Jews for Scotland

"..I like being in Britain with Scotland in it, as someone with my kind of background". 

David Aaronovitch from Dateline London

I don't want to make too much of this statement, and the blog title is not a serious one*. David Aaronovitch is a liberal, right-of-centre columnist. He isn't a signatory to the Euston manifesto, but he is a blood brother. He may have a typical London Jewish background, but he is publicly atheist - all of which I can relate to. I'm sure I understand his statement to mean that it is more comfortable for minorities to live in a country not defined by a race or creed (like, em, Israel), and that a union of countries better exemplifies this.

But I'm afraid that is a very strange yoke to throw around the Scots. Very kind as that would be, nevertheless the Scottish have no responsibility to help the English be more cosmopolitan. Indeed the Scots have every right to become a little more flag flying and partial as their inevitable independence would encourage. There will still be as many Scots in London, no matter what currency is used in Edinburgh. In fact, I suspect more bright Scots will head for London if they are forced to narrow their identity.

There isn't much doubt about the strength of London as a trading nation and liberal force is due to the relative comfort afforded to folk without deep Anglo roots. And London, as one of the main cog's of the UK, has indeed broken free of any English/British questions and is just another World City.

Elsewhere, there has been a confusion between British values and English values - but that is because England has been part of Britain within folk memory. Arguments about relative value of "the North" vs "the South" may well get a bit more heated. Behind this, we all recognise that the great unifying force of World War II will finally dissolve for the next generation.

But if we haven't persuaded the Scots after this length of time that they are better off in a union, then one side or the other must be deluding themselves. So it would be better if the divorce were amicable, giving us more time to persuade Wales to stay put.


(*There is, rather oddly, a Jews for Jesus organisation, and the post title is really a play on that.)

Man of the Year

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States magazine Time that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year"

You may laugh at the pointless sexism implied by "Man of the Year", and of course it is now "Person". When do you think they made the change? After 1952 when the Queen was selected? No. 1999. And that year, they picked a man.

And this year, it is not a man or woman, but a generic "Protester". This is not the first time the editors twigged that the anachronism wasn't working. In 2006 the winner was "You". In 1982 it was "the Computer".

One thing this silly award has proved is how the internet has usurped the idea that history is carried exclusively by the genius of a few individuals. In the end, Barack Obama was selected in 2008 because of what that represented: white people voting for a black president.

In the past, fate or good organisation attempted to place the best minds into influential positions. Great progress in any sphere was only possible when brilliant individuals held sway. Darwinian selection formed the aristocracy from those who were good with horses and spiked sticks.

This wasn't a good thing, it was a sad necessity. Many millions of great minds were wasted because they couldn't record their thoughts, or get to positions of influence. But as the excellent may be able to do a magnitude more than the merely very good, this made sense in times of limited communication.

But these times have long past. No modern society or enterprise, whether democratic or not, need invest a single person with any form of ultimate responsibility. A visible titular head helps to avoid invisible influences, but we don't expect any more than pleasant words from leaders, and maybe some negotiation skills. "Leaders" are still paid handsomely, because it would be too self defeating not to. But when we were told that the then president Ronald Reagan had a lot of naps while in the Oval Office, this was just a genuine indication that the Leader of the Free World was mainly there to tick boxes when asked to do so.

To maintain an all powerful leader today is to be at a terrible disadvantage. Somebody usually has the job of saying "yes" or "no", but any issue should be framed in such a way that the decision is trivial. The real work is moulding the issues correctly. In many ways, modern leaders are correct in seeing their real job as managing presentation. If one last person is left to make a vital decision, the organisation is already failing.

While there will always be the odd amazing scientist or researcher who simply restates problems in amazing new ways, in general science builds on itself - so to select a scientist is to celebrate the tip of the iceberg.

The human condition is very much to look upwards in a hierarchy. Your parents. Your older brother. Your teacher. Your manager. Your god. Some imply guidance (the transfer of experience) some imply submission (the transfer of responsibility). These one to one relationships mean less and less as the nodes get further. I don't gain anything from my teacher's teacher. Grandparents are respected, but mainly because they help to explain our parents. And most religions place their deity at the root of all things and don't accept a god of gods. The loss of a close relationship always hurts, but the top of an inverted tree should be easily replaceable. To this extent, Premier league football clubs are right to replace managers regularly; they only have a substantial effect on the team if the team believes it.

I don't expect Time magazine to ditch their award - but we can look forward to some strange "People of the Year" in the future: quangos, social networks, buildings, brands, space; maybe even editors.

I'm on the train

One of the sad things that the Leveson inquiry has brought up is the number of times that victims of phone "hacking" have blamed those close to them for the release of information, unaware that their own voice mails - taken illicitly by journalists - had betrayed them. While the case of the Dowler family is uniquely evil, it is the stories of B-list celebrities that are illuminating.

If you are missing a vital piece of information, you may well end up coming to a conclusion that you would not otherwise have arrived at. In many cases this leads to embarrassment but few consequences. Most families can relate stories of the "it was the dog that ate it after all" type, usually remembered best by the injured party.

The vital piece of information that some of the injured parties in the Leveson inquiry were missing is that a mobile phone does not solely create a direct connection to someone else's ear. A phone is part device and part service. Media intrusion by phone "hacking" is pernicious, but it isn't black magic. You wouldn't protect your front door with a 4 number combination lock, with the combination "1234". 

This type of digital dysphasia is remarkably common. An email does not create a direct connection to a single other person's screen. A message in Facebook does not transfer itself directly to the minds of your friends. If I send a CD of sensitive government information over the post, there is no guarantee it will end up on only the recipient's laptop.

This has nothing to do with security; most communication tools and services are not particularly designed with security in mind. That comes a long way behind price and convenience. Indeed, social internet services are designed to increase connections. The slogan information wants to be free is not so much a call to arms as a reminder of what the gains of open communications are.

For most of human history, societies depended on a tiny set of great men and woman to make huge leaps. But only by luck or inherited wealth did their ideas come to light. (If you are still under the illusion that great people somehow rise mysteriously to the top, then it probably is worth reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.) One hopes that mobile phones and the useful bits of the internet make it easier for good ideas and brains to be discovered - wherever they are and whoever has them.

Secure private communication is something that those who are no longer anonymous believe they need. The annoying man who speaks loudly on his phone in a railway carriage has got one thing right; because he is anonymous, his public wittering does not effect his privacy. You neither know nor care who he is or who he is talking to. Similarly, using Gmail doesn't effect your privacy, even though your message content will be scanned. Because so are a billion other messages.

The best way to ensure privacy in a public world also has nothing to do with security. Refer to people you know and places you go to with pet names. Use in-jokes. All of which most of us do anyway. Think about a management meeting and the indecipherable acronyms and meaningless project names used. Who could benefit from that?

There is privacy, even if everyone is listening.

Back from the ill behaviour

One thing I haven't done before is blog directly about my individual experiences. I don't like to give too much extra credibility to something purely because "I was there". You don't see much of the world just through your own eyes.

But my two week hospital stay courtesy of the NHS gave me a little view on Britain as seen from one of its most contentious institutions.

I entered hospital for the first time as an adult because a GP who had never seen me before said "I didn't look well", correctly ignoring my flu like symptoms. 72 hours later I was waking from a life saving operation. Along with the various tubes attached to me, I was wheeled back to my ward to start recovering.

As a patient, your bed is an island within the sea of chaos that is the hospital ward. Nurses maintain a vigil, day and night, checking your vital signs as well as dispensing pain relief. Orderlies support the nurses with the more physical duties like giving a patient a shave. Porters steam in, pick up patients and steam off to get an x-ray. Cleaners float about scrubbing and mopping any exposed surface. Junior doctors follow senior consultants like ducklings as they do their rounds. Phlebs surface from the depths and take more blood. Food and refreshments arrive on a large trolley. And all this happens with no apparent orchestration.

The sense of hierarchy and purpose in a hospital feels timeless. I suspect Florence Nightingale would be quite at home on a ward today. But because everyone is always needed, there is no obvious tension between the staff roles. For instance, with the fear of MRSA, a cleaner is not seen as lowly - rather a vital defender of holy cleanliness. Everyone scrupulously cleans their hands coming in and out of a ward.

The ethnic mix working in this outer London hospital is familiar and updated. The bulk of nurses are Irish and Caribbean, with a good few Filipinos and the occasional Australian accent. The junior doctors are mainly Asian - Indian or Chinese. (There are too few consultants to make any type of generalisation.) Orderlies and Porters are often East European. Indigenous Brits seem most evident in support medical staff - physios, councillors, admin etc. This is just a rough sketch of course; I asked one junior doctor where she came from, and she replied Mauritius. It could be that a flood of immigrants have rushed to take all available NHS work - but the truth is almost certainly that well off Brits just don't see themselves working long term in the caring profession.

This mix of backgrounds encourages a functional spoken English, free from the bureaucratic corpspeak found in most NHS written communication. Yes, there are the obvious cultural nuances that can clearly cause problems. For example, there is no point asking the older generation of British men if they are "ok" - they will demurely respond with a polite "yes, thank you". Even if they are in fact about to expire.

The octogenarian opposite me was told that he could go home the next day. During a care worker interview he made it clear he had no regular help, but blithely stated he would be fine. But I knew he frequently forgot where and when he was, and had difficulty getting to the chair next to his bed without assistance. Fortunately a second set of care workers were more assiduous and delayed his release.

The food really wasn't that bad - it naturally has to be biased towards being appetizing to the largest audience. This probably edges out healthier, but less familiar food. It is true that there seems little observation as to whether a patient is eating or not.

One of the bigger questions facing the NHS is how it can successfully accept IT. Something in the DNA of the service makes it immune to government initiatives, especially the large ambitious sort.

I was certainly asked the exact same questions by different staff about six or seven times. Even taking into account that asking questions is often a ploy to check the patients state of mind, it became obvious that data once given was not necessarily recorded. My immediate thoughts were "give everyone a bloody iPad".

A week or so after leaving, I was back, waiting for an outpatient appointment. I saw a man pushing a trolley full of fraying yellow folders, each stuffed with patient records - usually hand written notes. The trolley was being pushed around to distribute these patient files. It is hard to imagine such a disrespect for information.

Actually, I didn't have to imagine. Sitting behind his desk, my appointed doctor noticed that the folder with my name on the cover actually contained someone else's files. He said to the nurse "this isn't good". No sir, it was not. The correct folder was found ten minutes later - but the appointment was cancelled anyway because there was no report available for a scan I had only taken the day before.

So, hurrah for the NHS. There is no doubt that the system that brought together a set of professionals with minimal information on a Sunday in order to operate on me definitely works. It probably does not work in a way that a management consultant would appreciate, but a little like many institutions, it works around it's own shortcomings. When we decide what modern Britain should look like, perhaps it can be coaxed to fit in.

But if you do find yourself having to stay for a couple of weeks in hospital, I have only one bit of advice - bring a Kindle.

Elite

While I'm happy to support the Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment, this is a good example of an issue not particularly suited to mass support. I might have a moral aversion to state termination, but with no direct experience with the type of people likely to be executed, their victims or their executioners, I'm just an onlooker. My current outlook could - in theory - be altered by experience. Similarly, the people that wanted "Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister” may not have actually met him, or the many thousands that detest him.

The e-petitions site briefly appears to be a welcome introduction to direct democracy:

e-petitions is an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK. You can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be eligible for debate in the House of Commons.

Anything? The petitions on view quickly descends into duplication and nonsense. Similar sounding propositions sit next to each other splitting attention. Reasons for rejection are carefully logged, but many of the allowed petitions have little concrete meaning. 

The random nature of the entries (and the proud lack of curation) suggests that it was designed as a participation sport. In short, people want to see their suggestions on a list – to see the process work for them.

A quick look at wikipedia tells you that a set of informed articles does not appear purely because people want to see their words reflected back at them. Mass online participation does not lead to coherent action unless the intention is already there. (According to http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2011/09/fixmytransport-yes-please, the Scottish system is tighter)

Direct democracy is about choosing between a set of balanced propositions. Creating the right propositions requires experience not numbers. There is no hypocrisy here - democracy isn't some sort of riposte to conspiracy theorists; not every wild flight of fancy can or should be framed into a valid law. Yes, you need an elite to weigh common opinion.

Parliamentary democracy was a successful implementation of this elite; it has only failed recently because the 600 or so MPs no longer appear to have any role in government decisions. And if they do, their opinions must be filtered through party politics.

 It is quite possible that the immaturity of the e-petition idea is a stick with which to beat and destroy it (again). But it is not a step in any useful direction .

The threshold of 100,000 signatures before a Backbench Business Committee gets to decide whether it should be debated assumes that whimsy cannot happen en masse. But various Twitter and Facebook campaigns have regularly proved this incorrect.

Indeed a web based petition seems to represent a response to events, not a crucible for good law. To quote from an article by Natasha Engel MP:

The petition [to axe looters' benefits] was a reflection of the anger and frustration that people felt after the riots. But we didn't need an arbitrary threshold of 100,000 signatures to tell us that law-abiding people were furious.

None of this diminishes the need for direct democracy to intercede in our presidential government. But this approach isn't progressive.

Cornish

As the rebels take control in Libya, and the Gaddafi family take their last stand, now is the right time to question the role of the West in this enterprise.

Initially it seemed that we backed the equivalent of the Cornish National Liberation Army to overrun London; an arbitrary grouping whose only qualification was dislike of the government.

But after reading the article Who really beat Qaddafi? I'm ready to accept the two main points that Clay Claiborne makes. Firstly, that we should know the rebel Libyans, due to the plethora of internet media about them. And secondly that the West has taken too much credit for a revolution that was going to happen anyway.

I remember turning on the news to see cheering rebels in Tripoli's Green Square, even though 24 hours earlier commentators were suggesting progress to the capital was slow. The sudden conversion of Tripoli from Gaddafi supporting heartland to rebel held bastion indicates that the mainstream media reports on the ground were inaccurate, and that revolution was well prepared. Whatever amateurish behavior we were shown weeks ago from yahoos in jeeps was a misdirection.

This leads to the likely reason for the latest Middle East escapade; that the West wanted to reduce the time between the predicted collapse of the dictator and a new government taking charge so as to keep oil resources running smoothly. Again, given the speed of natural regime change during this Arab Spring, you can see the logic in this from a skittish corporate world.

While hoping that Libyans achieve some measure of security, David Cameron and the other Gung ho leaders will now be seeking their reflected glory. Indeed, it is hard to separate local political ambitions from their stated wishes to bring liberation. The UN mandate to stop Gaddafi striking non-military Libyans was converted into a regime change order. The security of Britain was not in question, yet by simply acting quickly very little democratic checks were put in place.

Libya is not in our geopolitical back yard. If Iran supported IRA incursions into Belfast, I think we would be the first to complain. To get involved simply because the geography made it possible – unlike in Syria – is pathetic. On reflection, the diplomats who worked with Gaddafi to stop his earlier nuclear ambitions must have believed he was not the worst thing in the area.

We have already seen several times that there is absolutely no way to install democracy from outside - assuming democracy in itself is a panacea. However happy Libyans now appear to be on rolling news, most of them have lived their lives with the idea that government has nothing to do with them personally. With the best will in the world, they will not be able to hand over their guns and increased taxes like consumer sated capitalists.

There is something very wrong with the speed at which democracies now use military interventions to gain short term poll benefits. It is almost as if by working fast, people see a tactical necessity that doesn't exist. Too many politicians simply went along with the idea that bombing a dictator's compound was part of a humanitarian mission. This presidential style of decision taking seems to have eclipsed cabinet identity, so without some form of direct democracy, continuous war is the likely future. 

Paper weight

In the past, the important thing about any new enterprise was its value(s); not necessarily how well it was done. Whether it was a new business, a new rock band or a new book it had to be something people would want. That is, the people you knew would want it today. What is the value proposition? Is this what people are into now? When the new daily paper The Independent launched in January 1986 in the UK, it was a perfectly conceived response to journalism and politics at the time. That was enough to secure its launch. It took a little longer for people to realize it wasn't actually very good. 

One aspect of the social internet is that value is no longer something that has to be understood at the beginning of innovation. Because as long as you execute well and consistently, someone will find the value they need. Your immediate friends might not see the value in a book about a school for wizards, or a network with a message limit of 140 characters - but someone will. An audience will find you.

The quality of execution is always down to the maker, and that remains their prime responsibility. Make it work, make it fast, make it right. But you don't have to make everyone share your vision - or even have too much of a vision yourself. In fact a vision needs to be jettisoned quickly if it doesn't fit.  If you think it's green but your fans think its red, then it's red. Just pivot to the new way of thinking.  

The internet can quite easily grab something from the past and give it a new value. A whole set of "retro" things have been reclaimed from cultural abandon. In earlier times, it would take a half a generation or so for a forgotten artist or notable person to have his or her reputation restored.

Unfortunately the inverse is also true, something can have its value destroyed overnight. One interesting aspect of the calamity that hit News International this week was that the News of the World was killed because it was seen as a “toxic brand”.

But the marketing terminology somehow understates the problem - many people already thought the News of the World was not worth reading well before cronies were caught guessing the credentials to voice message services. If it had continued in print, it would have still made money for a while. But it would have suffered the fate of the low valued. The British motor industry lost value over decades. Eventually it was just easier for the same people, sometimes in the same factories, to make cars for foreign companies. Perhaps the News of the World would have hit notional bottom immediately.  

Of course, it is the term "value" that has really changed; in the limited manner I use it here. Perceived value is no longer some type of peer reviewed, curated, academic term. That's because if you can ask thousands of people what they think in seconds, you don't need to rely on a coterie of opinion formers. The opinion formers are relegated to being just another network. So the result is something more akin to a market value. We still want to listen to subject matter experts, but only to avoid pitfalls.