Blog
7 august 2011, the multitude of humanity
Sunday 7th August 2011
I don’t really get out enough, so after a furious afternoon of mud racing and drinking, a night out on the brighton seafront, all for my brother’s stag do, was a (gin and) tonic. We were not alone, amidst wall to wall hens and stags, at various states of undress, more as the night went on. Woke up to the tottenham riots, scouring the detritus of the night before in search of a newspaper. A couple of hours later, heading back to civilisation, the streets were already flooded with tourists, and I surfed the london tide, which clearly washes down here. The train of course was first late, then cancelled (the norm grumbled the odd regular on it), but I…
28 july 2011, and the winner is...
Thursday 28th July 2011
From my vantage point as a non-executive director on the board of our hospital trust, fabled as the birthplace of the equally-fabled nhs, I have been involved since december (indeed somewhat before) in overseeing the process of being acquired. It was an extremely interesting experience, weighing up the options, walking on eggshells with the stakeholders, and helping the more active members of the executive team define and execute a very robust and well-managed plan that led up to an all-day board meeting this week when we declared central manchester as the organisation in whose hands we thought trafford residents’ health would best be looked after. It was a long journey, not without its challenges, and with a fair degree of…
27 july 2011, from gazelles to gorillas
Wednesday 27th July 2011
I knew nothing at all about “business support” when I arrived back in manchester 3 years ago, but now I am overly burdened with the rather too public sector-esque menu of options and interventions for bringing money to bear in helping local firms prosper. An excellent paper, launched this morning helped tilt that investment more towards the high-value, high-tech, sustainable end of the operation, focusing on stimulating and supporting, with innovation – everyone’s favourite buzzword – high on the agenda. Best comment came from john leach who echoed the panel’s plea to do more for decent sized “foundation firms”. In a world of ever decreasing resource, you can’t do something for everyone, so this was a call to focus not…
26 july 2011, the chill from norway
Tuesday 26th July 2011
I somehow omitted norway in my recent sweep of europe’s fringe (26 march 2011, let’s ignore the rise of the right), which now looks a big miss after anders’ breivik’s horrific attacks. They were all the more horrendous for me as I spent many of my childhood summers at such youth camps. Though the incident represents one man’s madness and depravity, his connections with the far right, including the english defence league it does again suggest that such movements have a vile and violent tail and provide succour and morale support. No need to look to extremists though for easy scapegoating: the front page of the sun=http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=sun+headline+al+qaeda+massacre+front+page+norway&um=1&hl=en&biw=1600&bih=682&tbm=isch&tbnid=73Ll0Ix7v084lM:&imgrefurl, now britain’s best-selling newspaper, ran with the utterly presumptuous headline of “al quaeda…
23 july 2011, and on the euro – and now the dollar too
Saturday 23rd July 2011
A tired looking angela merkel left brussels yesterday with a deal agreed at a pre-meet with sarkozy and trichet, which most seem to agree was more than papering over the cracks. They committed to more economic governance which, based, on the expansion of the european financial stability facility, will be less than a euro area ministry of finance (see 2 june 2011 ) but well beyond what we have today. Whilst the “m” bit of economic and monetary union was meticulously planned and delivered, the “e” is an abrupt and ad hoc process. We will see what they deliver in this round, and what all 27 agree to. Meanwhile, enough was done to deal with the immediate issue of…
20 july 2011, the litmus test
Wednesday 20th July 2011
Rare praise for the eu, for bringing foreign airlines flying into europe within the ambit of its best-in-class emissions trading scheme - not that ets counts for much in the world, as the failure of copenhagen brutally showed (20 december 2009. This is part of a wider process of turning invisible costs on the environment into financial costs that will ultimately incentivise behavioural change. Yes, if we are ever to slow global warming rather than just mitigate, we are going to have to fly much less. The ets came from a growing realisation years ago that on current trends, climate change was likely to reduce gdp, probably by around 5% a year. Ironically the political agenda turned to this only…
10 july 2011, juba-lant
Sunday 10th July 2011
There are so many parts of the world I know so little about; something my time at the united nations reinforced. I first followed sudan with the troubles in darfur and the horrifying janjaweed, discovering that an enlightened american-led process of many years was already near completion to stop a north-south civil war that had killed perhaps 2 million people. That culminated in a ceasefire and an independence referendum, and then with this week’s celebrations, as south sudan became africa’s 54th nation state. A glance at western sahara shows that there is no inevitability about such progress. South sudan however is extremely poor, if sufficiently exposed to mass media to want development and prosperity. Ensuring a permanent end to a…
8 july 2011, end of the world
Friday 8th July 2011
The day after netanyahu won the election in 1996, a seminal moment in israel’s history (and that’s how it ended), the (rather leftist establishment) radio played rem’s “it’s the end of the world as we know it” virtually non-stop. Stop though, abruptly, will another world this week, as, after 168 years, this sunday will see the last edition of the uk’s biggest selling newspaper, felled by its utterly immoral behaviour several years ago. The news of the screws, as it was unaffectionately known, was the most populist of papers, both in its stance and visual content, where it was sometimes indistinguishable from the outright pornographic “sport” (a cross between viz and playboy) that incredibly lasted a decade before finally biting…
2 july 2011, should I delete this blog ?
Saturday 2nd July 2011
Sometimes you just read a fabulous thought-provoking article, like this. I have mused myself on the nature of memory, recalling vividly something bob dylan once said when refusing to be photographed, protesting that every picture takes away a piece of the soul. More accurate is a piece of your memory, as, like all parts of the body, memory cells have a finite existence, of some seven years. The brain therefore needs to make daily decisions on which memories to keep, and which will die. Looking at photos burns an old memory onto a new cell, skewing the brain’s process. Viktor mayer-schönberger takes this a step further, by noting that in the digital age we CAN keep it all.…
25 june 2011, let’s hear it for the bear
Saturday 25th June 2011
Being a bear is bad for business. No-one really wants negative news, and so being the one forever bringing it doesn’t exactly make repeat calls more likely (doom and gloom). Messengers did really used to get shot. Yet, if bad is on the way, surely it’s better to know it than not. And after one bad prediction, nouriel roubini has been economist du jour for years now. My broad view on the economy is that central bankers have worked marvels these last years to slow the need for deleveraging and keep the western economies afloat, but views that private investment and consumer spending are going to pick up the baton and race ahead are flatly wrong. The first will wait…
22 june 2011, camels, eyes and needles
Wednesday 22nd June 2011
The ten richest people on earth are worth some €200 billion - 60% of the income of the 700 million people of sub-saharan africa. Whilst 76.9% of statistics are made up, this one isn’t, and it hammers home the depravity of the level of inequality in the world, which continues to rise. In an ever more open world though, a common market for the world’s highest paid talent, this is a somewhat inevitable side effect. Clearly incomes at the bottom will never keep up, meaning the differentials will rise. The spirit level is a valiant attempt to show that societies with less inequality prosper more, a thesis that has surged across the world in all sorts of fields: here, in…
18 june 2011, in celebration of...
Saturday 18th June 2011
Politics needs characters, even if they usually comes with the straight talking that makes them look devious or ideological. None fit that description better than ken clarke and jean claude juncker, thrown together today in a typical juncker aside about how clarke saved the euro. My strongest memory of juncker is when he virtually wrestled with the other jean claude at a press conference over the title of "mr euro", a wonderful vignette about the struggle between what in a normal polity would be seen as an overmighty central bank and a feeble finance ministry. Trichet’s trump card was pulling out a euro note and pointing the assembled press to his signature. Juncker’s most common (mis)quote is about why prime…