How to earn a living

Jeff Immelt, boss of GE, the World’s largest manufacturing company, has been talking at the London Business School.

He is convinced that in the US  “a 30-year transition from a manufacturing export-led economy to an importing service-based one typified by the growth of Wall Street is over and has left America damaged“.

He believes that the workings of the world economy have been “reset” and are moving onto a new pendulum swing which will see the future dominated by new levels of government intervention, new markets and new technologies based on good old research and development.

I think he’s right and that’s a problem for UK plc.   We are good at inventing new things (at least we think we are!) but commercialising those inventions is something that Britain has been poor at (with honourable exceptions) for 100 years and more.

So how will we earn our living in the future now that banking and finance isn’t looking like such a good bet?

NuLabour buries toxic waste under Jackson tributes

The sudden and premature death of Michael Jackson has a silver lining for a NuLabour government that has more toxic waste than the banking sector.   It is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to bury bad news, really bad news, when the news agenda is otherwise engaged.  So who gets the prize for quick thinking in charge of a disaster?

Step forward Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.  He has ‘let it be known’  that the government is to abandon what the Guardian describes as “Tony Blair’s Flagship schools reform” and “the most significant education reform of the New Labour era“, namely the Stalinist national strategies for literacy and numeracy in primary schools.  The changes will end the centralised prescription of teaching methods whereby Ministers tell teachers how to do their jobs.

As Jenni Russell, also in the Guardian, points out results have been disastrous. 

Teachers feel helpless when they are in front of classes that aren’t grasping the points at the speed the national timetable lays down. There is no flexibility. The national plan compels a teacher to move on, no matter how many children are being left behind. Frantic booster classes at ages seven and 11 teach children the short-term tricks they must know to get them through Sats tests.

Results did improve in the first few years of the National Strategies but only because teachers were learning to teach to the test; once they had done so results predictably stagnated and it soon became clear that children were being turned off education by their stultifying experience of it.

However, it’s not just educationally that the National Strategies have been such a disaster.  Delivering them has involved massive expenditures on consultants; abandoning them could save £100 million per annum on the governments contract with outsourcing firm Capita plc.   In other words, NuLabour’s centralised command and control approach is not only a technical failure but also a financial failure.  

This is, of course, not a one-off failure confined to education only.  The development of a centrally-directed system that Stalin would have approved of is very much at the heart of the new NuLabour project and much of the excessive growth of government in recent years is attributable to it although, in fairness, one should point out that, as with so much else, Labour’s claim to fame is not that it originated this approach – that credit goes to the Thatcher-era Conservatives - but that it developed it to the current obscene level.

Meanwhile what of Ed Balls?   His news management strategy is working well so far.  Last night’s News at Ten on BBC1 slipped in only a brief mention of his change of plan just before the end of the bulletin and Newsnight made no mention of it at all.  Accordingly he has, in the time-honoured way of finessing a catastrophic defeat, declared victory and moved on. 

His latest wheeze is to redirect the money saved to schools to help them build networks with neighbouring schools thus driving up standards and exam results.   How wonderfully cuddly and, well, Internet-friendly  those ‘networks’ sound – it must seem to the poor souls like a shoo-in.   It won’t work of course, but hopefully NuLabour will be long gone before too much more damage has been done.

Lessons from London

According to the Wall Street Journal the US House of Representatives is to start posting expense reports online at the behest of Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the WSJ began publishing stories based on combing through the existing paper records.

It is not proposed that records from earlier years will be published online.  My guess is that quite a few congressmen have been reading reports from London and are keeping their fingers crossed that no-one digs into past expenses.

What a difference it would have made if Speaker Martin had opted for disclosure at an early stage.

However, it seems that the Senate still doesn’t ‘get it’ even though their expenses typically cost millions of dollars per year so there could still be fireworks from Washington.