The Bewilderness

The Wrong Leader (with more cheese, please)

As I was on my way to meet the Sandman last night, I decided to enter into the spirit of conference season and indulge my inner political anorak. Navigating the BBC website, I clicked on that newsworthy oil painting: Edward Miliband plagiarising Wallace & Gromit in "The Wrong Leader". My initial reaction was that I had entered into an awards ceremoy: political Oscars perhaps.

The speech, though rhetoric is sullied by the comparison, proved an amalgam of plagiarised gratitude, modelled on the mediocrities that pollute the airwaves. Pauses, doe eyed appeal to the audience, and some choked prayer of thanks to Harriet Harman and his family, an odd combination! The lashings of sentiment only fostered cringes, as the cartoon face tried to emote. How remote from the gravitas and skill of previous leaders. Where was the steel? Where was the passion? Where was the principle?

Some would say that this was a cynical exercise in positioning. Opportunistically attack the coalition, oppose every cut and talk the economy down without bothering to temper attack with policy. Parliamentary poses which had garnered some respect were frittered away in an abasement to the Labour left, embracing change with a reactionary embracing of the past. After all, Blair was jeered and the audience compared Miliband to Kinnock or Smith.

A party that does not like winning elections and cannot learn the lessons of the past are bound to repeat them. No doubt, at the conference next year, we will be served with yet again, "More cheese, Gromit".

Core competence can lead to stagnation

Running through an interview with Jeff Bezos on Les Echos reminds me that the mass take-up of the internet stretches to one decade, no more. All of our household names have sprang up in that time.

Bezos ruminates on how Amazon has survived and thrived as an internet firm. The death of the core competence is celebrated; the search for stability is actually stagnation. Bezos highlights the cultural adaptations of Amazon: obsession with the customer, not the competitor; an ability to think over the long-term; and, the courage to learn whole new sets of skills and build new institutions if that is required to build a profitable service.

In fast growing sectors, companies can acquire the skills of the conglomerate: acquiring, seizing, learning, innovating and adapting. Sticking to one's knitting is a recipe for stagnation as all profitability is open to disruption.

A core competence is now extend and profit.

Who is the nasty party now?

Tim Farron's speech to the Liberal Democrats highlighted why they are unable to rise above the contemptuous doorstep backstabbing that they have unleashed upon their opponents for the last two decades. Some will have Farron when he compared his own party to cockroaches. Down in single digits, one would strive to detect a little humility, some understanding that they were viewed with distaste by the electorate. There was no such introspection.

Farron gave a story that he expected the members who voted for him wanted to hear. The Tories are a nightmare and not worth wiping his shoes upon. The distaste, the disdain, the contempt dripped. And that is why the voters do not share Farron's enthusiasm for an uncivil discourse. If the Liberal Democrats were so holy, then they could take Farron's path of waiting for people to wake up and bow to their moral superiority. But Farron is not more moral than the Tories and impugning your allies is just plain nasty.

There is a nasty party in government and it is quite visible.

Social media will invade the workplace

At some time during the past decade, workers began to notice that their domestic computers and communications were surpassing the tools on which they worked. Before the firewall was a boundary of privilege, since only larger companies were rich enough to afford all of the new goodies that came to pass every year (unless one was wealthy or an early diy adopter). Now, it retards progress and more workers notice that their information rich lives are only replicated on their personal smartphones. That will make work a pretty barren place for the next generation, used to more than just email for their lives.

That the current tools of social media will penetrate the majority of workplaces is a given. What form it takes is unknown. Some will build internal models. But the key is privacy versus transparency. Social media is outward looking and has colonised the longstanding kingdoms of brand management and marketing. Reshaping the internal institutions of companies will prove a very different process and extremely challenging to the current command and control hierarchies that have developed to meet corporate and regulatory needs.

Euronauts become noughts

The shrinking ambitions of Europe and the United States are witnessed in more obscure programmes. Grandiose ambitions are tempered and then disowned. Such becomes the European manned space programme that never was.

Jean-Yves Le Gall, chief executive of launch-services provider Arianespace, agreed in an interview that an all-European manned space effort is off the table. "It's a dream," according to Mr. Le Gall, "but it's not realistic."

The dream was part of the doumentary word creation that all bureaux embark upon. Westerm dependence upon Soyuz has led to a scaling down and abandonment of co-operation, as their management of vehicle development truly sucks.

The agency's chief also said that by failing in the past to set up robust international space-transportation partnerships, Europe and the U.S. "made a collective mistake." As a result, Mr. Dordain said, "we now face the not very comfortable situation" of being totally dependent, at least for the next few years, on Russian technology to reach the international space station.

It is untrue to say that the European dream of manned spaceflight has ended. It never began.

Miliband's comfort zone: New Labour lite

Ed Miliband's conduct during Prime Minister's Questions showed how far the opposition had drifted from their years in office. On policies for policing and the NHS, Miliband called for the coalition to halt both bills and reinvest the monies earmarked on frontline services. The hooting then degerated into New Labour exchanges over money, numbers, targets, waiting times and the misinformation of management information systems. Was this not the style that debased political conversation in a policy free environment.

If neither Miliband nor Cameron can move beyond Blair's malign presentations in their exchanges, then further shit will stick to their characters. But it is Miliband's view of Labour's role in this crisis that has proved most interesting. With a smallish lead in the polls, Miliband has been tempted to tread the path of the amnesiac: Labour's culpability in public sector spending is conveniently forgotten and a blanket opposition to every cut is instituted. Why make waves and alienate potential voters? In this tactic, Miliband copies the puerile populism of New Labour, unleavened by any manifesto for change. His policy review promises to provide context for this tactic in the near future, but firming up a position will undermine Miliband's opportunity to attack all facets of government. I would expect Labour to remain a defender of the public sector without exception for many months to come.

Unmanned and underwater

Unmanned vehicles are beginning to hit the Navy. Now we have the US Navy examining unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) as potential alternatives for the aging out and refitting of their submarine fleet over the next twenty years. This is the same curve that has already taken off in air forces.

The service had hoped to leverage commercial UUV efforts — such as programs developed by oil companies — and tweak them for Navy use, but that equipment has failed to meet military requirements.

The programme will be more expensive and less useful, as commercial conversion has been ruled out. Quelle Surprise!

Waiting upon a butterfly, whose wings have already flapped

If you go out in the markets today, you are sure to meet a bear. And all the bears will be pondering the same philosophical question: if a bank fails, can it do so silently, or will the whole forest burst into flames?

All of the articles one reads offer the same handwringing condemnation of pusillanimous politicians and inevitable calamity. Yet, historians examining the same papers will come to radically different conclusions. What realistic choices do Eurozone participants have? They do not have control of the money supply. This belongs to the European Central Bank. They are unable to exercise full sovereignty. That was given away. All policy decisions require the unwieldy and unanimous commitment of all Eurozone members. Leadership and action are not words that could be associated, even remotely, with this set-up.

A radical response would be political suicide, entailing a dilution of fiscal responsibility and a further surrender of democratic sovereignty. The latter has been argued for by the bureaucrats and central bankers, pushing for even less accountability over budget and taxes from elected representatives. Such a move would usher in an illiberal confederation. None of the political classes have the courage to break with this structure, yet.

Since muddling through by consensus is the realistic policy response, criticism should flow from the ground chosen. Even on this narrower platform, the Eurozone members have proved to be a hapless bunch. Their play book is predictable and whatever firebreaks are built, only postpone the contagion. 

This does raise the important question: was the run on the € inevitable from a certain date? Would we have entered contagion without the pavane of promise from politicians, who feel dutybound to undertake the dance of the dead with their zombie banks? Could a proper accounting of sovereign debt after 2008 have averted this endgame? We will never know. 

It is the teasing out of structure versus action that raises an historian's game. Talk of economic determinism and a dysfunctional currency union ignores the ability of states to place politics over economics, even at great cost. Such arguments also dilute the responsibility of a political elite for the consequences of their mistakes (which we are all paying).

Now we are just awaiting triggers and that depends upon a butterfly, whose wings have already flapped.

Balls in the air for Scotland

The Liberal Democrats have attacked Alex Salmond in a speech from Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to the august corpocracy, the Scottish CBI. He opined on the level of debt that Scotland could expect (only £65 billion) and that the country would not benefit from independence. But England would, heh!

This is part of the 'mutual respect agenda'. Still, his illiteracy is countered by the SNP's who, in grand Brownstanding, calls for more government expenditure as a Plan B stimulus. Is Samond modelling Balls?