David Boyle's Blog, page 27

How we all learned we had to spread information

In Nelson's day, it was relatively simple. Once a fleet was at sea, it was effectively under local command. The Admiralty could judge the qualities of the admiral when they appointed him, give him a framework to work in and that was that. They had to leave him to it, for better or for worse.

The problem was similar before the First World War. Once the flagship had cast off the telephone line to London and put out to sea, the decisions would be his.

Wireless changed everything. In fact, it was just one of a number of innovations which allowed 20th century organisations to grow to prodigious sizes - but then rendered them powerless to evolve or act when the information changed. Chrysler''s invention of a hierarchical organisation, split into divisions in the 1920s and 1930s allowed the information to flow downwards rapidly, but what about intelligence from the front line? What happens when you have changing info hour by hour?

This was, arguably, the great 20th century problem. What made it such an issue in the First World War, perhaps for the first time, was only partly he enormous organisations involved - armies with a million men or more, global navies with many hundreds of ships and shore establishments.

It was fine to just send information and orders rippling down the hierarchy, but if it doesn't also go the other way - informing the centre about the grassroots, the centre gets stuck in its own delusions and everything grinds to a halt.

No, what first made this an issue was the lunchtime conversation at the Pall Mall club in London, between Admiral Henry Oliver (the Director of Naval Intelligence) and Alfred Ewing (the Director of Naval Education), about Ewing's fascination with codes.  Out of that conversation, which is supposed to have taken place on the first day of the war in 1914, emerged the attempt to listen in and decrypt the German naval signals.

And, perhaps rather to the surprise of everyone involved, when they found they could do it, it led to the development of the extraordinary Room 40 operation - decoding signals on a systematic basis for the first time in naval history.

It also created a series of problems too. How could the information be integrated with all the other knowledge that was pouring in - and used without giving away its source?

The fact that the initial failures to do this effectively, contributing to the disasters at the battle of Jutland in 1916, were eventually overcome, so that the basic lessons had been learned by 1939, were largely down to one man: Oliver's extraordinary successor as naval intelligence director, Captain Reginald 'Blinker' Hall?

One reason why I want to write Before Enigma is to tell this story, about Hall and Room 40, and the fundamental mistakes he was trying to put right - about the basic information problem - and perhaps what we can learn from it today...

There are 20 days left to contribute to the crowdfunding of the book, if you feel so inspired, or to pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested. I would be ever so grateful if you could.

Escaping the curse of iTyranny

It is fourteen years now since my book on the phenomenon of too many numbers was published. The  Tyranny of Numbers was an attempt to flag up the corrosive gap between official or corporate numbers and reality. Or anything important, which by definition can’t be expressed directly as a number.

The problem is that numbers look hard-headed and objective, but they are chained to definitions, and these are endlessly malleable. The result has been the slow undermining of most official numbers – whether they are the relative value of currencies or the emissions from Volkswagens.

I wish I could say that my book did the undermining, but I’m not yet so self-obsessed. The truth is that the targets culture has been steadily undermining itself – but without putting anything in its place that can set frontline staff free and yet provide some kid of accountability.

The Tyranny of Numbers was one of my most successful books, both in terms of sales and impact – but it badly needs revisiting (if any publishers are out there!). Because the story has moved on.

It has moved on partly in the way that money has turbo-charged the bad effects of targets, especially in payment-by-results contracts in pulic services – which, despite the rhetoric, when they were first introduced, are just targets on speed.

You can read more in my article on PBR measurement in 2011.

But it also moved on partly in the way that the digital world has further obscured the great gulf between numbers and reality. We believe what it says on the screen because it looks scientific. But often it is just standing in for reality, just as the old targets numbers did.

This is not to criticise some of the great innovations that have made modern life less stressful – knowing how long the bus will take to arrive is a major benefit for civilisation.

The danger comes when we start extrapolating the other way. As if exam results were really a measure of intelligence. As if genes were really measures of courage or ability with numbers or footballs.

This is a kind of impoverishment of public discourse and it undermines our understanding of the world around us – especially as, the more important you are, the more in thrall to this kind of measurement and graphs fantasy you seem to be.

It is a tyrannical removal of shades of grey in any argument. And it goes with the obscene profits of Apple this year, helped along by the forcefeeding of our children with Apple products by the education system.

In fact, I have coined a word for it – and would very much like to write about it, if anyone feels like joining me. It is called iTyranny .

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The curse of the empty corporation

In desperation, around lunchtime yesterday, I turned to Twitter to get through to Barclay's Bank, where - to my great shame - I still have a business account.  This is what I wrote:
@BarclaysUKHelp twice now hung on for 10 mins and then phone put down by your useless call centre. And all I want is a statement for sept.

It took them a couple of hours to respond, by which time - on my third attempt - I had finally managed to sort the problem. I was quite surprised to get a reply at all because Barclay's seems to me to have been well down the path to being that great modern phenomenon: the empty corporation.
You can tell this process is well under way when announcements were made that the bank was turning its back on its attempt to concentrate on domestic business - and sure enough, the signs of ersatz efficiency were becoming all too clear clear.
In fact, the higher Barclay's share price goes, the longer they take to answer their phones.
If this is overly cynical, it isn't much.  The classic empty corporation is TalkTalk, one of the least useful companies on earth.
Now I have sorted out all my multiple differences with TalkTalk. They have now stopped sending me 'final invoices' which I came to believe were being sent out automatically to all their recent former customers. I managed to get these stopped, though they carried on for three months, only by contacting the managing director personally.
I use TalkTalk as an example, partly because they seem to have allowed their customer's personal data to be stolen by a 15-year-old hacker, and partly because they are also victims of ersatz efficiency. If something goes wrong with their modem, or some other aspect of their service, as it it invariably does - nobody is home.
Yes, these empty corporations have call centres - usually in India - but if you ask anything complicated, they are likely to put the phone down on you.
I believe the phenomenon is an important one. It is also for a relatively simple reason: the idea that IT systems can automate everything.  What this means, in practice, is that anyone with a non-standard query - which is quite a lot of us - can't be helped. There is no space in their software. The different departments are unable to communicate.  
In public services, this adds to the costs as people bounce around different departments and helplines or A&E. See, for example, John Seddon's excellent book. In private companies, it just means people get ignored and frustrated.  And particularly incandescent that the company to whom they are paying money is congratulating themselves on their own dysfunctional efficiency.
AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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What Agincourt tells us about the conservative mind

We have managed to live through the sixth centenary of the Battle of Agincourt without too much embarrassment.  It is strange that we should still celebrate a battle which, although it was an English victory, caused so much death and misery.

But perhaps the French should just grin and bear it, just as we have been doing about Bannockburn - a battle fought in similar circumstances - now for seven centuries.

For me, Agincourt remains interesting primarily because of what nearly happened, rather than for what did. As I wrote in the Guardian last weekend, we came closer to merger with France then than any time except 1940. More on the creation of Frengland another day.

What Agincourt ought to be now is a symbol of the folly of military pride, and in particular the disastrous psychology of the frontal assault - which has served this country so badly over the past century and a half, just as it served the French so badly in 1415 and the English so badly in 1314.

It particularly afflicts empires and former empires. It goes with the conservative mindset of deference to power. I have just been reading Lady Diana Cooper's war memoir Trumpets from the Steep, and she encounters a number of boneheaded military types talking about how we need to "teach the Japanese a lesson". The result: the fall of Singapore.

Big organisations, 'big' nations, former empires fling up this kind of psychology. It rejects cleverness, refuses to accept intelligence, and sends their underlings into battle without a plan. It is the American invasion of Iraq - I'm sure the French aristocracy before Agincourt talked in terms of 'shock and awe' to teach the English a lesson.

So, yes, this isn't really a blog post about Agincourt. It is a post about conservative psychology versus Liberal psychology.

It is shock and awe stupidity versus the vital importance of challenging mindsets from below, in the sense that Karl Popper meant it in The Open Society and its Enemies. If you open that possibility, you can learn. You can be clever, you can move forward.

So save us all from being led by conservatives. Let's hope it never happens...

AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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Devo-max is still using language of supplication

I was very grateful to IPPR North for inviting me to speak at their conference on the State of the North this morning – partly because it’s nice to be asked, and partly because it allowed me to get my own ideas together about the Northern Powerhouse.

It also allowed me to listen to John Prescott and Dan Jarvis, which was a slightly depressing experience, if only for the strained atmosphere of hope-over-experience.  I'm not often exposed to Labour rhetoric these days and I didn't find it inspiring.

The report IPPR North published is pretty important, setting out some of the measures by which we might judge the economic resilience of the northern cities. It’s quite right that conventional measures like GVA don’t really hack it. Build a couple of luxury marinas and the GVA goes up without making any contribution to a new Northern Powerhouse at all.

I can’t help thinking on these occasions of Joseph Chamberlain, because he created his own northern powerhouse, centred on Birmingham in the 1870s, by basing it on the assets which Birmingham already had.

I’m sure he would have toured the equivalent of Chinese cities, begging for investment, if he could have done, but it wasn’t his prime focus. His main drive was to re-imagine the provision of gas and sanitary services to the city, not as an exhausting cost but as a huge potential asset.

He also wrested control of the city in 1873 on behalf of the Liberals from a group of councillors who met regularly in a pub called the Woodman’s Arms and who dubbed themselves The Economists. Their policy was to spend as little as possible. I’m sure the Treasury would have approved of them, but they needed to be cast out in favour of people with more of a powerhouse mentality.

Because the truth is that the idea that people are the assets a city has remains largely rhetorical. There must be a connection between the fact that people live there, that they have needs and imagination and the potential of economic activity – but we have forgotten what it is.

The emphasis remains still on an imperialist mindset – it is about attracting investment to the north, building them roads so that other foreign corporations can truck their goods more easily in and out, and a little will trickle down and stay put. There is a supplicant element to the economic language about devolving powers to the north still, despite the powerhouse clothing. It is dependent.

Worse, most government regeneration policy is also dedicated to the idea that successful people living in unsuccessful places should be encouraged to leave. In those circumstances, you might be able to grass over Bradford and still call it a success.

What really provides the link between people and economic success is the ability to make things happen, as Anita Roddick put it, when she defined entrepreneurs as people able to “imagine the world differently”.

Put like that, what is getting in the way of the Northern Powerhouse is not just the lack of skills, it is the bizarre division in UK education between the machine-minders and the professionals, secondary moderns for the former and grammars for the latter – and apparently nothing in between. We are still not educating our children to make things happen.

There is also remains a residual horror in Whitehall, or to be precise in the Treasury, about local economic revitalisation. They don’t believe in additionality – they think all local economic activity is simply shifted over the border from somewhere else. It is a kind of imperialist reductionism.

They fear the whole idea smacks of protectionism. Actually, it is about increasing competition, increasing local choice, using assets more effectively.  See my book People Powered Prosperity.

So what should the cities of the Northern Powerhouse be asking themselves? These are my nominations:

What kind of institutions do you need to use local imagination effectively?How much are you putting local savings to work as local investment?What kind of financial institutions do you need to do that, given that the national institutions have zero local commitment?Can you see where the money flowing through your city is actually going?If regeneration depended on revitalising local entrepreneurialism, what would you do?Ask those questions, come up with imaginative answers, and you too can be Joseph Chamberlain...

The people who made Alan Turing possible

I have launched a small crowdfunding campaign to write a book. I've never done anything like this before, so before I explain Before Enigma. perhaps the first thing I should do is to explain why I want to write it.

Three reasons, and you can see me explaining it in my very first crowdfunding video here. But I can go into a little more detail here:

#1. To put Turing in context. I first got interested in Alan Turing when I was writing about authenticity, because the Turing Test - a way of verifying whether computers are human or not - is relevant to my interpretation of what people mean by 'real' these days. Then I wrote a short biography of him, which has sold very well, and followed it up with Operation Primrose, which tried to put Bletchley Park's role in the struggle to beat Enigma into some kind of context. One of these was the forgotten business of the German codebreakers - who managed to read all the British naval signals from 1935 to 1943.

But even then, there was a wider context that needed to be explained. The people who recruited Turing and tried to manage him, and organised the systems which allowed him to be successful, have been lost from the story. And those people - Knox, Denniston, Birch - learned their trade, naval codebreaking, during the First World War. So I wanted to write about Room 40 at the Admiralty, what it was like, and how they were moulded into shape by a man who was, in his way, almost as much of a genius as Turing: Captain Reginald 'Blinker' Hall.

#2. To put the navy back into the picture. In my youth, hardly a week went by without a picture of a British warship on the front page of the newspapers. Not so these days - we seem now to regard ourselves as an army nation, with all the regimentation that implies. And in the coverage of the First World War centenaries, hardly any mention at all of the naval war - not the Falkland Isles, or Dogger Bank or the submarine passage of the Dardanelles. It needs remembering. Beyond Enigma tells the story, from a cryptography point of view.

#3.  To look at how effective organisations develop. I've become fascinated about how organisations have become so dysfunctional in our own time (see my book The Human Element ). The First World War was arguably the moment the problem of spreading information up and down a hierarchical mega-organisation first emerged.  The unexpected bonus of being able to read the enemy's decrypted naval signals caused a small crisis in the First World War - they were used disastrously, and particularly disastrously in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. But the lessons were learned so that, by 1939, the system had developed - again thanks partly to Knox, Denniston and Birch (and certainly Hall) - so that it worked.

Unfortunately, we have forgotten the organisational lessons since.  Not so much in cryptography, but in the public services and other mega-organisations we depend on every day.

Before Enigma is a book - a short ebook - that aches to be written. If nothing else, it will put The Imitation Game into some kind of context. So if you could see your way to contributing in some way - either financially or by forwarding this message to anyone who might be interested - I would be enormously grateful...and it would make possible rather a good book, though I say it myself...

You can read all about it here.

AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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What the Lib Dems can learn from Trudeau

I gather that expectations were so low for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in Canada ahead of the first election debate in August - this has been a long campaign - that the Conservative leader’s spokesman said: “If he comes on stage with his pants on, he will probably exceed expectations.”

Given that 'pants' has a slightly different meaning on that side of the Atlantic, that isn't quite as bad as it sounds. But it does emphasise one of the lessons from the Liberal landslide in Canada - one way of building momentum for a Liberal campaign is to do better than expected.

I've been reading the Canadian press to find clues about why Trudeau managed to pull off such a spectacular success, from third, for a message of hope not fear. I must say, there aren't many.

There are people who say that there are only those two narratives in political campaigns - hope versus fear, or rather 'time for a change' versus Stanley Baldwin's old slogan 'safety first'.  They are hard to predict because public moods are febrile and way ahead of the politicians.
Trudeau was halting in debate, but passionate. He knew what he believed. He wasn't a clone or a Blair. He was authentic. 
But the Canadian Liberals managed to do as well as they did perhaps because of two fascinating factors.  First, the Conservatives were struggling at the time to ban the niqab. That is, of course, a wholly illiberal form of dress, but nonetheless - you don't want the government interfering in what people wear.  Nobody wants that - and even the medieval sumptuary laws didn't go down very well at the time.
Second, Trudeau managed to steal a march on the NDP, his opponents on the left, which were trying to detoxify their own brand by promising to balance the budget. The Liberals were excited when they announced this because it meant that they could promise a small unbalanced budget in order to invest in future infrastructure.
This confirms my own sense of the zeitgeist, which is now hurtling towards the regular forty-year shift in mainstream economic thinking - people are aware that something needs to change, but they are not sure what. They are not going to vote for people they don't trust to keep their heads - or keep their trousers on in debates - but equally, I think we may be entering a period where they are not too keen on politicians who grip conventional thinking too tightly.
In other words, Osborne may look safe one year and then puritanical or doctrinaire the next.
Whether our own Lib Dems can manage to arrange themselves in such a way to attract this new spirit, I don't know. They will have to be safe and responsible, but also to embrace the economic future. For a time, that is going to be mean they will have to be passionate, excited about the future - but at the same time to recognise that it isn't going to be like the present.
Positive change is a difficult act to pull off. It means you have to stop complaining about the present (though of course to tell the truth about the abuse of power and money) and to assert the future. If you can manage that, it gives you an unexpected authority.
And when you can do that, the other side has to respond to you. It is precisely the opposite to the way the left has campaigned over the past decades.
AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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Euro-referendum: the uneatable and unspeakable

I described a kind of nightmare scenario yesterday where the UK leaves Europe and sells off its social
security system, rather as England did in the 1530s.  It is a strange repeat of history, this time as farce, starring George Osborne as Thomas Cromwell and, I suppose, David Cameron and Boris Johnson as Henry VIII (it takes two of them).

But the truth is that the coming European struggle is not nearly as clear-cut as it ought to be - and I fear I am going to upset my regular Lib Dem readers (if there are any) by my quiet note of scepticism.

The problem is that neither side of the formal European referendum debate, as currently set out, are at all attractive. Perhaps that was also the fundamental difficulty with the Scottish referendum - both sides seemed so awkward that you had to hold your nose to decide.

In the blue corner for the Great Euro Debate, there are the xenophobes and vainglorious nationalists. But in the red corner, gathering rather quickly now, are the usual suspects on the other side - the technocrats and the monopolists, the supermarkets, the big banks - those who believe that the world should be made safe for Barclays Capital.

It's a bit like Oscar Wilde's description of fox-hunting - the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable. Perhaps also like Benjamin Barber's choice of Jihad versus McWorld - I don't want either. They may not be equal in their poison, it is true, but when you have xenophobes versus technocrats, I don't know which way to turn.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian last week went a little far when he said we should shake up Europe by voting to leave. I have some sympathy with that position - unlike some pro-Europeans, I don't confuse the ideal of European institutions with their technocratic reality (tyrannical reality if you are in Greece).

But what I really want, above all else, is the option to vote for the Europe I dream of - based on the original idea of subsidiarity, and deriving from Catholic social doctrine, developed for Pope Leo XIII by Cardinal Manning in London, and derived from the English agrarian tradition as represented by John Ruskin.

That's what I want - a Europe that uses its muscle like a medieval monarch was supposed to do but very rarely did, to defend the small-scale against the rich, defend the human detail, the ordinary against those who would keep us passive and easier to process.

The sad fact is that David Cameron is seeking to sweep Europe further into the technocratic mould.  And I am supposed to vote to stay in as a result...

I know this isn't exactly the party line, but can you at least acknowledge that I have a dilemma? And can you imagine how a Liberal force might articulate a different vision?

AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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2010s or 1530s: Is history repeating itself with Brexit?

Imagine that a revolution is happening in the nation. We have withdrawn in high dudgeon from pan-European supranational authority – complaining that we are not allowed to be an exception to European rule.

We are also watching an extraordinary overturning of our tried and tested welfare, healthcare and education system, with the institutions that we have relied upon, and complained about for generations, chopped up and sold off to the highest bidders or to favourites of the regime at Whitehall.

As you realised immediately, I’m sure, I’m not describing the political situation here in a year or so, when the UK suddenly leaves the European Union. I’m describing Henry VIII’s reign as England broke away from the Catholic Church and sold off the monasteries which had fed, taught and treated the poor. This is the 1530s, not the 2010s.

But the fact that there is this alarming precedent convinces me, sometimes at least, that there may be a grim historic inevitability that will lead to our withdrawal, along with a major privatisation of the buildings and staff of the welfare state, as the two seem to go hand in hand. History repeats itself, said Karl Marx, first as tragedy and then as farce. I have been wondering what role George Osborne was playing – he appears to be a Thomas Cromwellian figure, intent on selling off Wolf Hall.

I’ve been looking out for parallels between these times, since it struck me – while I was writing Blondel’s Song – that Rome and Brussels had played parallel roles in the English political psyche for centuries, and certainly for the last eight hundred years or so.

In that respect, the EU is a Roman Catholic project designed by Christian Democrats, built out of Catholic social docrine, and it doesn’t mesh well with the ultra-protestant zeal the British have always wanted to impose on it. It may be inevitable, put like that, that we will eventually leave.

If so, we might perhaps be able to sketch out a likely future – decades of bitter struggle between the Europeans and the anti-Europeans, perhaps been a few burnings at the take, followed by a peculiar period of isolation while we stand alone from mainstream Europe, raising the money we need by raiding Spanish treasure ships. No, a leap too far...

Then over the summer, I happened to run across an issue of Current Archaeology which looks in detail at that period after the dissolution of the monasteries, by examining 4,500 child skeletons. The result was described like this:
"Based on my analysis of 4,626 children's skeletons dating from AD1000 to AD1700, I found that the Reformation caused the single greatest change in childhood health, and that it had more of an effect than the Black Death, Wars of the Roses, or Hundred Year's War. Children's bones allow only one possible conclusion: growing up in Reformation England was a traumatic experience."

This confirms to me something I had always suspected, that the Catholic historians – plus William Cobbett – were right that the main impact of Henry’s withdrawal from the authority of the Pope, and the parcelling up and sale of the monasteries, were experienced most traumatically by poor people who depended on them.

So let’s try not to repeat history if we can help it. Or if we really need a new Reformation, let’s have some kind of alternative community safety net in place first. We do at least have a voluntary sector these days - just.
AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 
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If we protest against Hinkley, what will the Chinese do?

You don't get many moments when you get a shiver down your spine at events you read about, certainly not in the Sunday Times, but the news that George Osborne is to go ahead with the Chinese deal to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point - not to mention another one at Bradwell - really gave me a cold shudder.

It is one of those moments you see the Tiber flowing with much blood, though it perhaps doesn't do to gargle with exactly those words any more.

It isn't so much that we are backing such defunct technology, hugely centralised, vastly expensive, massively subsidised. And bear in mind that, as solar costs fall, nuclear costs are bound to rise - even just the security bills (unless we believe that the world is suddenly getting safer).

Never mind the other risk of technology failure, the risks of ISIS getting hold of some of the fuel is so unthinkable that there really can be no limit to the security costs.

But it isn't that.  Nor is it really the subsidies that scare me, though the idea of our children and their children paying the double the current costs of electricity right up until 2060 - which I understand is when the agreement lasts until - is downright obscene.  This truly is the super-PFI to cap all PFIs.

But no, it isn't that either. What worries me most is the implications of major non-violent opposition to the developments, as parents quite reasonably begin to fear for the health of their children - not to mention fearing for their wealth. Because I believe the nuclear kickstart will also kickstart green protest in a way we haven't seen since the road protests of the mid-1990s.

What does the government do? Treat these demonstrators in a tolerant English way and risk offending our Chinese paymasters? Or will the government be required, by some secret or assumed agreement, to behave in a far more heavy-handed Chinese way towards them.

And in that logical fork, I see a real threat to our way of life. Osborne may admire the Tiananmen Square style capitalism of the Chinese. I don't, and neither I believe do most the nation.

Perhaps that doesn't matter when that style of government stays in Tiananmen Square. But what happens when we import the Chinese billions to build our white elephants over here?

AND! My ebook  Operation Primrose  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 

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