Bastards To The Left, Bastards To The Right

Don't trust the Tories | Henry Porter | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Henry Porter makes a sensible point. After all, these people are all absolute shits.

I was particularly cheered by the fact that he also names people off-piste, as it were, such as Matthew Taylor, CEO of the Royal Society of Arts:

But any pleasure one feels at the party and leader's discomfort is tempered by a strong suspicion that the Conservatives will follow more or less the same path. The Sun's defection was proceeded by the smarter parasites from think-tanks like Demos, which is lifting its skirt in an indecent way at the Tory conference next week, and by people like Matthew Taylor, formerly of Blair's No 10 and now the RSA and the sinister Julian le Grand of the London School of Economics, also formerly of No 10, who of course suggested that the state should forcibly marry pregnant teenagers.

These characters long ago sensed the flow of power from one party to the other and have hopped like so many fleas on to the new host. The fact that someone like Le Grand is granted any kind of hearing at all the Conservative conference, even though a fringe event, is a rather bad sign.

Reading Matthew Taylor's blog posts recently had led me to the same conclusion.

None of these people is to be trusted. They all trim their sails to the winds of power. Older voices may call them Vicars of Bray. I wouldn't be so polite.

Matthew Waffle Taylor Waffle Spending Waffle Cuts Waffle

Over on his blog Matthew Taylor, CEO of the RSA, makes waffly sounds about the supposed savings made by cancelling such projects as the ID card scheme:

The costs of dropping a scheme could include money spent winding it down, compensation for cancelled contracts or redundancy payments. These costs are rarely counted in claimed savings.

He seems to saying that a) the amount saved by scrapping 'one-offs' is minuscule compared to the vast debt we're facing and that b) the saving may not be as large as people estimate.

Nothing at all, of course, about the unacceptable nature of the ID card system and its attendant 'one-offs', such as the National Identity Register, ContactPoint, etc.

But there again, Matthew apparently was 'in government' (I thought he was just an adviser to Tony Blair?) and knows about this stuff.

G20 Summit RSA Third Sector Dunfermline Spawn Stitch-Up

They even have their own website: the G20 gabfest. You, too, can listen to Dame Barbara Stocking, Chief Exec of Oxfam answering questions on climate change, etc, and wonder why.

The Dame isn't the only one pontificating about things which are technically not within the remit of their business. Over on his blog, Matthew Taylor, RSA supremo, pontificates about the need for robust governance in the 'third sector', ie charities, voluntary organisations and pretend charities subsidised by public funds. What this has got to do with the RSA is beyond me. It's another case of ideologically motivated people interfering in areas outside their expertise, proposing solutions to problems which, as far as I can see, don't exist and which are none of their concern.

As for the shenanigans over the breakup of Dunfermline Building Society, for once I'll actually believe a banker. Jim Faulds, chair of the Dunfermline, appeared on Channel 4 news yesterday in an angry mood, saying that he had had no contact with the Chancellor or Gordon Brown, that the Society was in fairly good shape and only required a loan, not a bailout, and that the Scottish parliament had offered it one.

Tonight's Channel 4 news mentions none of this, doesn't have Jim Faulds on it but does have bits from Brown and Darling. That caps it. There's something fishy going on here. My current theory is that the government wanted to scupper the Society so that the press could point the accusing finger at another greedy banker/chairman/board, blame them, meanwhile bunging a small amount of cash at Nationwide, etc. The press are obviously briefed up on this approach as well. In other words, Dunfermline has been sacrificed for purely political (ie save Gordon Brown and the government) reasons.

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.