This piece was originally published on my old site, shortly before I switched to Squarespace. I've reproduced it here in view of Guido's story about the Charities Commissioners looking at the status of Gordon Brown's Smith Institute. (In other words, it's a naked attempt to generate a bit of traffic).

Sometimes you have a dull moment and you just fancy reading something that you know will make you really angry. I usually find the Times "Public Sector" supplement just the job, and last week's edition was no exception.

It's not terribly exciting - we learn that she knows nothing about charities, but has a background in regulation. She was born in Uganda and has done some paragliding. But then this appears at the bottom.

Career:
1979-84 research officer, Consumers in Europe.
1984-86 trainee probation officer
1997-2001 chair, Exeter and District NHS Trust
2000-02 deputy chair, Food Standards Agency
2002-06 chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
2005-06 chair, School Food Trust

Read that again.

She went from being a research officer at an NGO, to training as a probation officer and then, after a gap of ten years was considered suitably qualified to head up an NHS trust. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off.

What on earth was she doing in that ten year gap to suddenly make her top management material? A bit of digging turns up this article which reveals that she was a "homemaker and freelance consumer consultant". So from her published CV she started in her position at the tiller of an NHS trust with no professional management experience whatsoever. This might go some way to explaining the performance of the NHS.

What possible reason can there be for this extraordinary advancement? Perhaps she is just extremely good at interviews or just plain lucky. Perhaps we'll never know.

In unrelated news the Guardian notes:

Dame Suzi, as she has been since January, [is] a committed member of the Labour party.

It's also interesting to compare the press release on her appointment to the FSA to the CV above:

[Sir John Krebs'] Deputy will be Ms Suzi Leather, who has twenty years of experience in consumer representation.

(My emphasis)

Still look on the bright side she says she's going to be robust in making charities submit their accounts on time. Perhaps she'll be dealing with the Moslem Council of Britain who have never actually submitted their accounts since their formation ten years ago.

 

The government clearly decided on day one of their administration that the populace should be treated with the utmost contempt. Perhaps it's true that we get the government we deserve.

Hardly a day goes by without a policy announcement, ministerial bullshit dutifully regurgitated by unquestioning hacks in the mainstream media. The assumption is that once an announcement is made, no further action need be taken. Nobody will ever follow up and ask what the results were.

In 2004 the schools minister, David Milliband told A-Level students that the exam was

as testing as ever

He went on: 

I am not claiming that today's students are cleverer than their parents; I do say that schools are getting better at teaching them well. Improvements in education have released the potential of middle England.

Good. Win-win. Everyone happy. Keep going just as we are, cos everything's fine. Right?

Today, however, it was announced that:

Tony Blair will endorse the International Baccalaureate Diploma as an alternative to the "gold standard" A-level today and promise funding to allow state schools to make the switch.

I leave it to my readers to decide whether Milliband was telling the truth or not.

Meanwhile, on the GCSE front ministers loudly ordered a rethink of the qualifications on offer, commanding a consultation on whether the International GCSE should be offered instead. Just one month later, the bureaucrats have come back and told him that the IGCSE is not suitable. 

Does anyone seriously think that these jokers should be in charge of the education system?

No, not a posting about my readers' reactions to my postings, but a better way to deal with relations between employers and employees.

In a previous job I was witness to the corruption that is the employment litigation industry. An employee at my place of work decided she had had enough of it. She stormed into her boss's office and screamed that she was leaving and not coming back. She was gently told to calm down and to come back after the weekend and talk it through. On Monday she reappeared, armed with her letter of resignation which she slapped down in front of the boss man, and walked out.

"Fine", he thought.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later he received notification from her lawyers that she was suing the company for unfair dismissal!

At this point the lawyers had to be called, and the fees started clocking up. The first reaction was to offer an out of court settlement (a couple of grand, if I recall correctly), which was duly done. Unbelievably, this was rejected out of hand, and the case went all the way to tribunal. Here, a few thousand in fees later, it was peremptorily thrown out. Of course the tribunal was asked to award costs but this request was rejected by the tribunal. Costs in these kinds of cases are virtually never awarded to the employer.

This is absolutely typical of employment tribunals. Grasping employees are in a win-win situation. It is always worth their while to "have a go" because they are funded by legal aid (in Scotland, at least), and they know that costs will not be awarded against them. The losers are the honest employees whose own wages will bear the brunt of the costs.

And none of the political parties is proposing to do anything about it. 

So what to do about it? There is a much simpler and better way of dealing with it. In Switzerland (that den of exploiters of the working classes) the relations between employer and employees are governed by ...wait for it...contracts of employment. Everything clear and simple. Liberal. Fair.

It could never happen here.

(Hat tip: Libertarian Home) 

Brian Micklethwait was on 18 Doughty Street on Monday along with James Oates from Cicero's Songs. One of the best things I've seen on the station so far.

Before the show went out Brian seemed to have been pretty suspicious of James. In a posting on his blog earlier in the day he had this to say:

[W]hen you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe.  The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear.  But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear.  So don’t vote for these lying creeps.  At least the two leading parties do stand for a recognisable attitude that unites their members, although less and less as time goes by.

Having had some correspondence with James and having been favourably impressed (EU-enthusiasm excepted), I was interested to know what Brian made of him.  The answer was..

I liked the guy, and he convinced me that the Lib Dems may indeed be moving towards a more principle classical liberalism than was the case in former years.

Which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say. I've spent quite a lot of time hanging around LibDem blogs in the last year or so, trying to assess just this issue. I so think that, in common with the rest of the blogosphere, there is a libertarian feel to the LibDem blogs. Cicero is sound, Jock Coats is sound. Liberal Review is pretty good too, although some of their guest posters occasionally come up with some good old fashioned statism. Whether the rest of the party is liberal too is another question - as a commenter to a post of Jock Coats about the political compass makes clear. Tom Papworth of Liberal Polemic says:

I expect there are a lot of us in the truly liberal bottom-right. Just none of our leaders. This is the lamentable lot of the liberal!

How right he is. As an example of just how statist the party remains, take a look at this thread on the Liberal Democrats Youth and Students forum (an excellent site, by the way, with a well-mannered clientele - but my God, the statism, the statism!)

The problem seems to me to be that the Lib Dems are still effectively two parties. There is a liberal wing, and a social democrat wing -it just hasn't been exposed because the LibDems are never going to win an election outright and so are never subject to the same scrutiny as the other parties.

Mind you, the Conservatives are just as split with the big-state, "one-nation" wing apparently having the upper hand at the moment, and the small-state libertarians in retreat.

It's very, very sad that the liberal movement is split between two parties and has found itself in the minority in both. This is the tragedy of liberalism in the UK.

It's hard to take seriously a proposal that is a blatant case of bureaucrats trying to expand their remit, and is also one which is supported by Alastair Campbell.

Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Well, let me tell you, the current voluntary option has failed. Shan't sign.

(Hat tip: Longrider)

Is it just me, or is the reaction of ITV head office staff to the arrival of Michael Grade just a tad suspect? Especially when you recall that he had the same cheering crowds when he arrived at the Beeb.

What sort of person voluntarily hangs around in the reception and applauds the arrival of their new boss? Is everyone in television naturally sycophantic? On the other hand maybe they were rounded up and parked in reception by the higher-ups. But the question is, "Who". Did Grade request this reception himself or did someone think it a good career move to arrange a welcome committee for the new boss?

We need to know. 

Now that we've had a snigger at Greg Clark's confusion over what is poverty and what is inequality, we can speculate a little about what exactly the problem is. This might at least set us on the road to a solution. As in my earlier piece I will refer to poverty and inequality as two distinct phenomena. I wish everyone else would do the same.

Various commentators, Clark included, have talked about a "lack of social cohesion" and the poor being "excluded from society". None of them seem to be willing or able to explain precisely what they mean by these terms. Are we talking about those who work, but whose income is low? People, in other words, who are upright, law-abiding citizens but who do not have much money? Is Greg Clark saying that these people are the problem? If so, then in what way are these people excluded from society? What is it that they are unable to do? They work, they meet friends, they can go to churches and schools, join clubs, vote, go shopping. They are part of society in every way and cause no problems to their fellows.

Then again, we might be talking about those who are unemployed, but are in other ways no burden to the rest of us - upright and law-abiding in every way. Are these people excluded from society? It's hard to see how they are: because of the crazy marginal tax rates endured by low-paid workers, the upright unemployed probably only have slightly less money. In other ways their circumstances are very similar and society is open to them in the same way.

I conclude then that the problem must be with the underclass - those who are not upright citizens. They are probably unemployed, perhaps criminal. They are certainly a nuisance to their neighbours, most of whom will be the upright low-paid and upright unemployed.

The thing to notice is that money or inequality are at best only contributory factors. The underclass has no less income than the upright low-paid and the upright unemployed - probably they have more, given their access to illicit earnings. They are no more unequal either. So Clark and his co-enthusiasts for inequality need to demonstrate the other factors which cause someone in the lower echelons to join the underclass rather than the upright classes.

The corollary to this is that money or inequality might not actually be contributory factors at all. Again, Clark needs to make his case. He needs to describe the mechanism by which a doubling of someone's income can help make someone else decide to join the underclass. It should be interesting if he ever sticks his head above the parapet to explain. In the absence of this "inequality mechanism" it's reasonable to conclude that there are other causes to the underclass problem. What these other causes might be will have to wait for another posting.

Here's an interesting site: farmsubsidy.org is a Europe-wide campaign to win transparency about payments under the Common Agricultural Policy. Lots of politicians have their noses in the trough by the look of it.

Time for David Davis to practice his oratorial skills?

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians.

A V Dicey

Jackie Danicki knows about this. If you're in London you should see if you can help.