Respect and other key words

Friends at work

The debate in parliament at Westminster to-morrow is important, and not just for its subject, the EU.

It is the first debate under the UK’s 100,000 signature petition procedure.  Members of parliament, ministers and shadow ministers will respect and rise to the occasion.

Words are important.  Parliaments are houses of words.  The words in a constitutional document are especially significant.

The constitution of the United States of America seeks

A more perfect union.

The treaties of Rome and Lisbon seek

An ever closer union.

The words chosen speak from, betray perhaps, the history, the experience, the ambitions and the vision of the people who wrote them.

I hope for, and want to be part of, a diverse and more perfect world.  What do you want?

Paws4Now

Jock

More friends

So there is a debate on Monday

Hi

More than 100,000 people have signed a petition.  Parliament has a debate on Monday.  Let's hear what they all have to say.


It is important but it is just a debate.  Calm down dear.


Paws4Now


Jock

Cuts Traps Potential

 

Back in march I wrote about Cuts and Bad Behaviour:

Some local authority leaders are designing and planting Taliban style I.E.D’s timed to explode in the summer and the autumn.  They cut lollipop ladies on £70 a week, preserve Directors on £2000 a week and appoint Special Advisers on £4000 a week.

George Osborne and others, you are now falling into the heffalump traps that your enemies have dug for you all over the country.

It is very easy to cut costs.  It is even easier to trip up the boss who has told you to make efficiency savings.  It is extremely hard to develop and implement changes to work practices and systems that will both reduce costs and increase the value of the goods or services delivered.

George, your logic and your response must be tough.

Work through an example.  You have required productivity savings of 20% to be achieved at a rate of 6% a year over three years.  A department, a quango, or a local authority responds by cutting by 40%, either its lollipop lady workforce, or a contract for services awarded to a supplier, very possibly a charity. 

Read more »

Don't Legislate - Manage

Hi

So Liam Fox has gone.  So just manage.  Cut the ratio of top brass in the navy, army and air force to total force numbers to an average of just twice the US ratio. 

Just get your head round the numbers.  Britain has between three and a half and five times as many officers of general level or higher rank proportionately as does the USA.

The NHS does not need new legislation, does not need yet more mechanistic re-organisation, whether that be top down or bottom up.  It needs to appoint and trust skilled managers and practise wise gardening.  That involves a lot of grubbing up and recycling – every day on the ground with mud under the fingernails.

The exposure of disgraceful standards of care in some hospitals and trusts will not be cured by changing management structure, policies or targets.  The cure is to replace failed or incompetent managers and staff.

The place to start is at the top.  Mr Lansley is a pompous politician and an incompetent untrained manager. 

Forget Legislation just Manage.  Michael Gove is showing the way.

Voters in 2015 will not look at how many pages of statutes have been enacted.

Paws4Now

Jock

And westward look 

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A.

To You From Failing Hands We Throw The Torch - Be Yours To Hold It High.


John McCrae - In Flanders Fields - Cambridge American cemetery.




'Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,' - that is all


Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.


Paws4Now


Jock

David Cameron III

  

Dear David

I promised you proposals for Economic Action.

You are the only political leader in the vulnerable western economies who is breaking free from sterile debate

Twentieth century bumper sticker politics, simplistic, insulting even - Left against Right, Labour against Tory, Republican against Democrat.......

You stressed leadership in your conference speech.  I applauded all the way.  You meet the fabled Napoleon test.  You are lucky.  You hold  aces and trumps.  Play them.

At Manchester you named keys to growth.   High technology, research, development, and manufacturing are already powering ahead into the wider world, supported by our universities, Cambridge, Warwick, Manchester.......

Given wise regulation, banking and services will remain world beaters.

But at home for wellbeing, employment, growth, it has to be:

Housing     Housing     Housing

Economic and political history tells you that housing is a driver of domestic economic activity, growth, employment and wellbeing.  It is a fast acting multiplier. 

With Housing you really are lucky. 

Keep going now.
Read more »

David Cameron II

Long shadows

Dear David

I promised you proposals for Action this day. 

A year ago you, George and the team understood the proven wisdom:

You have to save yourself into survival: you cannot save yourself into prosperity.

But you have both overestimated and underestimated your power.  You believed that the “first class government machine” would do what you told it to do.  You were wrong.  Your savings agenda has been hijacked.  You have been shafted.  It isn’t a machine with precision control levers.  It is a vast overgrown jungle, in which the law of the jungle rules.

You were warned on 27 March 2011:

Meanwhile the real Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, David and Nick, are failing to lead by example.  Whitehall mandarins have increased their numbers and powers since last May.  Some local authority leaders are designing and planting Taliban style I.E.D’s timed to explode in the summer and the autumn.  They cut lollipop ladies on £70 a week, preserve Directors on £2000 a week and appoint Special Advisers on £4000 a week.

Lollipop Ladies on £70 a week have gone in droves.  The annual saving is minute: the resulting operational and social mayhem was clearly intended.

Earlier, I had obtained advice from my reliable Welsh source with the rules for you to follow.  I passed them to you on 22 March:

Rule 1.  Think of the problem as gardening rather than engineering...............    Spanner and micrometer are useless.  Get to work with pickaxe, spade and chainsaw.

Rule 2.  Find some things that everyone dislikes.  Old trees and shrubs, that have been there forever, that produce little.............  Cut them down root and branch; burn them.  Let in light and energy.

There is, at least, one such rotten tree.  Old fogeys have been propping it up and calling it new names for nearly a thousand years..........................

 

Everyone will cheer.  But, more important, everyone will recognise that you are serious and that you know what you are doing.

Your own office and the Cabinet Room table is, in reality, the only part of the machine (or overgrown garden) of State that you directly control.  So the big rule is:

Rule 3.   Lead by example.  Cut the top payroll.  One Prime Minister, plus four Secretaries of State and a Chancellor is enough.  You then need “up and comer”, Ministers, two for your office and twenty five spread between the others.  Thirty three in total is a big enough political team to run anything.

You can then look everyone, politicians, councillors, generals, administrators, permanent secretaries, in the eye and require them to follow your lead.  Cut deeply at the top; cut lightly at the grassroots.

Be seen to lead.  

Rule 4.  Make no exceptions.   (N.B.   Recently applied cuts of around 40% in payments to charities undertaking sub-contract work for councils are wrong.  The cut should be either 100% under rule 2, or around 5% under rule 3. You have been walked onto an I.E.D.)

Only by dramatic action and example can you start to change the culture.  Your actions will generate respect, admiration, terror and imitation in equal measures. 

We all want and recognise a good leader.  Once again Prime Minister your country needs:

Action this day.

Paws4Now

Jock

The future