David Boyle's Blog, page 94

Sovial Value Bill: a potential game changer

The Social Value Bill could turn out to be one of the most important shifts in this parliament.  It could be a game changer for local economics, but it depends on people using it:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/03/05/a-game-changer-for-local-economies

Bonuses are as pernicious as targets

Why?  Because they are both the same thing - forcing managers to meet numerical approximations, when they should be struggling for broad improvement.

What should we do about it?  How about we tax all bonuses, in public, private and voluntary sectors, at 90 per cent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/02/bonuses-target-culture

What Londoners can learn from Covent Garden 1809

The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden burned down in 1808.  Not an event that is much remembered these days, but I have been reading about its troubled refurbishment and re-opening the following year in a brilliant book called The Making of Victorian Values by the historian Ben Wilson.

When it re-opened in September 1809, the theatre-going public were outraged to find that the seats and the pit were much less comfortable, and up at the top the audience had to peer between pillars and through 'pigeon holes' to get a view of the stage.  The tickets also cost more.

The problem was that the refurbishment had been paid for by giving a better view to the private boxes and then selling them off to the rich and fashionable.  Before the fire, even the royal box was available to anyone else if the king wasn't using it.  After the refurbishment, the boxes were closed and permanently hired - even when they were empty.

On the opening night, the punters were so angry that they howled down John Kemble's Richard III.  On the nights that followed, they turned their back on the stage and watched impromptu amateurs, perrforming at the back.  Forr a period, anyone could be an actor.

The campaign became known as O.P. (Old Prices) and it continued until the end of the year.  There were banners saying OLD PRICES and NO SNUG RETREATS.  There were horns blaring and continual racket.  At one stage, Kemble and the management hired thugs to beat the most vociferous protesters.  Many of the tussles ended up in court.  Night after night, the punters turned up, paid half a shilling to get in - this was not a proest by the poor - and risked ending up in gaol for the night.

At the end of December, Kemble negotiated and finally the old prices came back and the private boxes and boudoirs were opened up.  And then, guess what.  The protesters asked him to a celebration dinner.  How very English.

These days the English are far more polite, whatever the Daily Mail might tell you.  They are far more timid in the face of authority.  Yet the O.P. protests are somehow terribly familiar.  We are constantly finding that resources are bundled up, the commons are handed over to the mega-rich, and the service for the rest of us reduced, and all in the name of modernity.

But I wonder, in the summer, whethere we might not be in a similar situation.  We will have special VIP lanes painted on our roads in the capital - just for the ubermensch in the international Olympics committees, and the corporate sponsors and their families, for the mega-rich again - where even ambulances answering 999 calls will be banned. 

I should not be surprised if some people don't remember the O.P. campaigners of Covent Garden in 1809 and show them what London really means.

British business, drunk or sober!

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

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

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

British business, drunk or suber!

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

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

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

Why targets are on their way back, but scarier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grooming our children to be online drones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pressure growing for a real bank break-up

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

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

The bank's very own transaction tax

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

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

Councils supporting small business? Think again

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

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