The beginning of an era at the end of an era
Source:Editor's Blog
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Welcome to my blog, in which I will record matters that I perceive as relevant to the readership of Exec Digital magazine and its associated channels. That is a broad palette but I will try to be focused.
And because Exec Digital is going to be shaped and informed by its readers and its online community of business leaders, entrepreneurs and policy makers I want to stress right now that the most important bit of this page is the SPEAK NOW button below. Click on that and add your opinion.
What a time to start the column.
Three big things have happened.
Firstly, Tony Blair finally announced his retirement. On the whole I think Gordon Brown will be a better bet for business if only because the economy is higher up his agenda. He has run a fairly tight ship over the last ten years, kept a lid on inflation, and the CBI has been polite to him, though he turned up to address its annual dinner dressed informally. So is he going to treat business and industry with respect? “We must maintain and enhance our flexibility with less regulation and a competitive tax regime,” he told the CBI on May 19: yet with twice the amount of matter in the tax code than there was ten years ago that would require a volte face. Over regulation is one brake on entrepreneurship, and precious few positive measures have been taken to encourage new businesses to start up and grow.
Secondly the Bank of England raised UK interest rates to their highest level in six years. Early signs are that inflation is responding to this particular regulator, but it is a crude tool to adjust the rest of the economy. House prices are not the only indicator of importance and high interest rates kill enterprise.
And the third thing? The Home office in the UK has split into two ministries. The new Ministry of Justice will take on responsibility for prisons, probation and sentencing, while the Home Office will keep responsibility for security, crime, drugs, counter-terrorism and ID cards. The present Home Secretary John Reid is leaving the department he himself has branded as failing, so the timing of this huge administrative change is mystifying. Mr Reid denies that the justice ministry would be "a bunch of liberal leftie human rights lawyers" at loggerheads with the "Cromwellian rightwing national security obsessives" who remained in the Home Office. But the opportunities for non-communication between the separate wings of an organization that has raised non-communication to an art form.
It would be different if the Home Office were run by Percy Barnevik who transformed ABB by focusing on communication. And being a Swede he might actually cut the grotesque number of people we incarcerate at huge cost and loss to the nation. Communication is what makes businesses succeed, it might be argued, and communication is what Exec Digital exists to promote.
As one of the most outstanding journalists of my generation replied when an editor asked him to contribute an article of exactly 600 words:
“There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.”
David Halberstam died in a car crash a couple of weeks ago. I knew him in Warsaw when he was sent there by the New York Times after being withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 for his ‘negative reporting’ (he didn’t support America’s involvement in other words – but that reporting won him a Pulitzer prize). I wasn't a journalist in those days but now that I am it's great to have the memory of David, of whom we were in great awe given his reputation, the Pulitzer prize and his very considerable physical presence and wit. In our circle at the time were the actresses Elzbieta Czyzewska and Beata Tyszkiewicz, the former small and dynamic, the latter willowy, both transcendently lovely and between them the epitome of vivacity and hope in a country that couldn't have been more depressed, economically and politically. David snatched Ella from under our noses and married her in 1967 just after I left Poland and not long before he himself was expelled for his frankness about Stanislaw Gomulka's hypocritical and oppressive regime. I remember him as a scarily honest intellect, disconcerting to the polite diplomats he met, but always a warm and entertaining companion.
I hereby appoint him our tutelary deity.
Friday, May 28 2007
As promised the new website is live, just as the May issue of Exec Digital is published. Do please tell me about any teething problems.
Margaret Hodge started something when she said that long-term residents should have priory over immigrants when it comes to allocating social housing. I believe this is another example of what Julie Meyer (see this month’s interview) has called the stink of entitlement: the immigrants we have coming at present are doing us nothing but good, and can be seen to absorb and improve the resources we neglect. My local town of Thetford in Norfolk has changed over the last five years with the arrival of significant numbers of Poles, Portuguese and Lithuanians. These people have taken up low paid jobs in local food processing firms, true. They have also started businesses, taken positive steps to talk to their English neighbours and send their children to local schools. Before they came the place was run down, blighted by the post war planners, with a climate of crime and depression. Now it’s a much nicer place to be in and the local economy has been boosted.
Don’t you agree that the post accession movement of labour into this country could be as important to the UK and Irish economies as the Gastarbeiter programme was to Germany?
Enjoy the Whitsun bank holiday.
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