Why business should run business and government should run government

~ Bob ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few years it has become popular in government to engage a business tsar. I’ve never been entirely sure why Lord Sugar or Baroness Brady should have been characterised as autocratic supreme leaders within such a bureaucratic setting. They may well perform that dictatorial role at the top of their own business empires, but inside government they could only ever be oxymoronic advisory tsars.

Many examples exist of MPs who have foregone their elected office to work in the private sector: former Labour MP Jamie Reid to a job in the nuclear industry and George Osborne has travelled a lesser distance, perhaps, to edit the Evening Standard. This is all perfectly reasonable to use skills and experience gained in public life to earn a living and feed one’s family. It only becomes more murky when an upright individual such as Ian Hamilton is given a government post in charge of Deregulation (following regulation never having been one of Mr Hamilton’s strengths).

There is, however, a fundamental difference between running a business and running government. Motivation in public office must be to act for the public good. The public are not customers, they are not sales prospects or opportunities. They are, to quote I, Daniel Blake, citizens. Government must act on behalf of every citizen. Civil servants who oil the wheels of government and who make the State function, do so because their skill set is often to serve several masters and to ease the inevitable transitions from one political flavour to the next more-fashionable one.

Successful entrepreneurs are motivated in some greater or lesser degree by profit. How they chose to use that profit may vary. There are very successful business people who use profit for social benefit, either by treating their employees well or by maintaining high ethical standards in their industry. Ideally of course they do both. Some, on the other hand, are exclusively motivated by personal gain. I would no more elect Philip Green to represent my interests than I would Donald Trump. Business running government is simply a disaster waiting to happen and in some cases already taking place.

Government, either in the form of politicians or public servants, is equally unsuited to running business. Serving the customer, innovating products and prices, motivating the workforce, improving productivity, challenging the market – none of these concepts can co-exist with bureaucracy. The history of government run industry is one of enormous waste, inertia in a vacuum of decision making and constant fluctuation with political change. It inevitably leads to a loss of competitive skills and eventually to takeover by foreign corporations.

Nationalisation is not a sustainable answer to fairness in transport or energy marketplaces. Far better models exist of businesses run with social aims and objectives than that of nationalisation. Public monopoly is the antithesis of public benefit. It leads to corruption and stagnation.

Back to the future

~ Bob ~ Leave a comment

As I write this in May 2025 it occurs to me that there may be people who read my blog and have no idea about the Great Time Machine Referendum of June 2024. The question put to the people of the United Shires of England (USE) was of course: We, the people, believe that we should invest in a time-travel machine for the whole of the country, and we would like to move to a different year.

We know that the vast majority of the younger population voted ‘No’ on the basis that their future was looking reasonably exciting, if overshadowed by the time-honoured threats of nuclear mass-destruction, scary house prices and The Only Way is Norfolk. However, casting aside the exuberance of youth, the electorate returned a decisive four point margin in favour of temporal shift.

What nobody had foreseen in those heady campaigning days of electric poster clad buses was the question of direction. Wither shall this time machine take us? Forwards or Back?

The incumbent government with its clear mandate for delivering the time-machine has argued that ‘the people’ had made plain their desire for a backward step. Back to things familiar to the middle-elderly populace; back to a golden era of certainty, security and Eastenders. The shock-jock Nigel Le Pencil, recently married into the regressive French dynasty and never in post long enough to be inked in as Leader of the USE Intolerance Party, has argued that nothing less than a full 45 years, back to the potent days of Mrs Thatcher will suffice.

His Majesty’s Opposition is split with the Bynsters arguing for the opportunity to demonstrate how the nationalised industries should have been run and the Cornets, urging a slower, more measured reverse to a time when the NHS employed nurses, though there is some debate about exactly how long ago that was.

Following the Supreme Court judgement that the referendum had not in fact provided guidance on the direction of time-travel an anarchic insurgency has gained momentum, declaring itself in favour of forward movement. Such radical thinking has gained some traction amongst the younger generation, unwilling to give up virtual telephony and emojis.

With backbench MPs flinging themselves down zipwires in desperate attempts to attract the popular vote, the DePfeffelites have urged the Prime Minister to call a snap election to garner a mandate for the quantum and velocity of time-shift. Somewhat rudderless since the unfortunate spontaneous combustion incident, the influence of this faction has waned since their leader’s demise. Preliminary indications from the enquiry still point to a superfluity of flammable hair gel and friction.

With the plebiscite now called, we the electorate, find ourselves facing an uncertain future whilst contemplating a even more uncertain past. If you find yourself reading this article at some point before it was written you will know which way the vote went and less fortunately you will know which way things will be going.

Putl’lt

~ Bob ~ Leave a comment

I was in Victoria on Vancouver Island last year visiting the First Nation exhibition in the Royal British Columbia Museum. There was a section on the many different native languages spoken. I was struck by the simplicity of one Nuxalk word: Putl’lt, which roughly translated means: Everything belongs to the generations not yet born. It is an encapsulation of a sophisticated yet immaculately simple idea in one short sound.

What we have does not belong to us, it belongs to the unborn children of the next generation. We must guard the fragile, precious resources of this world for them and set them an example that they will follow. We should use all the sophisticated scientific knowledge that we have as well as our natural instincts to ensure there is a beautiful natural world for the heirs of our heirs.

April Foolhardiness

~ Bob ~ Leave a comment

A piece of comedy gold came through my letterbox this morning, April Fool’s Day. Stylistically it is written as Boris doing his best Jim from the Vicar of Dibley impression: “Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, No!” Whenever I catch a tone of Boris I smile inwardly, though not perhaps for the reasons he would like. The diatribe was entitled ‘The UK and the European Union: The Facts.’ Actually the thing that first gave it away as an April Fool was the way THE FACTS screamed out in giant red capital letters. The European Union according to Monty Python.

This blog is not a polemic on one side or the other of the argument, so please, Brexiters, sit down, calm down. My point is that this pamphlet is masquerading as a factsheet when it is merely another treatise on behalf of the would-be leavers. Had the cling-ons written to me on 1st April pretending they had a set of self-evident truths to tell I would have been equally amused.

Cunningly the fact that this handbill comes from Vote Leave is squirrelled away in tiny print, just in case an innocent householder didn’t realise the date. The BBC had an article about blue crisps this morning; and then there was the one about the England cricket team and the 20/20 World Cup. So I have been on full alert for more chicanery.

As for the argument I am waiting for someone to convince me that they have finally got to grips with how the EU works and found a sensible strategy for getting our own way occasionally. On the other hand I would be more open to the idea of pulling out if there were a single person I could trust with the centimes we are apparently going to save who was advocating for the UK to leave. Currently I wouldn’t vote for any of the office-seekers on the Vote Leave side so I am not inclined to trust them to spend the rescued squillions where they are desperately needed.

The lesson to be learned by the clever marketing adolescent who came up with this tract: check the date you are putting out your story. But then again, thanks, you made me chuckle.