will be extremely happy to see the back of Lord Adonis — the unelected Transport Secretary whose background from Oxford university onwards is even more privileged and cloistered than that of Cameron and Osborne — he followed teaching at Oxford with journalism on the FT and the Observer and, unsurprisingly according to Wikipedia, hides away from the hoi-polloi in the New Labour ghetto of Islington. This technocrat academic has maybe been handed the transport brief as no politician who wanted a hope in hell of getting themselves elected would want to be an apologist for this government’s lamentable lack of delivery in this area — belatedly getting Crossrail started and finishing the St.Pancras Channel Tunnel link that was started by the Tories and very little else except the ultimate cheapskate innovation of getting us to drive on motorway hard shoulders.

In the last few days he’s announced (or been reported to be about to announce) three things that would keep me blogging for a month.

1) The route of the High Speed 2 rail line — with its bizarre combination of tunnelling through London up to Amersham and then despoliation of the Chilterns and Aylesbury Vale from there on.

2) His ludicrous and partisan siding with the BA bully boy management in the cabin crew dispute. Someone should whisper to this sheltered egghead that he’s actually in a government that’s supposed to represent organised labour. Maybe the title of the party is a bit too obvious for his large brain to notice. Perhaps someone from Unison should remind him in a traditional working class way of the history of his party.

3) The proposal reported in the Sunday Times to reduce the drink-drive alcohol limit to effectively zero. This proposal sums up the cynicism and headline-grabbing ethos of this rotten administration as it anyone who understands human nature (by definition not most New Labour ministers) could predict that this is likely to lead to more, not less, drunk driving.

My anger about all three of these points goes beyond normal politics. Were this a genuine party of the left, rather than a bunch of self-serving parasites in thrall to global capital, then I might have more patience with them. Yet what really galls me about Brown’s Labour is that they offend something very basic and fundamental about human nature — they are complete hypocrites. They fail in almost every test of competence of their own administration yet they take every opportunity to preach to us plebs about the error of our own ways and are forever trying to interfere and assign blame in the minatae of social life. (It’s no co-incidence that Brown’s character determines that he does the same in government and his disastrously over-complex economic policies.) This wouldn’t be so bad if they had any integrity themselves but they are obsessed with appearance and perception to the detriment of reality — forever passing laws that they fail to implement. In some respects it’s the behaviour of an arrogant, totalitarian elite — even if it is fronted by meek and nerdy Adonis types.

More detail on each point above anon.

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I Get What the BBC Is For Now

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

…it’s a job creation scheme for gold medal winning athletes from years ago. The Winter Olympics is a case in point. The main qualification seems to be respectable and middle-class rather than to know anything much about the sport. I’m used to people like Sue Barker and Gary Lineker presenting programmes and the likes of Steve Cram do a reasonable job presenting and Matthew Pinsent makes a relatively enthusiastic reporter but this Winter Olympics seems to have the medal winning presenters and reporters crossing the liminal zone into commentator and pundit territory. Therefore Matthew Pinsent has been volunteering his expertise on both curling and ice hockey. He’s a nice chap (I’ve even held one of his gold medals at a corporate event) but I wonder how much more he knows about these sports than any viewer who’s read the papers and watched a bit of it on television. I guess the BBC would argue that he has a unique insight into the psychologyof the medal winning athletes — but that argument is utterly self-defeating because if none of the audience thought they had an ability to try and imagine what it’s like to win gold then the viewing figures would probably be cut by about 95%.

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Best Albums of the Last 30 Years?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

‘My arse,’ as Jim Royle might say.

Radio Two listeners are having to pick the supposed best album of the last 30 years out of the motley list below. Maybe the list is selected from only the people who can be bothered to turn up to receive the award at the Brits? It’s difficult to imagine a bigger bunch of crap — who on earth shortlisted this rubbish? In many cases the album isn’t even the best that the artists concerned has made.

A Rush Of Blood To The Head – Coldplay: they might be a decent band if they got a singer. I thought ‘Viva la Vida’ was ok but most of Coldplay is pretentious whining — cock rock for middle-class students.

No Angel – Dido: this is actually a very good album and balances the pop influences of Rick Nowells (Stevie Nicks, Belinda Carlisle) with the trip-hop influences of her brother’s band Faithless. At least with names like Dido and Rollo, they had to admit they were posh — not kids off da street like most middle-class musicians. Because of inverted snobbery by middle-class music journalists the only people who were allowed to admit they liked Dido were those who had impeccably ‘street’ credentials — like Eninem, who knew a good tune when he heard one.

Diamond Life – Sade: this one is good too. It has the mark of a good album in that some of the non-single tracks are equally memorable as those that got in the charts. It’s got a lot of period charm.

Hopes And Fears – Keane: I don’t know anything about this one or Keane, in fact, apart from their song ‘Spiralling’ was ok.

What’s The Story Morning Glory – Oasis: a load of over-hyped, third-rate bombastic imitiations of Beatles tracks

No Jacket Required – Phil Collins: unbelievable — ‘Face Value’ was genuinely an album of its time with a single that has endured (even if the drumming gorilla didn’t save Cadbury’s). ‘No Jacket Required’ was loveable geezer Phil at his showbiz worst.

The Man Who – Travis: I’m the man who can’t remember anything about Travis, let alone their supposedly brilliant album

Rockferry – Duffy: OK but largely a throwback to the 60s in musical style — is imitating 40 year old music something that makes the best album of the last 40 years. At least it isn’t Amy Winehouse.

Urban Hymns – The Verve:I bought this on cd when it first came out, listened to it once and then never bothered again. Good opening tune but wasn’t it derived from the Rolling Stones?

Brothers In Arms – Dire Straits: like the Phil Collins selection, not their best album — they did some decent stuff a few years earlier but this is stadium formula bloat-rock.

Seems like whichever nerd put the shortlist together selected their favourite album (probably Keane or Travis) and then put it up against a load of other dross to ensure it wins — while milking Radio Two listeners for phone votes. It will be interesting to see how the women artists compare. I think anyone with any independent taste should organise a Rage Against the Machine campaign to make Dido’s ‘No Angel’ the top album of the last 30 years. It’s certainly the best there but that says everything about the competition.

I’ll try and think of my own list.

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New Labour Destroys Yet More of Its Core Supporters

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

The working classes built the Labour Party through their struggle to seek representation through the union movement and to stand up to the amorality of global capital. Gordon Brown is in the ironic, and shameful, position of leading an incarnation of the party that has taken this working class vote disgracefully for granted. Intelligent MPs such as Frank Field and John Cruddas appreciate that much of the micro-engineering of the benefits system, so beloved of Brown, has wrecked the moral values of a strong working-class culture. The cabinet is now full of arrogant, condescending privileged, middle-class meddlers who have no inking of the self-reliance that used to be the foundation of working-class communities. To them, it is inconceivable that anyone would want to stay working class. The vanity of the New Labour elite is such that they believe everybody should aspire to be just like them. They erroneously conflate poverty with class and seem to believe that the country will thank them for destroying the working class. In its place everyone would either be middle-class or part of the underclass. Such is their unshakeable conceit that they don’t realise the political flaw of this strategy — the new middle-classes will tend to vote Tory and the underclasses will display the same apathy to the democratic process as they have to their own lives (preferring to become Brown’s clients as he dispenses skewed benefits) and not vote. The overall effect is that Labour has set on an unwittingly self-destructive mission to eliminate its own core vote.

However, Labour has always been able to rely on the vote of one significant part of the electorate — students. Even the spoon-fed, waited-upon offspring of the indulged middle-classes often realise its in their own self-interest to vote for a party of the left when living their pretend impoverished student existence for a year or two. That’s not counting all the crap spouted by politically correct university lecturer ideologues (again out of self-interest, conscious or subliminal) that probably sways a few impressionable student voters.

Yet following its success in destroying its working class core vote, Labour (if Mandelson still fits that description) sneakily chose the run up to Christmas, when they no doubt thought all students would be pissed, to declare war on this loyal part of their vote.

The scale of the cuts proposed is quite shocking and promises to demean higher education even further in this country. I had experience of the rubbish that undergraduates had to put up with in this country about 10 years ago — hundreds of students in a lecture theatre, negligible contact time with lecturers, widespread use of group work that allows skivers to be carried, large-scale plagiarism and so on. This was in a university that had a decent reputation for certain subjects (such as business). When I was an undergraduate I used to go for weekly tutorials with a lecturer and three or four other students. Even so, by international standards, universities in this country are relatively good — see how many international students are attracted to them (a good job as they have kept the sector solvent up to now).

Unfortunately the New Labour philistines have now made the cynical calculation that higher education funding is something that can be cut now but the resulting decline in quality won’t be immediately apparent.

Compensating for the lack of funding won’t be possible by bringing in gimmicks like two-year degrees and cutting holidays — an example of hypocritical scum Labour spin doctors going for the gutter vote by pretending students will need to work harder and not drink as much.  Dave Prentis of Unison is right in suggesting this will have a long-term effect on the country’s competitiveness of destroying exactly the sort of knowledge based economy that we were meant to be relying on now Thatcher and New Labour have outsourced all manufacturing to China. No-one should really be surprised about this as this government has no conception of the long-term. Long-term thinking to them is the time it takes before the headlines appear in the next day’s papers.

It wouldn’t be so bad except this government encouraged a huge expansion in higher education in the first place — with a target of 50% of 18 year olds going into full-time education. I tend to think this was more motivated by removing a huge demographic group from the unemployment figures than by altruism. (Quite clever making them go into debt to do it as well.) Now, having massively expanded the university sector to cope with the huge influx of students, the government is actually penalising them for taking on too many students.

It’s predicted that whole universities will close or merge and the more expensive courses will disappear (ironically those which tend to teach skills that aren’t available elsewhere like advanced science and engineering). It’s also anticipated that the UK will end up with a two-tier system with a small, elite group of universities funded to carry out research and a large number of chav universities that ‘teach’ large numbers of students in a cheap and nasty way. Of course, access to the two parts of the sector will be entirely unequal — with those from privileged backgrounds playing the system and swanning into the good universities (with maybe a bit of token equal access thrown in for ‘the kids from the inner cities’) whereas the majority of students will be funnelled into the sausage factories. It will be just like the good old days to the large numbers of privately educated cabinet ministers from privileged backgrounds themselves, such as the privately educated Harman and Balls.

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The First ‘Out’ Gay Rugby Player — They’ll All Be Taking Their Clothes Off Next

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Apparently former Wales and British Lions rugby captain Gareth Thomas has outed himself as gay. According to the BBC he said “It’s pretty tough for me being the only international rugby player prepared to break the taboo. Statistically I can’t be the only one, but I’m not aware of any other gay player still in the game.” Good luck to him in having made this public as a player in “the toughest, most macho of male sports”.

In my experience rugby has such a bizarre, almost homo-erotic culture that it would likely provoke the most strange reactions in a genuinely gay player. It’s well known that rugby players like to get extremely drunk. This often culminates in clothing being removed and it’s quite common for a bunch of rugby players at the end of a night to be stark naked in the bar — usually but not exclusively in an all male environment. This seems to be a rite of passage. Not exactly related to nudity but on a scatalogical theme is that it’s also considered by the more extreme drinkers that someone hasn’t had a good night’s drinking unless they have drunk so much they’ve lost control of their bodily functions — vomiting and losing bladder control are a bit passé, the ultimate is to wake up in bed caked in one’s own fæces.

I used to live with (in the non-biblical sense) a member of the university rugby team. When on tour his teammates used to play a hilarious trick on any player who they spotted asleep. It was better if the slumbering student had his mouth open as the trick was that another team-mate would place his penis as far into the sleeper’s mouth as possible. The rest of the team would then wake the victim and laugh at his shock at what was resting on his lips. One of the team also had an ambition that he was well on the way to realising — to drink ‘a pint of piss from every county’. This meant that in the bar after the match a pint pot would be passed around the opposition, who would urinate in it until it was full. Our hero then downed the pint in one – to much enthusiastic applause.

I also lived with another club rugby player who went on a European tour with his club. He brought back the most strange set of holiday photos — he was quite lucky to get Boots to develop them. There was the obligatory tour photo of course – all thirty or so players (all male) stood in a familiar school photo tiered arrangement with the minor detail that none were wearing any clothing. Some had their modesty covered by the players in front but plenty of the team were happy to bear all. That’s probably fairly par for the course. What was most bizarre was their game of human skittles. This involved turning the bar into a bowling alley by piling up chairs and stolls at one end like skittles and then making a bowling lane along the length of the bar. This was lubricated with soapy water. The human skittle was then propelled down the makeshify bowling alley at the ‘skittles’ with the objective of knocking over as many as possible. Naturally, to avoid friction the human skittle himself had to be stark naked and was thrown face down as hard as possible by four teammates who grabbed each limb and swung him forward to gain momentum before releasing him down the alley. This was all captured on the photos in step-by-step detail and the skittle himself seemed quite pleased with his achievement.

This subculture would no doubt be of fascination to anthropologists practised, as it was, by red-blooded heterosexual males. No wonder Gareth Thomas went to great lengths (he got married) to keep his self-knowledge secret.

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Boeing Has A Dream(liner) — Nightmare for BA

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

The infamously delayed Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ actually got off the ground today – two and a half years late. This is a pretty good achievement seeing as one of the latest delays was caused by a fairly important structural flaw — apparently the part of the plane where the wings join on wasn’t strong enough. It wouldn’t have been much of a dreamflight if the wings had fallen off. According to the BBC, the wings managed to stay on for the duration of the test flight, although it landed earlier than schedule.

BA has 24 of the 787s on order but the papers have been speculating whether BA will even exist when they’re ready to be delivered — not because of more interminable Boeing delays but due to the death-wish that the management seem to want to inflict on the company. Willie Walsh seems to have backed himself into a corner — trying time-wasting wheezes like trying to sue the company over technicalities. He should look at the majority in favour of industrial action instead — 9 to 1. That can’t be blamed on militant union bosses — it’s the result of catastrophically bad management. This is no surprise when the company can’t decide whether it’s a low-cost airline that abolishes free food or an upmarket brand for the business and more discerning end of the market.

The BBC’s reporting of the strike has been woeful. They ask people who’ve booked holidays on BA what they think of the strike — what sort of response do they think they’re going to get? Yet the next item on the news is about Copenhagen and climate change. While there are people travelling over Christmas for necessary reasons there are an awful lot of the BA customers who are just jetting off for a sunny second (or third or fourth) holiday — so we’re expected to emote when Samantha and Toby can’t easily take their brats to the Caribbean for Christmas but then wring our hands over climate change? It seems like the editors of certain broadsheets are peeved that their own getaways are possibly being jeapordised — the Independent bizarrely wants the union to play down its huge majority for action.

Another inconsistency and hypocrisy is that the management of BA has the customers’ interests solely at heart — those nice men. Think who installed an abrasive chancer like Walsh into his position — the back-scratching clique of institutional shareholders like pension funds, stock market gamblers, hedge fund managers and so on. Exactly the bunch of economic micro short-termists whose judgement (along with Brown’s complacency) landed us the credit crunch. BA’s management has no-one’s interests at heart but global capital.

It’s a hugely irresponsible management that has had this strike ballot pending since the summer and seems more intent on provoking a showdown than resolving the underlying issues. They are a bunch of chancers and the union has hugely called their bluff by planning a strike of a length that would cripple the company. (For one thing, if all BA’s planes were grounded they would have no room for them, certainly at Heathrow.) The Daily Telegraph is considering if BA will be completely destroyed. It seems that Walsh is about to hand Branson and O’Leary a nice Christmas present.

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How To Get Away With Outraging Public Decency

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Easy in Brown’s Britain:

  1. Grovel to the judge like a dog
  2. Wear a a ‘smart grey suit, pink shirt and a blue-and-red striped military style tie’
  3. Come from a middle-class town like Macclesfield where mater and pater are likely to be rather rich enough to employ a decent defence lawyer for you
  4. Most importantly, blame everyone else but yourself especially ‘a culture of drinking too much’

The scumbag who urinated on the war memorial and wreaths could get himself a new career of advising other middle-class oiks from priveleged backgrounds about how easy it is to avoid taking personal responsibility for one’s actions.

He should have been locked up anyway for wearing ridiculously low-waisted jeans with shocking pink underwear protuding underneath — a mark of a complete and utter ‘merchant banker’ in any case. See the picture on the Sky site.

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Nuttcase?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

According to the Telegraph sacked drugs advisor Professor David Nutt has come out and said that his public statements on drugs were made to highlight the evils of alcohol.

It seems to me that he’s gone over the top in showing his contempt for alcohol and taken the tack of trying to score sensational debating points rather than advance a cogent argument — exactly the behaviour one would expect from a politician and not a scientist.

For one thing he bands about extreme and emotive language: ”There are hundreds of kids lying in hospital beds waiting for transplants that will never come.” Are there really hundreds of under 18s waiting for liver transplants caused by alcohol abuse? How can he be so sure they will never get these transplants and it’s a bit bizarre anyway for someone involved in medicine to complain that there aren’t enough transplant organs available. This must be a measure of success for others in the medical field.

His biggest mistake is confusing absolute numbers with proportionality. In absolute terms, he’s probably right. There are probably more people with health problems due to alcohol than from any other drug, although why he’s not as miltitantly against smoking as alcohol I can’t fathom. However, when he makes statements like the horse-riding is more dangerous than ecstasy,  he trivialises the debate. Does he really mean that because there are more horse-riding deaths than those from ecstasy in absolute terms that means horse-riding is really riskier — apart from the numbers of people participating there are also lots of other factors to consider. What he doesn’t know and can’t possibly argue with any credibility is that we would all be better off if 90% of the population were on heroin, cocaine or whatever other drug he chooses as he argues alcohol is the worst.

Nutt also tries to make his argument (in true NL fashion) by attacking and denigrating something else without realising that many of the anti-alcohol arguments can also be applied to the substances he is promoting. He would find more favour by arguing that banned drugs had similarities to alcohol (i.e. if he said just as most drinkers aren’t alcoholics then he could say most e or cannabis users aren’t addicts).  Typical short-sighted, point-scoring student debating tactics.

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Positioning v. Core Competencies, X-Factor and New Labour

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Thinking about ‘The Restuarant’ again I was struck how the format reflected two polarising concepts of corporate strategy. In the programme the chef of the pair had to cook their signature dish for Raymond’s assessment. Then the front of house person had to pitch the concept of their restaurant to Raymond and his minders.

This reflects the debate between the positioning school of corporate strategy and that of core competencies. Michael Porter’s famous market positioning theories emphasise how organisations should have a clear idea of where their objectives in a market — do they go for mass market leadership or for niche differentiation. This has filtered down into companies’ much reviled mission statements and goals and, in the process, Porter’s original insight has been lost. So you have companies that come out with the absolute banal like ‘we want to serve all your leisure travel needs’ which really says nothing apart from the company is in the leisure travel market. A brilliant definition of strategy is that it’s the decision about what NOT to do — as that decision can’t be reached by meaningless platitudes. This distortion has seeped into popular culture in shows like The Apprentice, X-Factor and the Restaurant where contestants always say they just want to ‘be the best’ or ‘kick the competition’s ass’ . It’s completely stating the obvious and not what Porter’s original analysis meant — which was to emphasise the role of careful choices and decision making — such as serving a gap in the market. So the clever X-Factor contestant might rationalise that there isn’t a successful act in a particular niche. Of course, it would be pretty impossible for them to do that as they’re all picked to a stultifying unoriginal formula.

It’s all very well saying what you want to be but it’s worse than useless to believe in an ambition if you have no capability of achieving it. This is where Hamel and Prahalad’s Core Competencies come in. This theory states that  organisations have inherent capabilities that cannot be easily imitated by competitors. These could be cultural, organisational, intellectual, political, managerial or directly related to the quality of the staff. The theory argues that companies often fail to realise and capitalise on their core competencies, especially if they are being crisis managed or ‘turned round’ by firefighting managers or management consultants (how often have ailing companies been completely finished off by new managements — the Royal Mail comes to mind at the moment).  The same is completely true of people (and contestants in reality shows). Everyone has things they are good at and not so good at and it is absolutely futile to try and persue an ambition if you don’t have the skill to ac hive a level of competence at it (never mind to achieve exceptional talent). So if you can’t open a tin then it’s pretty unlikely you’ll end up a Michelin starred chef, however much it’s your dream and ambition.

Of course shows like the Apprentice and X-Factor have this tension between positioning (what the contestants want to be) and competencies (what they are actually able to do) at their heart. The Apprentice is also brilliant at showing the dramatic irony of when contestants don’t have the self-knowledge to realise that that they don’t have the competencies to achieve their desired positioning. Sometimes the two things co-incide well and what the value of these shows (even the X-Factor) is to show that often ‘ordinary people’ have the most extraordinary, unexploited competencies and that they have as much talent as ‘the stars’.Yet the programme makers like to concentrate on the deluded people who think their competencies match their desired positioning like the ridiculous twins from Ireland.

It’s surely no co-incidence that when our government likes to maintain the ludicrous pretence of complete equality in everything (and in the process ensure there is less real equality than ever before), particularly in the education system, that the highest viewing figures are for programmes where people are judged – almost to the point of humiliation. Like the leaderboards in these programmes, people have a deep-seated sense of status and want to gain status (by definition at the expense of others). The programmes make sop to New Labour’s pathetic ‘Every 1′s a Winner’ mentality by having audiences which jeer and boo any negative comment (not realising that positive comments need some critical comment to achieve credibility and balance). It’s the equivalent of the ambition of giving every 16 year old an A* grade in GCSEs and thinking that demonstrates the brilliance of their education system.

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Heretics?

Friday, October 30th, 2009

I was reading the news about Threshers going into administration in the Times (free with an Ocado delivery). It made me wonder why the last large scale national off-licence chain had been suffering for trade if the BMA, the BBC and most of the rest of the media are to be belived that we are a national of insatiable binge-drinking drunks heading for absolute calamity. At the end of the report was an interesting statement: ‘The volume of alcoholic drinks consumed in Britain has remained static in the past ten years, according to Mintel, the market researcher.’ So what about the middle-class alcoholics soaking at home in a sea of gin and Aussie red; or the maurauding feral teenagers fuelled up on white cider; or the circuit drinkers in town centres who we are told invariably end up in the gutter in a pool of their own vomit or in A&E? Either there’s nowhere near as many of these as we’re led to believe or there must be an awful lot more teetotallers than there used to be. Someone seems to be hyping and distorting the statistics and my money isn’t on Mintel.

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Pubs — The Preserve of the Middle-Class?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
King William IV Speen

King William IV Speen

Today I drove through Southcourt in Aylesbury: a large, 1930s-60s housing estate which was originally almost all council housing. Such estates used to be bastions of working-class ale drinking but the smoking ban and the credit crunch have finished off two of the three pubs and the closest pub in the direction of the two centre is also shut. A pub that tried valiantly to keep going in the face of cheap supermarket beer and home-based entertainment like videos and Sky TV was the Steeplechase, which did some decent real ale at times. It has been boarded up for a year now and is a sad sight.

However, on the bright side, a report partly supported by CAMRA and publicised on the BBC website reported that cask ale was the only type of beer now with growing sales and partly because twice as many women enjoyed drinking it in the past couple of years. There was also a very interesting report on the Radio Four Food Programme about hops and their use in real ale — which gave an opportunity for Roger Protz to yet again claim that beer is far more interesting than wine. The brewer at Brewdog commented on his Punk IPA, which the female presenter found very tasty. (I love this beer and its weaker sister — Trashy Blonde – Brewdog are so non-pc they even make an 18% beer.)  The programme noted that the trend towards using more (and more assertive) hops started by US craft breweries and is now being adopted by ale brewers here. Such beers have to either have a high alcohol content to balance the bitterness or need to be drunk in much smaller quantities (such as thirds of pints) to be palatable.

The two themes above suggest that there’s a trend for both beer and pubs to lose their long-time association with the working man and instead to become the preserve of the middle-classes. A valid criticism of CAMRA is that while it has spectacularly succeeded in preserving real ale and increased the variety available, it has done so mainly for the benefit of a minority of beer snobs and tickers. Real ale is not the drink of the working man any more — that accolade was lost to lager a long time ago — the fact that real ale quality is dire in a large number of workaday, non-CAMRA-Good-Beer-Guide pubs might have a lot to do with this. However, it seems that these sort of workaday, average, unremarkable pubs are the ones that are suffering most at the moment and, as the cask report says, it’s the affluent real ale drinkers who are able to afford £3 a pint in the pub and don’t go for the £10 24 can Stella pack at Tesco as an alternative.

So perhaps the saviours of the English pub as we know it are the middle-classes, much as that might be an anathema to some of the more revolutionary founders of the real ale movement. The middle-class seem to have saved real ale and pubcos should perhaps target these high-spending, but demanding customers more. Another factor in the pub’s favour is brought to mind by having forty-something politicians paraded at the party conferences over the past couple of weeks: it seems the annoying, social-skills free nerds that inhabited student politics in the 80s are now making their bids to be the annoying, power-crazed nerds that run the country. But if that’s reflected in other walks of life there may be a silver lining in that the middle-class, especially Generation X who are entering middle-age, have very fond memories of the pub from their student days (mostly rose-tinted in terms of the amount they drank and time the spent there). Yet this almost sentimental attachment to the pub as a hub of student life might yet save the great British institution. The middle-classes might not be propping the bars up swilling ten pints of mild a night but they might be pretty solid campaigners to ensure that pubs are still there for people that do.

Crown, Sydenham, Oxfordshire

Crown, Sydenham, Oxfordshire

To illustrate the point there are a number of examples of local pubs being saved from closure by being bought by (presumably relatively wealthy) members of the local community and re-opened and run on a community basis. The Unicorn at Cublington and Crown at Sydenham, Oxon are good examples. I went tonight to a pub, the King William IV at Speen, that’s not owned by the community but run in a way that is designed to be community minded — to the extent of having a small room of a perfect sized for committee meetings. It also has an ice-cream parlour selling locally sourced ice-cream. A group of local charity volunteers were also enjoying the evening in the pub. These pubs aren’t, of course, exclusively full of middle-class people but they’ve benefited from the sort of activism that the middle-classes (and, dare I say it, CAMRA) have shown to be very successful.

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