No Action Taken Against Common Purpose

Common Purpose to face no further action from Information Commissioner

The Information Commissioner's Office has decided not to take any further action against leadership training charity Common Purpose despite upholding its initial assessment that the charity had probably breached data protection principles.

The ICO ruled in October that the charity was unlikely to have complied with the provisions in the Data Protection Act 1998 on processing personal data when it compiled a list containing the personal details of people who had made requests under the Freedom of Information Act relating to its dealings with public authorities.

The list was sent to public authorities receiving new Freedom of Information Act requests to demonstrate the view of Common Purpose that the requests were vexatious.

Not that I'm being paranoid, you understand.

Other links: What Do They Know?
Common Purpose

Pirate Hordes Take Over Europe

David Cerny, artist of the controversial EU sculpture Entropa, has dismantled the artwork ahead of the deadline in protest at the new government in the Czech Republic.

Cerny has also made it clear he did not support the new government of Prime Minister Jan Fischer, because it included many former communists.

"I don't want to support them, they do not deserve to lead the European Union, this is as if a pirate horde has taken over Europe", Cerny said.

Gordon Brown ploughs on with his compulsory volunteering for young people: Youth Community Service. All part of the hectoring, self-righteous bossiness we've come to expect of the Spawn and his familiars. I note that these young people are only good enough to be groomed as servers and not as leaders, so no Common Purpose for them, then.

Brown talks about young people being able to 'make a difference'. Well, he could make a real difference by fucking off. It's a pity we'll have to wait till the election before we can defenestrate the bastard.

The Common Purpose Of The RSA

Opening my copy of the RSA Journal this morning my eye fell upon a brief interview with David Archer, co-author of Collaborative Leadership. The first thing I thought was that we don't need any more 'leaders' of any sort. Most of the problems the world suffers from are caused by 'leaders', ie politicians (and their friends, ie 'leaders' in the business and banking worlds). My experience is that people who regard themselves as leaders are nearly all egocentric tossers.

Then a phrase caught my attention towards the end of the article: 'different groups may have separate agendas but a leader must find a common purpose and handle the kind of conflicts that will inevitably occur'. Now, I like to think I've not become a conspiracy freak from having spent too much time reading blogs, but these days a little alarm goes off in my head when I read the words 'common' and 'purpose' in close proximity. As it did when I read this phrase - particularly as it was about leadership.

I thought no more about it until some ten seconds later, when the same phrase jumped out at me again: "Fairness and common purpose prevail over selfishness, even between anonymous strangers" - it's a subheading quote from an article 'The descent of rational man' by Pete Lunn. Bugger me, I thought, I'm just imagining it.

But I wasn't - just a couple more pages on and 'Our common purpose' springs out as the title of a piece by Paul Collier on how 'a bottom-up approach, driven by informed citizens, offers our best hope of addressing global problems.' Twice is coincidence; three times is not.

The RSA (its website strapline 'Removing barriers to social progress' - which doesn't strike me as exactly what the Society was originally set up for) has decidedly become more of an unofficial organ of New Labour and its worldview under the direction of Matthew Taylor, a former adviser to Tony Blair. The Society and its Journal are awash with all those buzzwords that you find in modern newspeak: 'new', 'innovative', 'global' (everything has to be global these days), 'community', 'common response', 'social capital', 're-engineering', 'regeneration', 'networks', etc. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find close connections between certain key members of the RSA and Common Purpose.

The Journal these days is a pretty bland read: I could do without the articles of pseudo-science ('behavioural economics', 'emotional brain' stuff) and the waffle about having to find 'global' responses to 'common' problems. This is all moonshine. You can't have a global response until you have global agreement - and that will never happen unless you have a global dictatorship. So we can see where that one's going.

I hate the way people are coming up with this nonsense about us facing 'new' challenges and having to confront 'new' realities and come up with 'new' responses to everything. It's cobblers. These are the same problems and realities we've always had to face: the stupidity of politicians and the cupidity of business. This isn't the first time the world has had to face collapsing economies, currencies, land and property prices, etc. Every time I hear someone talk about 'innovation' I want to punch them in the face. 'How about that as an innovative response?' I want to say.

Bah! that's it for now.