Blog
4 october 2010, monday, birmingham
Amazing who you see at the conservative party conference these days, and I was amongst them. Alone in a lift after breakfast with ian duncan smith (27 may), who prodded his floor (3) and then turned his back, guarding the buttons, so I had to politely lean in front of him to prod my own (1). Andrew lansley (16 june), by contrast, who was walking in the hotel as I walked out, seemed a more affable chap. Saw the back of boris, who seemed to be jumping up and down even as he ate breakfast standing up. John hayes is a story for another day, and I stoppped counting odd ministers when I hit double figures. Greg « magna carta for localism » clarke had a few interesting things to say, but star of the day on the fringe, by a country mile, was the decidedly non-party lord digby jones, whose passion, experience and worldly can-do pragmatism would steal any show.
30 september 2010, can’t spend, won’t spend
Even as the dollar continues to enable the us to spend, spend, spend, still the fed may yet go back to printing more money ("quantative easing" as it seems to be soothingly termed now), as may the bank of england, as public spending tails off and recovery looks unlikely to be able to pick up the slack. Even the anti-christ of asset purchase, the ecb, is slowly becoming a serial offender, again this week intervening to support the irish, with every sign of more to come on that front soon. The evidence is ever stronger that the western consumer has finally decided to stop spending ever more and start paying off debt, and even putting away a bit for a rainy day, which long-term macroeconomics would recognise as an unalloyed "good thing", but which is going to act as a long-term drag now that the well of the two interlinked drivers of western economies for the last years (consumer spending and credit flood) has now run dry. So the million renminbi question, is where will growth come from ? Regular readers will know my considered view that there is an inevitably long way to go in the dip and stagnation cycle before we find the answer to that question.
26 september 2010, on my bike
I spoke at a cycling summit earlier this week. Not my best ever gig, but saved by the passion of the message I found coming through as I skipped over the plethora of statistics about how cycling can save the world to my own very real enthusiasm. Yesterday, I was practicing what I preach, picking up my youngest's bike from the repair shop (I'm not very black-fingered) and the three of us going on a 10km-round trip. My other half was in budapest, as her mum rather suddenly passed away earlier in the week, though the kids didn't know yet. We made a good day of it, pausing for lunch and just generally having fun in an urban environment that I have to say was very green and cycle-friendly. We also discovered, literally a few hundred metres down the road, a great farm shop, from which I bought a few fresh things. Today, we delivered the news to the kids, and so are so are just spending a quiet day pottering around. I watched ed miliband on the andrew marr show and am bracing myself for the consequences of the israeli moratium on settlement building being lifted...
21 september 2010, marvellous, mechanical manchester !
With due thanks to a colleague for pointing this out, the new york times has run a sensational piece on the city. Manchester has a "habit to do everything well... manchester is far and away the best town in great britain. It has all the public spirit, energy and municipal self-pride of birmingham, without its unpleasant bumptiousness. It is far more cosmopolitan and broadminded than liverpool and kindly in spirit than glasgow, a thousand times more conscious of municipal utilities, rights and responsibilities than sprawling, disunited london. Its chief citizens are the pick of the kingdom, the choicest specimens of the capable english. They have carried british commerce to its furthest points... Manchester and the enormous human hive of which it is the industrial centre... is also the greatest productive and manufacturing district in the world... it furnishes nearly two-thirds all of all the exports of great britain" and so it goes on. It's 1893 of course, but after a few years here now, I can testify that some things have not changed...
19 september 2010, the eternal caretakers
Whilst brits were in tatters 3 days after the general election and still no government, more than 3 months after theirs, still no white smoke in belgium. It's not unusual: the last round took 8 months, leading me even then to talk about breaking up. The only thing keeping together what is essentially 2 countries (french wallonia and dutch flanders) is brussels, which with both nato and eu headquarters is all but the capital of europe. Serbia and montenegro managed to bloodlessly split, czech and slovakia's was even happy, so why not belgium ? Every time forming a national government becomes even more excruciatingly different, and this time has an added nasty edge as immigrants are no longer seen as the positive cosmopolitan type but the more normal issue of need and detriment to society. Richer flanders just upping sticks and going its own way, as kosovo did not so long ago (legally, we now know), is now a real possibility - and 200 years isn't such a bad run for a so-called country without a national newspaper or tv station, and with two separate foreign aid budgets and no less than seven parliaments. Yes, there will be eu problems, but they could join within 18 months, probably with croatia, another self-declared state come good. In fact it is the eu that makes independence so much more alluring, enabling such a small country to have a certain weight in the world. Unlike flanders' 7 million, the half-million luxembourgers choose an eu commissioner and are represented at every eu intergovernmental body. Belgium's on borrowed time.
18 september 2010, building something here
In my mind, this is a space away from work, but as I've just spent an hour of my early morning on it, and been so immersed I haven't escaped here for a fortnight, it doesn't seem inappropriate. It's also because I'm lucky enough to actually enjoy a large part of my another day, another dollar toil. Including blue-sky thinking about building a research centre. We're not starting from scratch of course, as around the patch there are lots of people working on research, analysis, strategy, evaluation "and so forth" (as I might say in a paper) - but how, in a world where pillars are daily being knocked down to build a new temple to intelligence rather than do a samson ? We are trying to create a model that blends financial sustainability, high-quality output, dutifully servicing clients and paymasters and, most importantly of all, generating innovation and originality and protecting a space for radical, evidence-base thinking in a real-world rather than academic setting, that is fully informed of the best of what's out there but does something new and something real with it: a petri dish for those next big ideas that are going to rock our world. I'm enthusiastic !
1 september 2010, still on holiday
A week back and I am still daydreaming holiday, finding it quite hard to return to the urgency of drafting that needs to be done yesterday, frameworks that must be managed over human obstacle courses, menus for grand dinners and manic preparations for having 30 mad kids run wild around the house in what is quaintly known as a "birthday party". I guess I can't complain though, as whilst my 30-odd days holiday a year compare poorly to the average french 38, they are a good notch above the uk average 26 and mile and a half ahead of the average american 13. This matters, because whichever way you cut the statistics, europeans work less than americans (and indeed most), and that single fact more or less explains why 280 million americans are more productive than 450 million europeans. I for one though am not yet ready to give up my hard-earned leisurely european lifestyle. Jeremy rifkin got it right in his now rather-dated the european dream: how europe's vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the american dream - while americans live to work, europeans work to live.
31 august 2010, belgrade
It's a slow news day at frankal hq. After some two and a half years, I'm going through a treasure trove of stuff from frankfurt, and came across a series of posters I made, which feature, amongst others, the now finnish foreign minister and eu economics commissioner. The photos are my own, and there is a story behind the one of the demonstration, which is when the serbs took to the streets to get rid of slobodan milosovic. I was travelling home overland from israel, and my aunt had given me a warm jacket for the journey. This was long before mobile phones, and it was some days before I spoke to my mum, telling her I was in the beleagured serbian capital. I know, she said, as apparently at the precise moment I took the photo, I was captured by cnn, and the aunt had spotted the jacket. So here's my passions for photography, politics and eastern europe in an instant.
29 august 2010, first out the traps
We brought back an interesting souvenir from hungary: my niece. So we've had a girl and a teenager in the house for a while, which is very different from two boys under ten. A characteristic however with even more influence is that our visitor is the second-born (of five). How many conversations I've had about the first being thoughtful, diligent, diplomatic and polite, intellectual, an avid reader and a sensitive soul; while the second is more carefree and adventurous, outrageous even, argumentative if not downright rude, sporty, flexible, always pushing the boundaries and with a lower attention span. There is such a wealth of experience here it simply must be nurture not nature, with the way all we parents rushed to the doctor with the hint of a cough with number one, whilst letting number two sleep off that bloodied lip, as we knew he'd survive to the morning. We also expect more, tutor more and just simply had more time and no need to split our attention. Number two also learnt from number one, with that infuriating babbling to midnight when they slept in the same room actually playing a very useful purpose. I think too of my own childhood and how I, rather than my 14-month younger sibling, was always so much more into lego, monopoly and such things. I guess I was always that much better, which made it always that bit more fun. There's quite some literature on this of course, with much evidence that first borns do better in life - so now would be the time to boost the others, though not of course at the expense of the baby that will always be the first.
26 august 2010, funny, ha, ha
Not much gaiety in the blog, so even better than edinburgh's best, some of my favourite one-liners: people laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian, they're not laughing now (bob monkhouse); most of us have a skeleton in the cupboard, david beckham takes his out in public (andrew laurence); a good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong (milton berle); I realised I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat (marcus brigstocke); the right to bear arms is only slightly less ludicrous than the right to arm bears (chris Addison). I can't attribute the rest: don't take life too seriously, no one gets out alive; beauty is in the eye of the beer holder; the darkest hours come just before the dawn - so if you're going to steal your neighbour's milk, that's the time to do it; never forget that like everyone else, you are unique; before you judge someone you should walk a mile in their shoes - that way, when you judge them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes; if at first you don't succeed, avoid skydiving; and, give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day. As e e cummings said, the most wasted of all days is one without laughter.