David Boyle's Blog, page 75

Why Moshi Monsters are moshing us all up

I have lost count of the number of times Mind Candy, the company behind Moshi Monsters, gets mentioned in the business press as the great hope of UK business.

Apparently 75 million children have signed up worldwide, and there was its founder filling the 'business person' slot to comment on the final round of The Apprentice.

Well, I'm not a fan.  In fact, this is the kind of blog post you can only really write over the age of 55 (which I now am) so please be understanding as you read it - but my feeling is that, if something quite so vacuous and ephemeral is the great hope of UK business, then the situation is worse than I thought.

Let me give a bit of background.  I rigorously control the amount of time my children spend online, and will continue to do so until I lose the ability (my oldest is nine).  I'm not the only parent to worry about what constant screentime does to their creativity and imagination, but I also resent the waste of time spent fiddling with computer games.

Yes, I am puritanical about that, but I'm not puritanical about everything.

I also resent the complexity imposed on them by companies like Mind Candy.  The alphabets of different passwords and screennames, the screeds of personal data they require, the irritating way in which they stop working unexpectedly.  The way they leave my children in tears of frustration every time they are allowed to waste a bit of time on them.

Do I fit the profile of somebody the geeks really love to hate?

But then, can you find anything exciting about Moshi Monsters? They are one-dimensional characters, with no development, no imagination, no scope for offline play.  The whole caboodle is set up to encourage passive consumption of the most mindless kind.  Strip away the first layer and there is nothing there at all.  It is a glitzy, shiny vacuum.

It is fake fake fake, designed to keep my children passively indoors, dreaming of spending money.  The great hope of UK business, at the expense of my children's lives?  What does that say about us?

I also resent the way the schools force my children online, to do their homework or read books.  I understand that this may be a way of getting boys to read, but has it occurred to the educationalists that boys are not reading because they are already spending too much time addicted to online games?

I don't want to sound self-congratulatory about this.  It isn't easy.  I'm not even sure I'm right about it.  But I did have a peculiar experience last week which made me think about it.

I was visited by two very nice ladies from the BBC to interview me in the middle of the huge Spa Hill allotment site.  "So this is where you live your Swallows and Amazons life," said the producer, as she came in.

An hour later and a great deal of verbiage from me had gone on their recording machine, and we were making our way through the gate.  There was a little scream from the producer, and a flurry of sticks, and there were my children, leaping out of the long grass, their faces painted, wielding bows and arrows.

I was cross with them for shooting at guests, but I thought about it afterwards.  I'm glad at least that they weren't indoors, wired into Playstation 3 or struggling to remember their tenth password for Moshi Monsters.

Why fracking will turbo-charge the green movement

Scientists suspected a link between asbestos and lung cancer as early as 1918.

The news that exposure to asbestos fibres might cause cancer were confirmed in a series of medical studies in the 1920s. But it was a test case in the US Supreme Court in 1969 - half a century later - that impacted on the money men and the politicians.  The result was the cause of the near collapse of the Lloyds of London reinsurance market in the early 1990s, and the scandal which I wrote about in my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?

The case concerned a former asbestos worker called Clarence Borel, and was brought by his widow, Thelma. He had been told so little about the little white asbestos fibres that were to kill him that he used to bring them back to decorate the Christmas tree at home.

The Supreme Court found in favour of Thelma Borel, and as a result, the asbestosis claims began to mount and the ultimate insurers – those with the unlimited liability – turned out to be some of the Lloyds syndicates which specialized in reinsurance. In 1979, the US courts ruled that the insurers were liable for all the years between when the workers were exposed and when they fell ill.

I tell this story because it illustrates how long it takes for the dangers of any profitable process filtering through to the policy-makers and financiers.  In the case of asbestos, they were able to finesse it for half a century. Thanks to global communication, it won't take so long this time - but it seems to me highly unlikely that the damage by fracking won't beat the damage from asbestosis by a long way.

The costs in compensation will eventually be huge, but it is the political shift that concerns me here.

That makes yesterday a surprisingly important day.  So you might as well remember the date, 19 July 2013 (also, by the way, my father's 80th birthday). It was the day that the coalition announced tax breaks for companies to bring their shale gas mining or fracking techniques to the UK.

As a result, it will turn out to be the day that marks a major radicalisation and popularisation of the green movement. It is the day that will change everything - when every politician will be asked in a decade or so: where were you? What did you say?

Of course I may be wrong, but the series of class actions in the USA against the shale gas industry suggests that I'm not. In any case, for months, or maybe years, nothing much will change.  But the first health scares, the first scandal of poisoned children or unborn children, will change everything.

Because the UK is small and densely populated. You can't pump millions of gallons of chemicals for each shale site, especially an inflammable and poisonous chemical like alpha-methylstyrene, under ground in the UK - and certainly not London, Boris - without it turning up in the water supply, then the food we eat, and then our bones.  You can't do it without it affecting children's health.

The people who fondly believe you can are likely to be fantasists, dreamers - and politicians.

Not to mention the earthquakes.

Then we will ask who did the long-term studies on the effects on the water table, and find it was barely carried out at all. We will also ask why the polluting companies were given special tax advantages, and will find it was to delay for a few more years the investment that was required in renewable energy.

We will draw parallels with the rise of asbestosis, where the basic effects were known by 1918, and nod our heads wisely and miserably.

The green movement is currently stuck. It lacks the language to break out of its small coterie of middle class supporters. It is politically negligible. But when the health of people's children is at stake, everything changes.

Then people will say that everything in this country comes from the soil, the groundwater and the rocks below, and will ask the politicians responsible why there was so little debate, and why they have such a miserably narrow time horizon that they trash the land for a few more years of gas.

And the politicians will start looking back at their diaries and wonder a little who was right.  And finally, exasperated, they will say: but nobody said anything at the time.

It won't actually be true.  The truth is that they said nothing themselves.  No questions, no debate, no challenge.  So remember where you were yesterday - it could turn out to be important.

The downside of the pupil premium

Nick Clegg has announced that the pupil premium is rising to £1,300 per pupil per year in primary schools,  which is a major investment in disadvantaged pupils and a powerful attempt to shift the huge privileges that flow the other way.
It is a definite achievement for the Lib Dems in government.  I'm not quibbling about it.  But there is a worry about the pupil premium and it is this.
It has twin objectives.  The first and simplest is that it makes money follow the disadvantaged pupils rather than the other way around.  As long as the schools spend the money effectively - not on huge video screens by the main door as my children's school has - then this has to be an overwhelmingly good thing.
But there is another more subtle objective: to provide some motivation for the good schools to accept pupil premium pupils.
This is important because the basic pattern remains that the better-off tend to congregate in the best performing schools, giving wealthier people a better range of school choices. 
Those more disadvantaged pupils are often excluded from the best schools simply by high house prices in the catchment areas of the better schools, but also because the league tables provide incentives to schools not to take them - they regard them as a risk to their position.  Most pupil premium pupils are in the less successful schools.

The official response is that policy-makers must shift where the capacity exists by getting the best schools to expand, and by replacing the worst. But there is resistance to expanding among the best schools, partly because they don't have the space and don't want to sacrifice their playgrounds or green spaces - quite reasonably.   Nor is it unreasonable if they believe that their human scale is part of the secret of their success.

Because school league tables are so all-important, and pupil premium pupils are a potential challenge to their league place, not even £900 a pupil - the current premium - seems to be a temptation.  The worry is that this money is now pouring overwhelmingly into the less good schools.
So here is the problem.  The pupil premium may provide some of that extra power to disadvantaged applicants, but equally it may encourage the poorer performing schools to expand faster, given that they have far more free school meal pupils. There is a therefore the danger of a gulf opening up between successful, smaller schools and the increasingly large-scale institutions that cater for the rest of the population, which can give that much less individual attention. 
Small, human-scale personalised schools for the wealthy, huge factory schools for the poor.  That is the danger even without the pupil premium, but it also potentially provides the resources to turbo-charge it.
There are already divisions in the state school system.  The danger  is that the resources of the pupil premium may be misused to widen them - just as intense population pressures in some of the poorest areas seriously reduces the choice of schools they have, especially in East London.
When I was carrying out the Barriers to Choice Review for the Cabinet Office, I met one chief education officer (not in London) who has to build a new school every year for ten years just to keep up with a rising population - and with virtually no resources to do so.

Is there an answer?
Not really, but it would be sensible to focus on the core of the problem: the existing league tables discourage schools from taking pupil premium pupils.

One of my proposals was to publish a new league table which shows the performance of all schools with their free school meal pupils, and excluding those schools which accept well below the national average of them. The impact of the 'transformation league table' would depend on it being celebrated, and on providing strategic advantages for those schools which score well.

The Lib Dem education minister David Laws has been focusing attention on the gap between pupil premium pupils and the rest, even in the apparently successful schools, partly as a result of the Review.  So something is happening and the schools are rushing around trying to fix the problem.
But the underlying trend needs to be tackled too.  We don't want to end up with a wider gap between the classes of state schools - small and human for the rich, big and alienating for the poor.

Bankers, nurses and the way targets narrow language

"No nation has ever produced a military history of such verbal nobility as the British. Retreat or advance, win or lose, blunder or bravery, murderous folly or unyielding resolution, all emerge clothed in dignity and touched with glory. Every engagement is gallant, every battle a decisive action, every campaign produces generalship hailed as the most brilliant of the war. Other nations attempt but never quite achieve the same self-esteem. It was not by might but by the power of her self-image that Britain in her century dominated the world."
So said the American historian Barbara Tuchman about the British retreat into India in 1942.  That was the way we regarded things a generation ago - the military, our police, the NHS.  What changed?  How did we go from verbal nobility about the NHS to the corrosive vigilance that has led to the current panic about eleven dysfunctional hospitals.
Before, our ability to congratulate ourselves would over-shadow almost any local abuse.  Not now.  What changed?
The answer is the transparency, faulty as it is, that comes from measuring everything.  We pore nervously over the data, the averages, the bizarre conceptions of normality, and we appoint inquiries.  Then we sum it all up, pathetically, into Ofsted-style ratings (that is the future of hospital inspection apparently).
You can't un-invent this kind of measurement, and it does shine a light into the dark corners of the NHS which - let's face it - have always existed: the geriatric wards, the nightmares of psychiatry, the abusive cruelties of the system - as well as the brilliance of the vision in practice (sorry, verbal nobility again).
But there is a major downside if we turn these measures into a means of control, and the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett hinted at it yesterday in a brilliant programme in the Radio 4 series Pop Up Ideas .
As a trained anthropologist, she talked about her journeys into the world of bonds and derivatives as the system overheated in the mid-2000s.  The obscure language reinforced the otherworldliness of the financial sector.  They believed that only they could understand it.  And what blinded them about the way the world really was, she says, was their narrow measures.
There is a vital truth here.  
I remember early in 2007, before a whiff of financial calamity had leaked out, I gave a talk in a bankers forum about new ways of imagining the future, and announced a new consultancy to do just that (which we never actually set up).  At the end of the talk, there was a rush for my desk by members of the audience.  But to my disappointment, they were not rushing up to offer to employ us - they were rushing up to ask for a job.
If I had understood the significance of it then, I could have predicted 2008.  But I didn't.  The point was not that the language of banking was so narrow that it took the financial world by surprise.  It didn't.  They all knew what was about to happen, but the language of 'verbal mobility' and groupthink prevented them from saying so publicly.
So here is the irony for the NHS.  Measuring everything drives out the verbal nobility that Barbara Tuchman revealed about the British military.  But measuring things too narrowly, and calling them targets, and trying to control people with them, blinds insiders just as effectively.  
It means they follow the target numbers for waiting times, or make the financial targets, even if it means cruelties and abuse on the wards.  It isn't that they don't know what goes on, when it goes wrong, but - like the bankers in 2007 - they lack the language somehow to describe it.
That is the problem of targets, which we still have in our services in abundance.  They narrow the language.  Those who are subject to targets come to think that they describe reality.  They are able to see outside the numbers, but somehow lose the ability to describe it. 
It is groupthink of a kind, but what it is really an example of the way that targets numb the brain, narrow the language to a comfortable two-dimensions and lobotomise us all. 

Fairies: the British religion?

The historian Ronald Hutton described fairies as ‘the British religion’, and – although I spent the daylight hours agonising about public services – I am very interested in this British religion and what it means. Even so, it is hard to over-estimate just how unfashionable fairies have become in the UK during the 20th century.

They had a good start thanks to the combined Edwardian talents of Arthur Rackham and J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan was first shown to rapturous applause in 1904. In fact, there is some evidence that fairies tend to enjoy their revivals at the turns of centuries (Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595/6, Coleridge’s Song of the Pixies 1793). But something about the whole Tinkerbell thing – the delicate femininity, the questionable childish sexuality – did not mix well with the century to come.

When Arthur Conan Doyle published the Cottingly fairy photographs in 1921 – the very obvious fakes made by two little girls in Yorkshire – they had the very opposite effect on later generations that he intended. One look at the dancing gnome, or the obvious brassieres, was enough to turn fairies into a laughing stock. Though one of the girls maintained until she died that they had faked the photographs because nobody believed them when they had seen fairies.

Six years later, Sir Quentin Craufurd founded the Fairy Investigation Society, designed to promote serious study. Over the years, it managed to attract a number of prominent supporters, including Walt Disney and the Battle of Britain supremo Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, whose career was not helped by his public expressions of belief.

But by the 1970s, the Society could stand the cynical public climate no longer and it went underground. I wrote to their last known address outside Dublin some years ago, when I was first interested in these things, and had a strange letter back. It was from a man claiming that he knew the society’s secretary, but he said he didn’t want to talk to anybody.

I know one folklorist who spent years trying to write a thesis on belief in the Banshee – a rather noisy aspect of the fairy legend – in contemporary Ireland, but couldn’t find anyone who did believe in it (luckily, the university cleaner happened to mention that she had heard one the night before).

Even so, there is evidence all around us. The recent West End play Jerusalem ends with a tremendous scene as the lead character conjures up the spirits of the woods with the aid of a drum to help him avoid eviction by the planning department.

I wrote a novel for adults about fairies a few years ago, based on the same theory that there are fairy revivals when centuries turn. There was some interest from the big publishers in publishing it, but only on condition that I took out the fairies. Since that was really the whole point, I declined.

Luckily my own story is now published as an ebook by Endeavour Press and starting from this morning – and for a short period – Leaves the World to Darkness (for that is its name) can be downloaded free.

I thoroughly recommend it if you want to learn about the old British religion.

How to broaden and deepen what public services can do

They finally let Norman Lamb into the Today programme yesterday morning at the last possible minute before 9am, to talk about the potential role of neighbourhood watch groups in looking after older people.

I’ve done that Today slot myself and it doesn’t give you much chance to say much, still less to answer whatever bizarre take on the subject that John Humphries has in his head that morning.

And this is a pity because, far from a peculiar thought by the social care minister (Lamb) - after the disastrous coverage of NHS hospitals over the weekend – Norman’s proposals are absolutely central to the new public services that are struggling to emerge.  By which I mean better and more effective than the old.

It reminded of what Julia Neuberger said about the last days of her uncle. In her book about older people, Not Dead Yet, she described with horror how her uncle was neglected in three of the four hospitals in which he lived his final weeks. She explained that the one exception was also the hospital which was most cash-strapped:

“When my uncle eventually died, in the hospital which really understood and respected his needs and treated him like a human being, there were volunteers everywhere. In contrast, there was barely a volunteer to be seen in the hospital which treated him like an object, although it was very well staffed. At a time when public services are becoming more technocratic, where the crucial relationships at the heart of their objective are increasingly discounted, volunteers can and do make all the difference.”

She was writing shortly after the first Mid-Staffs revelations. What she suggests is that volunteers are the antidote to this. In wards where older patients might otherwise be mistreated or ignored, she says, “the mere presence of older volunteers are the eyes and ears that we need.” Human beings provide that kind of alchemy, however target-driven the institution is around them.

Now, Julia Neuberger was talking about hospitals, not about social care and companionship, but the move towards getting volunteers into public services to work alongside professionals is not just about using resources better – it is also humanising. It is the antidote to de-humanising targets, and to hidden brutalities in the system that we find out more about every time the Sunday papers drop through the letterbox.

I wanted to say three things about this.

1. There is huge demand from the potential volunteers. Patients working alongside professionals is not just a nice add-on, it is the future of public services – and on a scale way beyond anything we have contemplated so far. Working on the Barriers to Choice Review convinced me, not only that there are huge potential benefits to this kind of approach, but also that there is a huge appetite among people to do it – over 17,000 trained volunteer health champions in Yorkshire alone. They welcome it is a way to feel useful and to get training and experience and this needs to shape the future of services on a much bigger scale.  Sceptics say that people won't be prepared to volunteer for public services; on the contrary, a lot of people will.

2. It can broaden and deepen what public services are able to do. It can provide services with an ability to reach out into neighbourhoods and visit people when they’ve just come out of hospital, help children with reading, befriend lonely people, and do all those things that services really ought to do now but actually can’t (this isn’t about cutting services, it is about extending them). We need to use public services as a backbone for what would otherwise be an amorphous and vague Big Society, to knit communities back together around services on a massive scale. As the main thing they do, they will be asking their beneficiaries to give something back.

3. It can blur the boundaries between services. Because, when you work with what people really need, face to face, they don’t fit neatly into departmental boundaries. So when you start this co-production approach, you automatically start making all public services multi-departmental and multi-disciplinary. So I’m not at all surprised that Norman Lamb extended the idea of a policing initiative to tackle loneliness. That is what co-production does. It makes services more all-embracing, more human, more informal and less rigid.

That is the direction we need to go in. It means an enormous extension in volunteering, not through the voluntary sector – this is not about middle class semi-professionals ministering to the needy – but through the public sector, where the beneficiaries support each other.  As a major element of their new design.

Let's name the Lib Dem approach to recovery

As I may have mentioned before, Liberals the world over have one blind spot - one prevailing weakness which can blunt their effectiveness and their wisdom if they leave it unattended.  If socialists are not terribly interested in the abuses of power, Liberals are not terribly interested in the abuses of money.  They don't think about economics very much.

That leads them into the greatest of all political errors which the English trip over in every generation: they don't think about it very much but, when they do, they assume that the way money works and flows and accumulates is by some kind of eternal law, set down by God at the creation of the world.

No nation on earth is so conservative about the way money works as the English.  They still believe Captain Mainwaring is at his desk, dispensing sherry, and weighing up the pros and cons of specific loans, when he has long since been pensioned off by software at regional office.  They think that money is created by the Bank of England in the form of notes and coins, when actually 97 per cent is created by banks and it surges through the wires in the form of speculation at the rate of $4 trillion a day.

Last week, I used the phrase 'an ecstacy of positioning' about Lib Dem economic policy over the past fifteen years.  It keeps being quoted back at me and, I must admit, I'm quite pleased with it.  The basic problem is that they haven't believed that economics was important enough to shape a distinctive approach to it.

I don't believe the modern Lib Dems can ever thrive unless they do, unless they wield a slogan like Lloyd George's 'We Can Conquer Unemployment'.

So I was very glad to see Nick Clegg's letter to party members, announcing his intention to do just that.  But there remains a problem: it is still just a list of measures, which any sensible government might do, and no To-Do list is itself a memorable and distinctive approach, which people might hear, think about and whisper to themselves: 'We ought to give it a try - it might work'.

Luckily, I am in a blogging mood this morning, so I can supply what is missing.  Three things, and they can all be done by the party immediately:

1.  Name it. There were announcements in Nick Clegg's statement about a new way of extending local borrowing to build council houses and extending apprenticeships, but all the rest is about the same thing: creating the institutions capable of lending to a new entrepreneurial sector - the very institutions which Britain currently lacks so badly.  That is the core of the approach: it means naming it, and making it distinctively Lib Dem.

2.  Commit to letting the new Business Bank operate on lower profit margins, as similar institutions are allowed to in other countries.  There is no point in creating another bank exactly like the other dysfunctional institutions, and that means they have to be explicitly committed to lending at below market rates to get the UK economy moving again - setting up sustainable, independent businesses which can't quite leap through the hoops that the big commercial banks set.  The Treasury won't like it - but the Lib Dems should have two more years in government and these decisions will make a huge difference, if they are absolutely committed to making it happen.

3.  Regionalise the management structure of RBS.  The government has ruled out splitting up RBS into mini-banks, but then that wasn't exactly what was being proposed.  What is needed is not a set of tiny local banks, but a network of self-governing parts of RBS county by county - like the networks of local business banks in Germany and Switzerland, with local business people on county or regional boards.  RBS will still exist, but its governance will be regional, and it will keep its national network to send the capital and liquidity where it is needed.  It can then provide an answer to the big question about the Business Bank: where is its network and lending staff?  How will it get its intelligence?  Because if it is just relying on the branch network of the commercial banks, then it will be about as effective as Funding For Lending (that is to say, not very much).

As always I'm indebted to my increasingly influential colleague Tony Greenham for the guidance on regionalising RBS, and he is absolutely right.

So there we are, let's not confuse people with long lists of diverse intentions.  Let's call the Lib Dem approach to recovery what it is - a commitment to reviving local economies by providing the effective lending institutions which the UK so badly needs.

The real story of the discovery of the shape of the globe

What was it about the 1490s that meant that, simultaneously, Europe got to grips with the shape of the globe?

That one generation - from the Bristol expeditions to the American coast from 1480 to the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan's crew in 1522 - took the world maps from a handful of vague blobs with Jerusalem in the centre to an understanding of the whole globe.

What is extraordinary is that those people who made the breakthroughs, notably Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci, all knew each other.  Once you abandon the rival nationalist myths about 'discovery', and weave the story together as it originally was - including Perkin Warbeck and the Borgias - it is as much about the European renaissance as anything else.  That and the development of Intellectual Property.

That is certainly what emerged in my book Toward the Setting Sun (now an ebook at £2.99) and that is what I said yesterday in the Huffington Post.

It makes it possible to imagine a bit more clearly just what humanity could achieve in ten years if they really set their mind to it.

The end of privatisation is coming

It is getting on for a decade or so before I first heard the fatal phrase, uttered in this case by a voluntary sector worker at the door of a community meeting:

"If you get any couples, mark them both down as women.  We haven't got enough of those."

In that simple sentence, you discover just what a trap the whole edifice of targets, standards and audited processes was that New Labour erected at such expense around the public and voluntary sectors.  The point is that target systems encourage frontline staff to finesse the way things are counted, to their own benefit.  When that involves money, it begins to look like fraud.

It is known as Goodhart's Law: any numbers that are used to control people are bound to be inaccurate.

Unfortunately for the coalition, the same is true of Payment By Results.  The whole system encourages gaming, and worse than that it encourages organisations getting public money to interpret figures to maximise their income.

I don't know, of course, what has been going on with Serco and G4S.  It may involve no fraud, just the unconscious failure to look too closely at the way numbers are transformed into invoices.  I expect this will be the ultimate revelation from any of the current inquiries that the Justice Department announced yesterday, but the question of how unconscious it was is precisely why the word 'fraud' has emerged.

The targets/results system encourages mild reinterpretation.  Once again, when money is involved, it becomes expensive.

Encouraged by the management consultants, outsourced or privatised services pay increasing attention to the business of counting so as to maximise income.  Hospitals are employing highly experienced accountants, at £1,000 a day, to re-code the work they do, so they can bill a bit higher.  There is also studious inattention to anything that might question the seamless process of numbers turning into invoices.  In this border between the accounting  departments of the oursourcing giants and those of the Whitehall departments, the costs are mounting.

In fact, it is just too expensive.  The influential NHS blogger Roy Lilley estimates today that CCGs may be spending about £95m a year dealing with disputed service contracts.

That is why, despite the parallel announcement about the privatisation of the Royal Mail, I'm pretty sure that this marks the beginning of the end of privatisation as we know it.  For that reason and these:

1.  The money isn't there any more.  The depth of the crisis in public service funding is now so intense, and the available funding has been sliced so thin, that the scope for making a profit on most outsourcing - and certainly most privatised utilities - is no longer there.  The demand is not going to be there from businesses, especially if they are going to come under the kind of forensic scrutiny that now awaits Serco and G4S (and we haven't even begun examining the Payment-By-Results contracts yet).

2.  The economies-of-scale doesn't work any more.  The only circumstances in the near future when there might be some opportunity for profit is if the deliverable outputs are so narrow, and the means so virtual, that some kind of economies of scale are possible.  That is precisely why the public is increasingly sceptical - and so are the professionals, because it is increasingly clear that these economies of scale are purchased at the cost of diseconomies of scale in  other parts of the system, which have to be paid for in increased demand by someone else.

3.  The issue is no longer public versus private, it is flexible versus inflexible.  The worst service, the most inflexible and inhuman systems are now to be found - not in the public sector - but in the privatised utilities: all the sins of the nationalised industries have simply been continued by their private owners, as I explained in my book The Human Element.  The issue isn't ownership, it is scale and flexibility - so as to avoid the mounting diseconomies of scale, when you have to do the work over and over again because it is so ineffective (why is quality cheaper, said W. Edwards Deming rhetorically? The answer: No rework).

So there we are.  RIP Privatisation (1984-2013).  It is on the way out, not for ideological reasons, but simply because it no longer suits the immediate needs of policy-making.  The Serco/G4S scandal is just the beginning: by the end of this process, there will still be outsourcing - micro-enterprises will meet a whole range of needs - but I don't see how the giants of outsourcing can survive.

Time to unbalance the economy

It is a relief sometimes to find the government has done something that is, not just unexpected, but overwhelmingly and unexpectedly right.

There I was staggered that Vince Cable is prepared to countenance plans to privatise the Royal Mail, a step which not even its most enthusiastic proponents would claim will improve the service - and will therefore introduce a whole range of externalities and costs for other people - with not a shred of mutualism to be seen.

And suddenly, the government wins a high court action against the big fishing companies, which had tried to prevent them re-allocating fishing quotas to small fishing boats.

This is such an imaginative move that I have been wondering if it could be extended to cover other parts of the economy.

It is true that progress 're-balancing the economy' has been extremely small.  It is difficult to shift economic power from the banks and finance companies, because the rewards to the Treasury of letting them carry on hollowing out real economy are so high.  So we still, after three years of the coalition, have an economy miserably dependent on a non-existent local lending infrastructure, and we still have 70 per cent of bank lending desperately attempting to create a new property bubble.

So why don't we give up the effort of re-balancing and set out a new policy of unbalancing the economy - a deliberate effort to shift power from the big to the small.

The rewards are difficult to estimate but they should be huge: small companies employ more people, expand faster, pay more tax relative to their size, provide challenging innovations and support their local neighbourhood in a way that the big corporate giants fail to.

Is there really any doubt that having a Big Ten supermarkets rather than a Big Four would improve service, employment and competition.  Having a Big Thirty banks rather than the handful of useless behemoths that we do have would expand the local economy far more effectively, rather than corroding it.

Shifting subsidies for farmers from the big to the small would improve yields, diversity and competition and help the balance of payments.  It would also improve employment.

Because only radical action like that would be able to shift the astonishing privileges the big companies have at the expense of the smaller.  Tesco is able to demand that suppliers wait three months for payment, providing them with an interest-free loan equal to two months of stock, when competitors have to pay in one month. Thames Water took in more in government subsidies than it paid out in tax.

What's the downside?  We could potentially lose some economies of scale, but since most economies of scale are matched by diseconomies of scale which very rapidly overtake them, that may be no great loss.

It would require guts and, more than guts, lawyers - and it would need to be justified by a manifesto promise.    But if anyone lets me back on the policy committee of the Lib Dems - which is far from certain - that is what I'll be trying to insert into their manifesto: something that is, at long last, pro-business and overwhemingly pro-enterprise and innovation.