Of course the NHS is out-of-control. It has been out-of-control for decades...

****

Of course the NHS is out of control. We really shouldn't be surprised to hear this from a minister - indeed it's perhaps the first honest thing we've heard about the NHS in my lifetime. Except, of course, that's not really what the minister meant - what she meant was that the service was out of her control.

A Tory health minister was at the centre of controversy after she was secretly recorded saying that the government could no longer exert much day-to-day control over the increasingly stretched NHS.

Read that carefully - the words used are "day-to-day control". In other words, the reforms to the system introduced under this government have finally (or at least in front of 'private' party meetings) ended the pretence that government ministers and officials in Whitehall "run" the NHS. As the defensive response from a government spokesman put it - doctors are in charge of the NHS.

Now I've a little insight into the NHS as a member of a health and wellbeing board. This doesn't make me an expert (partly because the NHS uses a language that is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English') merely that I have a little knowledge. The reality out there is that there is no effective 'control' anywhere in the NHS - at least not in the management sense of control. My amazement is that an endless search for strategy has replaced any sense of actually doing stuff.

Now health and wellbeing boards are that very thing - 'high level', 'strategic', 'focused on partnership' - that frustrates us normal folk when confronted with public sector management. The NHS likes to call this 'leadership', presumably invoking some sort of sympathetic magic that says if you call something 'leadership' often enough it will become leadership. The reality is that this high level strategic partnership approach to NHS leadership is more akin to a nebulous, ill-focused exercise in projecting managerial self-interest as strategy (and this is without commenting on the use of misleading statistics on public health and health inequality as the basis for planning - mostly because they fit the ideology of NHS management).

At the mish-mash of meetings where we consider vast swathes of documentation all written in that almost comprehensible NHS language, we have been told about a thing called 'the funding gap'. This is a chthonic darkness looming over health services in Bradford - the £364 million bogieman of the care economy. And we discuss this 'gap' as if it is real rather than constructed from a combination of speculation, guesswork and spatulamancy.

So because everyone present knows that the bogieman is probably a little old man from Kansas rather than Godzilla, the aim is to direct any changes away from each person's particular interest. The truth about that 'funding gap' is that it is almost entirely founded on the idea that healthcare cost inflation will exceed general inflation, that demand will rise and that the NHS will not improve its productivity or efficiency. This is pathologised by the setting off of pseudo-panic - 'if nothing is done now then the NHS will be in crisis' or 'the funding gap presents the biggest leadership challenge since the foundation of the NHS'.

Really? Over the life time of the NHS its inflation rate has always exceeded the general inflation rate, demand has always risen and any advances in efficiency have been resisted by unions or swamped by managerial mission creep. The current crisis is the same crisis as before except for one thing - we're assuming that the magic money tree won't provide meaning that the service really does have to think about its productivity. And faced with this fact the 'leadership' is like the proverbial bunny facing the pick-up truck, completely frozen, unable to act.

This inability to act is because the NHS is uncontrollable - even out-of-control. Take the review of hospital provision in London and consider how Labour used it to run a series of egregious campaigns during an election. Why would any politician do anything but resist any change at all to health services knowing that proposing - or even agreeing to consider - such changes will result in an unpleasant, personal attack from the other side. We talk about putting doctors in charge, huge investment in 'leadership development' is made and the chairs are reorganised into a nice new pattern.

But we're not going to make the changes needed to get a more efficient health service because too many people inside the service are banking on political pressure working. These people - at the front of the crowd are the trade unions but there are others like the risible 'National Health Action Party' lined up alongside - see defending the health system's inefficiency as some sort of holy mission. And because these campaigners can press that 'Our NHS' button, get people to say 'the NHS saved my life and nothing should change', the result is sclerosis - the arteries of the system are clogged with years of indulgence.

The NHS is out-of-control because - so far as I can see - it has no leadership brave enough or strong enough (indeed with the authority needed) to face down the vested interests of unions, assorted medical colleges and NHS management. So the service will sputter on - most of the time, in most places doing an OK job and certainly saving lives every day.  And the funding gap will get lost in the running of internal deficits, in salami slicing of non-essential activity and in skimping on investment.

So yes, the NHS is out-of-control.

....

So what are local councils for? A thought on objective-setting

****

I'm reading the agenda for Bradford Council's Regeneration and Culture Overview and Scrutiny committee (like you do). And I'm struck by the problem with local government - perhaps the problem with government everywhere - the problem of, for want of a better term, 'mission creep'.

Except it's not quite mission creep. The problem is that most of the time, in most places, government is really uncertain about its objectives. It's not that extraneous or new 'objectives' are added to an activity but that government doesn't actually know what its there to do.

Government is something we rather take for granted. We can see the things it does - everything from invading Iraq to emptying out rubbish bins once a week. At the front end, we tend to see the job being done more or less well. Satisfaction rates for waste collection in England are generally pretty high -  certainly over 80% and, in many cases, over 90%. And we don't need reminding how good our front-line troops are at their job.

However (and I'll stick with local government here), sit down with a big local council and ask them what their objectives are. What you'll get is everything from the stupidly banal - "to be a world class city" - to the utterly meaningless. Here by way of example is Manchester Council's 'objective':

As a Council our objective is to support the delivery of Manchester’s Community Strategy through the Manchester Partnership. The Community Strategy was refreshed during 2012/13, reaffirming our vision of Manchester as a world class city as competitive as the best international cities;

• that stands out as enterprising, creative and industrious
• with highly skilled and motivated people
• living in successful neighbourhoods whose prosperity is environmentally sustainable  
• where all our residents can meet their full potential, are valued and secure 

Who could disagree with any of this - as a mission statement it's wonderful, capturing the idea of a thriving, dynamic, international city. But is it actually an objective? Does it tell me anything about what I should be doing right now? Can it help Councillors and officers know what decisions they should be taking today? And is it a guide to developing a strategy?

Sadly the answer to all those questions is 'no' (I'm not picking on Manchester here - Bradford's will be just as anodyne, just as purposeless, I just couldn't find them).

Local councils are complicated beasts running a lot of different services that, other than being delivered locally, don't really have a great deal in common. Some are related to place - roads, paths, parks, trees and so on - while others such as home help services relate to individual people. Councils respond to emergency situations ranging from flooding through to taking abused children into care. And councils provide (although this is a little moot these days) services such as education across the whole population.

Go on then. Set a clear, understandable and quantified objective for all that activity. Pretty challenging! And this is the problem that results in terms like "world class city" cropping up. It seems to me that, in the absence of a clear external incentive (such as that coming from customers switching to another supplier or from the profit motive) Councils are forced to look within themselves for that incentive.

As a result Councils create visions, missions and objectives that aren't within their capacity to deliver - those four bullet points of Manchester's aren't really within the City Council's gift. The council can influence every one of them but doesn't control them. Nor for that matter are those bullets under the control of government (or 'the wider public sector' as we like to call it) making them almost entirely useless as an 'objective'.

I'm a 'soft loo-paper' Tory. Local government is not some sort of ideological mission to change the world but a fairly prosaic set of services that we think need providing - schools, waste collection and disposal, looking after the roads, helping old and disabled people who need support, protecting vulnerable people especially children and things like parks, swimming pools and libraries that provide for our leisure. Plus a set of statutory roles and functions including planning, licensing and environmental protection.

Our job as a council is to do these things well. Both to the satisfaction of local residents and to agreed objective standards of service quality. For sure we can add a little bit of vision and future planning into our mix of activities but our purpose isn't to change people's behaviour but to provide a place - safe, cared for and open - that allows people to make the most of their individual, personal lives.

The problem is that councils can't leave well alone. We have to poke about at the 'let's change people's behaviour', 'let's save the planet', 'we will transform lives in the borough' sort of stuff with the result being (as Bradford demonstrates) a host of essentially interfering strategies - a 'play strategy', a 'food strategy', a 'cycling strategy', an 'alcohol strategy'. The public hasn't asked for any of this expensive activity and wouldn't even notice if it wasn't there. Yet because the producers of these strategies can provide a tenuous link to the 'objective' or 'vision' they are claimed as vital and essential to the council's purpose.

We fuss and worry about the grandiose - indeed there's nothing us councillors like more than a bit of grandstanding (sorry, 'looking at the big picture'). It makes us sound good, the papers like it and we can pretend we're actually changing something when all we've really got is another wasteful strategy.

What really matters is whether the council has its finances straight, satisfies residents, and meets its own targets on service quality improvement. Making it so the highways engineer, the social worker and the bloke digging the spring beds in the park are all delivering to the objective of the organisation (and even better, can explain how).

Right now council leaderships - political and professional - spend too much time on grand words, strategies and visions but far too little time on making sure children and the old are protected, the roads are swept, the potholes filled, parks tidied and that the loos have soft loo-paper.

....

It probably won't work. A postscript on Syria.

****

We are always conflicted on humanitarian matters, on Britain's role in the world and on whether the suffering of civilians in some foreign place is, or isn't, our business. And if it is our business, what the nature of that business should be.

So we have - inconsistently and selectively - intervened. Sometimes this intervention is one of those surgical strikes beloved of my neo-conservative friends, more often it's a series of bombings that are not quite so precisely targeted. And sometimes it's real troops nervously clutching guns as they creep down unfamiliar streets unsure whether the people they see are friend of foe and whether the next corner will mean a bomb, death or the shattering of limbs.

We convince ourselves that this is right and, just as importantly, effective.

But:

To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.

In layman's terms interventions increase civilians casualties rather than decrease them.

Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences of countering murderous groups.

OK it's just one study and others may wish to challenge the findings but for me it's a reminder that, as ever, we should be careful what we wish for. And to understand that righteousness and good intentions alone do not suffice to put things right, you need a strategy that works too.

It seems to me that military intervention in Syria may increase civilian deaths. And if this is a definite risk (and leaving the moral issues to one side for now) what is needed to eliminate that risk so as to ensure our end is achieved?

....

Marketing, professionalism and some advice from an "anti-guru"

Markets - go watch some, you'll learn a lot & it's fun

A former advertising colleague of mine was once, for reasons of politeness, introduced as a “marketing professional”. Howard, my colleague, politely and gently put us right:

“I’m a businessman. I happen to be in the business of advising other businesses about marketing and advertising. Doctors and lawyers are professionals. Like the people I work with, I’m a businessman, doing business.”

This may seem a quirky response in these days when ever job role aspires to being ‘professional’. The concept of doing a job and doing it well or of being ‘in business’ appears to have faded. We have instead the triumph of ‘book learning’ and the dominance of the ‘profession’. And because we have taken the bait of “I’m a professional not some nasty rapacious businessman”, there has arisen a vast industry stroking our professional sensibilities.

From out of no-where springs the idea of ‘professional ethics’; as if no-one besides the professional knows how to behave properly. Maybe we’re still worried about being ‘trade’ and having to use the back door? And given the behaviour of all those banking ‘professionals’ perhaps being an honest tradesman (paid in cash, of course) is rather more appealing these days. I note, however, that the bankers we blame are mostly either foreigners or barrow boy traders. The professional bankers, quiet, calm and understated, slip by unnoticed in our blame game.

This brings me, in a round-a-bout kind of way, to my ‘profession’, that profession denied by Howard – marketing. In a free market (or the over-regulated sort of free market we actually have) marketing should be the thing shouldn’t it? After all it has the magic word – ‘market’ – stuck right in the middle of it telling that we’re the ones who get that mystic (and invisible) hand like nobody else. Except we haven’t got a clue and choose instead to clutter round the knees of erudite – often self-appointed gurus – listening to the latest re-hash of old truths.

I’d thought about unpicking one or two of these gurus. Maybe Seth Godin with his repackaging of age-old sales principles as “permission marketing”, and letting others misuse these principles to justify – yet again – the pyramid scheme or the mathematically deranged ‘multi-level marketing’ idea.

Or perhaps I could describe seven principles, five watchwords or 375 “things every marketer should know” – a process involving the collecting of, mostly trite, observations and bundling them into some form of schema. But the thought of this results in the guilt buzzer sounding as I know that none of this actually helps make your business more successful.

Back in my direct marketing agency days, we coined the term “magic wand” to describe what us account planners were to do in the bowels of a mill conversion in Bradford. Businesses would arrive – often businesses doing OK, making money, growing slowly, giving their owners a living – and ask us to reveal the deep occult truth about marketing. To wave the magic wand that would change them from a business turning over £750,000 and making a decent enough profit into the world beating mega-business on the front of the newspaper business section.

And we would have the sorry task of explaining that, despite all the books written, all the gurus, all the conference speech with splendid presentations – despite all this, there is no magic wand. Just as the bearded maharishi doesn’t really offer spiritual enlightenment in exchange for cash, the marketing guru won’t provide (in exchange for cash) the way for your little business to become a big business. Those gurus will tell you this - it’s how they sell their books – remember that Seth Godin didn’t become your friend or even ask your permission before flogging you his book explaining how that’s the way to sell stuff. Mind you we can pretend we’re his friend by following him on twitter and subscribing to his newsletters.

But enough of this – so Seth’s made a load of money from guru-ness, from our desire to find “The Answer”, to locate that magic wand, to reveal the occult truth. And sometimes – gurus are very convincing – we feel we’ve found that truth. Except that it doesn’t seem to make us richer or our marketing more effective. Maybe we’re not following the guru’s strictures correctly? Or, more likely, there simply isn’t a magic wand.

So, in the spirit of the ‘Anti-guru’ here are some things I’ve learned about marketing:

1. Marketing isn’t about “free markets”. In truth, marketers hate free markets as they make our job harder and our results less good. Us marketers love monopolies.
2. Strategy is mostly a word used by consultants so they can charge more money. Marketing is almost entirely about tactics. Strategy is the easy bit – what market are we in, what route to market. It’s getting what we actually ‘do’ right that makes the difference.
3. Marketing is 1% clever brainy stuff and 99% boring routine – indeed this explains most people’s struggles with the stuff and the search for that ‘magic wand’. That dull repetitive routine – capturing and storing information, managing communications channels, monitoring and analysing results, checking timings and all the other tasks that your junior marketing executive is doing – is the meat and drink of effective marketing. Your high level strategy and visioning conference isn’t.

And that’s it really. I could add stuff about product development, about pricing or about the behaviour of that tricksy thing, the human being – all of these things matter to marketing. But in the end the whole point is to look for market advantage (ideally monopoly), decide what & where we’re selling and get on with the daily grind of actually doing that job.

I guess this is why I’m not a marketing guru!

....

Decision-making, planning and the purposelessness of council strategies

****

Yesterday evening was spent at Shipley Area Committee. Now while this sounds to be in the same category as Vogon poetry, it is quite often an interesting occasion and not just because I’m a masochist.

Last night showed the contrast – and the problems councils have with this – between specific decision-making and the making of plans or strategies. Put simply, we’re pretty good at the former and really rather bad at the latter.

And the meeting allowed me to speak of two great but flawed marketing geniuses...

The first hour and a half of the meeting was taken up with two hotly contested decisions – whether to put speed bumps all over Nab Wood and whether to take the zip wire and bucket swing out from Claremont Fields at Wrose.

In both cases supporters and opponents attended the meeting. As is our practice the chairman allowed each of them some time to express their concerns. In addition to this, time is given to SCAPAG members (representatives of the parishes and neighbourhood forums across the Shipley constituency).

The resulting discussion would, I feel, give a buzz to fans of good local government. Residents were involved, every member of the committee contributed their thoughts and solutions were sought that aimed (if not quite reaching) consensus. People may not like the decisions we took but they couldn’t argue that they weren’t taken with thought and care by councillors.

The remainder of the meeting – another hour – was mostly taken up receiving reports “to note” accompanied by short officer presentations. Two items were linked – headlines from the “state of the district” survey and the Council’s sustainable communities strategy.

Now without going into the details of these things, it struck me that these two reports told a great deal about how the council plans and strategises. Reading through a document littered with words like “overarching”, “transformational priorities” and “journey”, I realised that we haven’t got this process right – or even nearly right.

The problem is that these grand plans simply aren’t working documents. No council officer starts his or her day with getting down the “sustainable community strategy” as a guide to what to do. Nor does any council officer get out our “2020 Vision” to check on our progress.

Published with great fanfares and with exciting talk of partnership, mission and vision, these are little better than glossies produced to give the impression of strategy and planning. Can we take seriously a plan that has nine or ten “transformational priorities”?

Surely, we should have just one priority?

Last night, one Town Councillor (from Denholme as it happens) showed us up by saying in one sentence what priority we should set. It was some along the lines of:

“After years involved in the District, I think we should concentrate on prevention and early intervention.”

A statement of priority and an indication of strategy. That is how business sets priorities, defines strategies and prepares plans. Councils should learn.

....

Bradford's LDF consultation will be a disgrace...

Cottingley

The current planning legislation and the legislation wending its way through parliament in the form of the Localism Bill speak often and loudly about ‘community engagement’, about ‘consultation’ and about ‘community-led’ planning. Let me tell you the truth.

Planners – or those planners charged with drawing up local plans, spatial strategies and ‘development frameworks’ – do not think the public, you and me, are qualified to know about such lofty matters. I recall being at a briefing about localism and communities developing local neighbourhood plans when a senior planner at a large metropolitan authority (not Bradford for once) described such devolution and public involvement as “the thin end of the wedge”.

By way of illustration might I present Bradford’s “LocalDevelopment Framework Core Strategy Further Engagement Draft” – currently so draft that the page numbering is inaccurate but that amounts to over 300 pages.

But this is just the beginning – there are some other documents, some of which the council has yet to publish. These include:

Open Space Assessment

Bradford District Baseline Study

Bradford District Retail & Leisure Study

Conservation Area Assessments & Management Plans (various)

District Wide Transport Study

Draft Settlement Study

Employment Land Review

Gypsy & Traveller Accommodation Assessment

Local Infrastructure Plan

Sports & Recreation Facilities Assessment

Strategic Flood Risk Assessment

Affordable Housing Economic Viability Assessment

Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment

Strategic Housing Market Assessment

Each of these documents will be over 100 pages – some much more than that. All of them will be hard to come by and laden with impenetrable technical language. It is truly a monument to the last government’s bureaucratic mindset and to the planners’ belief that only those will their occult knowledge can possibly create a strategic spatial plan for Bradford.

I am at a loss to understand how the ordinary public – the men and women whose local amenity and environment will be affected by these decisions – are able to engage with a process involving over a thousand pages of jargon-filled planning mumbo jumbo. This is not the local planning process we were promised when the “Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act” was passed by the Blair government.

People like me – with a little time and some knowledge – will try to understand what the planners are saying, will challenge their arguments on population growth, housing need and the distribution of employment, and will endeavour to get across to our local residents what the proposals are saying. But this massive, overweening, so-called “evidence base” will mostly go unchallenged except by those with the money to employ the experts to go through the documents and comment.

The Bradford LDF is planning to remove significant tracts of land from the ‘green belt’, to increase the size of villages like Denholme by approaching 50% and to force huge crowded “urban extensions” on to the fringes of the City. And it is that list of documents above that will be used to justify this pillage and to ignore the pleas of local communities for a conversation about the place they live. A conversation that would allow the negotiation of new housing – affordable and market – places for new employment and places that need protecting. Not from the view point of some expensive, besuited consultant but from the local people who the plan will affect.

It is a disgrace.

....

"More in sorrow than anger, guv" - the machismo of cuts or the protection of services?

Many thousands of words have been expended on the “cuts”. On whether they are necessary, on the pain that results from their imposition, as to whether they impact disproportionately on poor people or ethnic minorities or women (and, for all I know, on the fairies living at the bottom of social workers’ gardens).

In all this discussion I worry that little effort is directed to the strategies followed by public bodies – and especially by local councils – in response to the settlement “imposed” by a chubby former Worth Valley councillor. Most of these strategies – at least in the north – seem predicated on delivering the maximum amount of reduction in 2011/12. And this is achieved, in part, through the closing of “front line” services – swimming pools, libraries, resource centres and lollipop ladies.

There is no doubt that councils have to make significant cuts – described by some as a process of “re-basing” rather than mere reduction. The question is how we decide to achieve that new base level of budget – by draconian cuts this year, by a process of reductions during the lifetime (three years) of the recent local government settlement or over a long period of time altogether. For most councils all three of these options are available.

The advantage of cutting this year is that it gets the pain out of the way and allows a drastic pruning of services such as leisure provision and libraries. And most councils have wanted to restructure these services for some while but, because of the political pain involved, have not done so. Bradford’s facilities review in leisure and sport was first commissioned in 2002 and went through assorted iterations without ever being implemented. No council leadership wants to be the one to close swimming pools and sports centres after all!

However, the downside of rapid cuts is that decisions to close or reduce services are inevitably ill-considered. And the requirements for user engagement, consultation with affected employees and the scrutiny-delayed council decision-making process mean that – as we’re discovering in Bradford – it’s actually pretty difficult to deliver the savings needed in just one year. It looks likely that – without further front-line cuts – Bradford’s budget will be overspent in 2011/12. I am sure the same situation applies to many other authorities seeking to deliver reductions amounting to 10% or more of the net revenue budget.

The result of this strategy will be that the scale of cuts in years two and three of the settlement period will need to be greater than anticipated – risking further years of pool closures, higher charges for care and redundancies. The aim of taking a quick hit followed by a smooth, managed reduction to the new base won’t be achieved.

Some councils – Leeds appears to be an example of this – have taken the approach of, in effect, borrowing from future revenues to reduce the need for cuts in 2011/12. The same reductions are made over the same period as we see in Bradford but the smoothed profile allows for greater consideration and planning in service reductions. Closure or service curtailment is less ill-considered.

Under this approach – as is the case for the “cuts now” approach – the council concerned protects its reserves position and its capital programme. So far as long-term developments are concerned it is more-or-less business as usual. Thus Manchester protects its ‘flagship’ Town Hall project and maintains a range of separate funds alongside the core revenue reserve – after three years the reserves position of the city will change little as a result of cuts. There will still be over £200 million in reserve funds – roughly half of which will be available for spending.

My contention is that a council could use a proportion of available reserves to allow for the “re-basing” to take longer – perhaps five years rather than three. This would mean that many of the decisions to close services in 2011/12 are not necessary – we have a far longer period to consult, to plan and to design structures for future service delivery. Rather than witnessing a frantic rush to find community-led solutions to libraries this could be planned and implemented across the library estate – achieving front-line cost savings without the disruption of threatening the closure of the services.

Similarly, the “restructure” programmes many councils are implementing would be less risky and there would be more opportunity to discuss the things that are essential, the things that are nice to have if we can afford them and the things that, frankly, are an extravagance. 

It may be right to close some facilities, to stop providing some services but this shouldn’t simply be to save some cash. It is right for councils, for example, to get out of the business of providing old folks’ homes – we don’t do it very well and it costs a great deal more for us to do it when compared to the best of the private and not-for-profit sectors. But it would still be right if the government had given us a massive increase in grant.

I find it pretty hard to justify closing centres for disabled adults just to effect some savings in this year’s revenue budget – especially when we’ve best part of £100 million sitting in the bank. This money – there for a rainy day – could allow a restructure of the council, the reconfiguration of services and the stripping out of duplication, waste and indulgence over a longer period. And at the end of that period Manningham might still have a swimming pool and Denholme a library.

But the options put before councillors were driven by predetermined departmental spending limits rather than a medium term financial strategy worth the name. Councillors will have spent hundreds of hours trawling through lists of “cuts” prepared by officers and will never have stepped back to look at the whole picture – to ask about income as well as about expenditure, to discuss priorities and to consider what needs to be provided by the council and the size of a ‘re-based’ budget.

Above all, no-one will have asked whether the cash reserves – tens of millions at most top tier councils and hundreds of millions in some cases – might be used to reduce the immediate impact of cuts, to allow replanned services and to ensure that the reduction of unnecessary bureaucracy takes priority over the closing of services to the public.

I might be wrong. I’m happy to be shown how such a strategy would be mad, bad or dangerous. But I’m not happy to see disabled people losing services because the council can’t move quickly enough to get rid of layers of surplus management, to start sharing back office functions with neighbouring authorities and to make better use of the flexibility and innovation in the private and voluntary sectors.

It seems to me that the machismo of making cuts – "more in sorrow than anger, guv" – has triumphed over a desire to concentrate on making sure the public we serve get the services they deserve for all those taxes they pay.

....

Maybe there's a real shift in English politics? And will the Conservatives spot it?

***

The wholly admirable UK Polling Report presents some analysis of MORI’s 2009 polling figures and makes this observation:

“This pattern of swing, with voters in groups that traditionally support Labour swinging the most strongly toward the Conservatives, produces a truly startling pattern when we get to MORI’s breaks by type of seat. MORI have the Conservative lead in Lab-v-Con seats with a Labour majority of under 8.7% of 21 points. Depending on exactly what notional figures MORI used and how they treated three way marginals, that represents a swing of around about 12.5%. Looking at Lab-v-Con seats with majorities up to 13.9% the Conservative lead is still 21 points – suggesting an even bigger swing in those seats (somewhere around 14%).

If the Conservative swing is biggest in Lab-v-Con marginals it must be lower elsewhere. It isn’t in safe Labour seats, MORI suggest a swing of 13% there. Part of it is Lib Dem seats, where the swing from Labour to the Conservatives is less than 1% (the swing from LD to Con is 7.4%, but I suspect that under-represents how well the Lib Dems would actually do). Where the big swings in Labour seats are really balanced out seems to be in the Tory heartlands – in seats the Conservatives already hold MORI’s figures only suggest a swing from Labour of 5%.”

To paraphrase – the voters in upper middle class England are not swinging to the Conservatives but those in lower middle class and (dare I say it) working class England are switching to the Tories. Now Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report adds the caveat that:

"Previous elections have never shown differential swings of this degree, we simply don’t get swings of 5% in one type of seat and 14% in another.!"

…but it might, just might suggest a real shift in English politics (and Anthony suggests this too). A shift where ordinary, working class folk who work in the private sector, don’t earn a great deal and watch in bemusement as their public sector brethren suck up more and more cash – mostly to do things they don’t want to happen – where these people start voting Tory.

These are the people who were most damaging by the smoking ban, who are irritated by the endless nannying lectures on drinking, eating and, seemingly, everything else they enjoy. These are the people who are roundly cynical about global warming, who want to use cheap flights to warm places once or twice a year. These are the people who’ve seen labour rob their pensions, let them down on education and want to tax them to the hilt for the horrible crime of using their cars.

And let me close by saying this: if Anthony Wells analysis is right then David Cameron has his strategy wrong. Sucking up to middle-class Lib Dem voting public sector professional and labour-voting social workers by coming across all green simply isn’t delivering – in fact, if we carry on like this, we’ll just alienate those hard-working people who hate labour more than they love the Tories.

...

Out of the shed but still have my axe...(more on business wiffle-piffle)

***

I had a gentle rant about the Idea Hive a few days back - and some people suggested that "underneath the new age language" lay something called "sound theory". My problem is that because it's 95% piffle we miss the good stuff. My advice is to use English.

Maurice Saatchi was of the opinion that you should be able to express a strategy clearly on one side of A4. And as I have expressed before we get all too steamed up with the word – and lose sight of action and tactics. But today that’s not my beef – what I’d like to ask is why we seem to feel that there aren’t sufficient words in the language already.

However, rather than tearing into Idea Hive (Chief Shamanic Officer wtf is all that about then, guys) again I have lifted this from those nice folk at Clarity:

"Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?"

Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive marketplace.

In a partnering relationship with the client, we helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), we helped the chicken deploy its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework.

We convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with our own consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergise with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals in delivering and successfully architecting and implementing and enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes.

The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution.

In conclusion, we helped the chicken change to become more successful.

...read, enjoy and, when you write stuff, try to use those good old words that everybody understands. After all without comprehension (do they still teach that at school) you're wasting your time.

***