Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
On a point of pedantry, it was *one* of their ancient capitals.
Which one handled the planning application for Offa's dyke?
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
It is the only county in the shape of a spiral (compare to Glamorgan, the only county stuffed with cheese).
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Serious question here: is there any reason why I should care about the London Mayor contest? Given that I live in the north of Scotland and extremely rarely visit London (not been for about 4 years; have no plans to go any time soon).
Is there some effect on my life other than the waxing and waning political fortunes of this and that person or party that I should care about? The only thing I can think of is the counter-terrorism function, but am I missing something?
I'm sure the next Mayor of London will have more impact on your life than whoever will be the next MP for Mid-Bedfordshire for roughly one year.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
Where is the late David Graeber when you need him?
By the way the thought of belonging to a smart expensive operation of whatever size that doesn't already know what it is for is mind boggling.
And if you get why people are suspicious of jargon, why annoy a whole group of people (which may at a guess include Beethoven, Einstein, Socrates and Darwin) by using it?
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
I agree - while some of the actual wording is naff, it is what it is now. I no longer cringe at ‘benchmark’ or ‘KPI’ because we have a shared understanding of what they mean.
Admittedly I work out in the wilds of brand marketing which deals in powerful abstracts but also attracts hordes of low-wattage intellects who talk utter bollocks. It can be difficult to pick apart the pseuds from the genuine experts (a top tip is the latter tend to speak with less jargon and get drunk more).
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Tangentially, I never tire of astonishing people with the fact that Edinburgh is west of Liverpool.
Serious question here: is there any reason why I should care about the London Mayor contest? Given that I live in the north of Scotland and extremely rarely visit London (not been for about 4 years; have no plans to go any time soon).
Is there some effect on my life other than the waxing and waning political fortunes of this and that person or party that I should care about? The only thing I can think of is the counter-terrorism function, but am I missing something?
It is an opportunity for betting on politics. I know the PB commentariat prefer to talk about ancillary subjects but every now and then we do have to get our hands dirty... 😀
Fool of a Took! Nobody talks about betting on here. Apart from F1 betting, apparently.
This is on account of our epic failure to agree KPIs and recall that there is no 'I' in Team. Better Benchmarking required.
Whereas this, I first went on when it was the Pioneer Railway staffed by communist youth...
(Dog's ear for scale)
Nowadays the uniformed children have been replaced by retirees and weekend railway enthusiasts, but they still play the jolly tunes and salute each train as it comes in.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
How soon we forget those Thursday evening rock'n'roll sessions with saucepan lids.
It's always been a very mixed bag. I remember the first time my dad went into hospital with bacteraemia, about a decade and a hand back. He was put on the geriatric ward, where old coots seemed to be parked to die. Every day I was there visiting, they closed the curtains round the Ward beds to carry out at least one newly deceased. If the family hadn't gone in every day to feed him, he'd have starved to death, and wouldn't have got adequate (lifesaving) treatment had we not politely made ourselves pains in the arse.
The NHS is far from a terrible idea, but worship of it is delusional.
Late last October I went into hospital for a rather nasty operation. The nursing staff, whether qualified or unqualified were efficient, friendly and helpful. Treated me as someone who was expected to recover, albeit someone in his mid-eighties. Went from there to a rehab unit which was a bit more mixed, although I felt I had as much support, Physiotherapy etc as people much younger. It might have helped that I was known to some of the older staff, having worked with them, and indeed run teaching for them many years earlier!
When the NHS is good it can be very good indeed. When it's not it can be dreadful, and challenging it an exhausting experience (impossible without help, if you're ill).
I think most of the good things about the NHS and most of the bad things about the NHS you allude to are facets of healthcare in general. They’re not especially tied to the NHS as a particular organisational structure for delivering healthcare.
Another reason to do our best to step back and eye it with a bit of cold calculation, for better and worse, not cultural mythologising. Even if it is on the whole excellent such an emotive defensiveness is not helpful.
Sure, we can step back and eye the NHS with a bit of cold calculation. What we then see is that it is a broadly successful and efficient system hampered by Conservative underfunding and Conservative belief in “internal markets”.
Which, if true, proves the point that getting soppy about it is unnecessary on top of already being unhelpful. Not only does it undermine the assessment by wrapping it up in emotion, it wouldn't require the defensiveness that comes with such an emotional tone.
Nostalgic emotion about such things is only useful if covering for deficiencies. If its broadly ok despite some issues, then the emotion is just a distraction.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
I just reflect on how much time is wasted by HR departments with too much time on their hands (aka HR departments) coming up with 'organisational values'
I attended a corporate induction once where the poor (not in a literal sense) Chief Exec was dutifully droning on about the values, which included something about being against silo thinking or similar buzz phrase of the day, when one of the new starters had the temerity to ask about it, saying they had been at the same organisation 10 years earlier and was now rejoining, and they had the same basic values then, was the Chief Exec saying they had failed to deliver on it in all that time.
For all the management speak about open doors, always being willing to listen, no wrong answers etc, it was abundantly clear the Chief Exec was both flustered and pissed off to have someone interrupt the ritual lip service exercise.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
Quite so.
The best boss I ever had taught me always to define the aims and scope and objectives of whatever project I was developing. What is it intended to do? How to do it? How might success be defined? It was enormously useful in focussing thinking - for one thing because one could instantly dump the irrelevant stuff. (And it could always be adjusted as one developed one's thinking, saw some bright ideas or had to dump some dead ends, etc.) It wasn't actually an official corporate form. It didn't actually matter very much if the higher bosses saw it or not - but it was always good to have to show them if needed.
In my next job I was assigned almost at once to lead a section of a keynote project, taking over from the existing leader who was retiring (unexpectedly, and for reasons unconnected with the project). I asked him for the statement of aims etc. Blank look ... I had to write this key document retrospectively in the middle of the project while familiarising myselof with it - but without it I could never have got it under control, and completed to time and budget.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
What was Brockley like in the 1970s? Probably not a lot of cafes with tables outside.
Brockley was a bit of a hole as late as the 1990s, there used to be a NF pub close to the bucolic scene that my neighbour Tim posted. Nowadays Brockley's gentrification is almost complete although it hasn't gone full on Clapham yet - nor do I think it will, the SE postcode will keep out the rugger top set, thank God. I think a lot of people's mental geography of our patch of London is woefully out of date, like Leon's view that we're some dreary suburb, or the Del Boy gags. I was out in Peckham last night having a birthday meal for my daughter with the family, at a fantastic, bustling and buzzing Bao restaurant. The streets were heaving, with people sat outside bars and restaurants up and down Rye Lane. SE14/SE4/SE15 have become really very nice places to live for meterosexual centrist dads like me. Personally I can't think of another place on earth I'd rather be living right now.
This is fair. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually BEEN to Brockley. I just look at it on the map and think “ugh”
I have been to Peckham but it was decades ago in pursuit of William Blake. I remember it as extremely multicultural; with hints of promise and maybe the first signs of gentrification
Still fuckin Sarf Lunnon tho, innit
Check it out. I suspect you will like it. It is still Sarf Lunnon, which gives it its own unique character. Get the Knappers Gazette to send you South. The archetypal North Londoner swallows his pride and heads south of the river to explore the liberal elite's new Elysium, something like that. The Daily Mail has done a piece about all the It Girls making SE London their home, calling Telegraph Hill the "New Hampstead Heath". Time Out has named our local the best pub in London. Something is stirring in this neck of the woods that your readers might appreciate your insights into.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Tangentially, I never tire of astonishing people with the fact that Edinburgh is west of Liverpool.
Or that New York and Madrid are roughly the same latitude.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
Where is the late David Graeber when you need him?
By the way the thought of belonging to a smart expensive operation of whatever size that doesn't already know what it is for is mind boggling.
And if you get why people are suspicious of jargon, why annoy a whole group of people (which may at a guess include Beethoven, Einstein, Socrates and Darwin) by using it?
Boggling or not, that's how it is. When new pieces of work arrive, it's not always clear whose responsibility it is to analyse, plan, and execute that work, because the nature of complex organisations is that they are dealing with complex concepts. So dealing with a new regulation in financial services would need legal, operations, reporting, data engineering, and management teams to get together and divvy up the work. When you're already dealing with mind-bending organisational complexity, having agreed-on jargon to shorten conversations is little short of essential. Think of how tedious it would be to say "General Data Protection Regulation" every time instead of "GDPR" when a meeting about it might need the term spoken out loud a hundred times. Jargon condenses concepts, which is a benefit. The risk is it become impenetrable nonsense to the outsider or newbie. The trick is to strike a balance between avoiding it and getting the uninitiated initiated so they too can have speedy conversations.
Lastly, I don't know about Darwin but I can point to the use of jargon or similarly coded language or meaning used by each of the other three figures you mention. Concepts like "logos", musical notation, or mathematical equations are vital to communicate difficult concepts. There are jargon or jargon-adjacent modes of speaking or writing in the sense I have described above.
Just trying to imagine Darwin's work without the formal nomenclatorial jargon of botany and zoology, as well as the anatomical terminology. Writing, for instance, about orchids doesn't work very well with terms like "that pink flower we get down by the river in May", or "the pretty coloured bit on top of the flower" and the "sticky-out bit in the middle that collects the yellow dust".
Even if one calls it a Common Spotted-orchid rather than Dactylorhiza fuchsii, that *is* a formal agreed botanical name (just the English vernacular name).
Edit: but in fairness one thing one learns in competent science writing for the public is to dump or explain *any* jargon at once. Not least because the same word can have very different meanings - one favourite being 'fetish/fetishise' (anthropology, sociology, common parlance).
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
They had my team come up with some mission statements once. But it turned out it was a tool to tell us we were wrong about everything. Didn't matter though, as the instigator left and the next person disagreed entirely.
As to the point about potentially useful tools, that is a fair one, but I think a lot of people's experience is that too much of the time those deploying the tools do not know how to use them effectively. Instead they are treated like something you are just supposed to have, shorn of context or understanding, and so implemented because it's what you do in an organisation dontchaknow, rather than to attain any benefit.
Performance indicators which don't actually measure anything useful, objectives and values so broad as to be meaningless, visions which are never referenced again, constant reorganisations, and misusing the concept of agile working because they heard it at a conference once, the list goes on.
A shovel is a useful tool as well and they should not be maligned en masse. But if it was deployed with no intelligence or subtlety in place of any garden instrument, the workers would struggle to see the worth of it.
If something is done poorly a lot of the time, of course people have a negative view of it.
A friend has recently joined the Cumbria police. It took the best part of a year for all the pre-employment checks to be done. He's doing his training in Penrith and, so far, enjoying it. Came home for the weekend and said the hatred of and contempt for the Met among the senior officers was quite something. They hate being tarred with the same brush. As well they might.
Meanwhile - and this feels almost bizarrely karmic (given the way both institutions are stupidly hero worshipped by political parties), were it not so depressing - there are currently 7 police investigations into various hospital trusts:-
1. Alleged abuse at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust 2. Alleged abuse at home for men with severe learning disabilities and autism run by the Surrey and Borders Partners Foundation Trust 3. Derby NHS Trust investigation into a Dr Hay - police working with them to see if criminal offences committed. 4. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital: nurse under investigation re possible poisoning of baby. 5. The investigation into a possible cover up into mother and baby deaths at the Nottingham Trust. 6. Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton - police investigation into patient deaths allegedly caused by medical negligence. 7. Nurse under investigation over baby deaths at Birmingham Children's Hospital
2 trials: 1 of some nurses at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital for alleged ill treatment of stroke patients and the recent charges of North East London Trust for corporate manslaughter / gross negligence manslaughter.
I think more maternity scandals on the way. It has long been an area of difficult staffing and toxic relationships, not helped by the few set targets being poorly chosen.
On the other hand, all the above reached the light of day, albeit sometimes belatedly, so the reporting systems do work to a degree.
I was appalled to discover that we spend ca.£3.2 billion on maternity services and ca.£8 billion on negligence claims (approx 60% of the total bill of £13.3 billion in 2021 - 2022).
Some of the cases referred to above only reached the light of day because of patients pushing hard, often in the face of obstruction by the hospitals concerned. So I am not sure that I would agree that the reporting systems worked.
You could just as easily say this of finance but the fact that Libor and FX and many other scandals eventually came to light was not evidence of the system working. Quite the opposite. None of these problems - whether in the NHS or banks or the police or anywhere - started out as big scandals. They all started out small and should - if the reporting systems really worked as they should do - have been picked up at a very early stage.
That they weren't - or if they were- were not properly handled is evidence of the failure of the systems not its eventual success.
The cost of litigation is particularly high in obstetrics due to lifelong care costs for the disabled, and loss of earnings*. It is why there is only one hospital in the country doing private maternity care, and that is a private wing of an NHS teaching hospital.
One aspect of this is that the system awards large sums for a birth damaged by hypoxia, but nothing if equally disabled by fate, hence the long protracted cases. A system of no fault damages as per Scandanavia or New Zealand is both cheaper and kinder. Hunt has a chapter in it on his book Zero.
If there was one simple measure , it would be to stop scrutinising Caesarian rates. A common feature of maternity scandals is that midwives and obstetricians were in conflict, and in large part due to attitudes to operative deliveries. The fact is that for our skill mix and staffing levels, early section is often the safest option. In better resourced, better trained systems then more vaginal deliveries are safe, but we cannot safely force that by diktat.
*one shocking fact is that lifetime loss of earnings awards are determined in part by parental occupation, a defacto acceptance of social immobility.
I experienced a little of that conflict with my first child - not over delivery but in relation to breastfeeding, which I was unable to do. The health visitor kept insisting I keep going. I was in agony with mastitis, my son was not being fed and it was only when the GP got involved that it got sorted. He was furious at the health visitor. I can see how that sort of conflict at delivery stage can cause problems.
Elevating any mantra over the real need: a safe delivery of a healthy child, a properly fed baby etc is what causes problems. Mantras should never be an end in themselves. They should be one of the ways of remembering what the objective is. But that can easily be forgotten. And not just in health care.
Very true. The cost of doing so may be much elevated in health care, but it causes damage whereever it is found. People get fixated on what amounts basically to a slogan or mission statement, which might well be pretty good most of the time, and then warp things around it.
Mission statements are generally garbage. At best statements of the bleedin' obvious - banks must have "integrity" ("you don't say!") or platitudinous rubbish.
At one place I worked they wanted to have a mission statement for the Compliance Department. Some of the suggestions from staff were hilarious - if unrepeatable. Others included "Reminding you of the same damn stuff, every day" or "Cleaning your shit up". I suggested "Speaking truth to power". This was not taken up. The winner was in the platitudinous category and forgotten and ignored about 2 seconds after it was announced.
I agree they are often garbage but I have also found that in managing a department or team it can be useful to get the team to create (with guidance) their own mission statement. Sometimes it's quite informative to find out little team members have considered what they are there for.
They are garbage, and along with Vision Statements, Action Plans, Benchmarking, KPIs, Pivoting, Synergy, Low Hanging Fruit, Heads Up, New Normal are signs of outfits that don't know what they are for, or don't want someone else to know.
Another such sign is frequent name and title changing.
You missed out Health & Safety, paid holiday, toilet breaks and heated offices.
Don't be silly.
The problem is not having a clear understanding of what your team etc is doing and how - that is essential to good leadership. Rather, it is that all too often management focuses on lots of lovely statements and redesigns, thinks that this is enough and does not focus on the hard work of changing the reality.
With respect, I think algarkirk was the one being silly, dismissing a huge list of things as 'garbage' out of hand.
Some of these tools have a place. Are the often misused? Yes. Does that mean they are always bad? No.
Spot on. Getting a team to describe its own raison d'etre in "mission statement" can be a valuable tool in getting common understanding of what you're there for. In large organisations, the scope of a team's work is sometimes surprisingly hard to know when you join it, and knowing which adjoining teams are on the hook for something that YOU need delivered comes about... how? Other things listed as "garbage" like KPIs and benchmarking are incredibly valuable business concepts.
I get why people are suspicious of and hostile to jargon, but it has its place in condensing things that people really do need to communicate about.
Where is the late David Graeber when you need him?
By the way the thought of belonging to a smart expensive operation of whatever size that doesn't already know what it is for is mind boggling.
And if you get why people are suspicious of jargon, why annoy a whole group of people (which may at a guess include Beethoven, Einstein, Socrates and Darwin) by using it?
Boggling or not, that's how it is. When new pieces of work arrive, it's not always clear whose responsibility it is to analyse, plan, and execute that work, because the nature of complex organisations is that they are dealing with complex concepts. So dealing with a new regulation in financial services would need legal, operations, reporting, data engineering, and management teams to get together and divvy up the work. When you're already dealing with mind-bending organisational complexity, having agreed-on jargon to shorten conversations is little short of essential. Think of how tedious it would be to say "General Data Protection Regulation" every time instead of "GDPR" when a meeting about it might need the term spoken out loud a hundred times. Jargon condenses concepts, which is a benefit. The risk is it become impenetrable nonsense to the outsider or newbie. The trick is to strike a balance between avoiding it and getting the uninitiated initiated so they too can have speedy conversations.
Lastly, I don't know about Darwin but I can point to the use of jargon or similarly coded language or meaning used by each of the other three figures you mention. Concepts like "logos", musical notation, or mathematical equations are vital to communicate difficult concepts. There are jargon or jargon-adjacent modes of speaking or writing in the sense I have described above.
Thanks. Not wanting to disagree. Except that there is brilliant technical precision and highly creative thinking using clear but complex and profound concepts; and on the other hand there is platitudinous junk. Quite a bit of it. They need to be distinguished. The implication that Socrates spoke in buzz words while doing his blue skies thinking and benchmarking statements for truth correspondence would be sub optimal.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
I was encouraged to apply to The List once, but I'm glad I didn't.
I think it's a terrible job, and it's gotten worse.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
Inner London is defined by being the area which was the LCC before the creation of the GLC in 1965. (This is the melancholy date marking also the death of Middlesex.)
This is easier to answer than the vexed question in the frozen north: Is the new Cumberland a county or not, and if not, what is it?
For one awful moment I thought you were going to start a discussion about who is a northerner and who is a southerner. It will never be settled, and is most unjust to midlanders, who are a breed apart.
No views on this, living in England 120 miles north of Manchester. But if Midlanders are defined as Mercians and vice versa they have a byelection coming up in their ancient capital.
North/midlands/south can be divided up into blocks of 4° latitude:
UK's most northerly point: N61° 51' (Out Stack, Shetland) North-midlands transition: N57° 51' (in line with Dornoch Firth) Midlands-south transition: N53° 51' (just north of Blackpool) UK's most southerly point: N49° 51' (Pednathise Head)
I live in the midlands (albeit on the northern end). The exact middle, N55° 51, cuts right through Celtic Park.
Performing a similar east-west analysis (Lowestoft, Rockall), leads us to the dead centre of the UK, which is a cemetery on Jura, Kilearnadil. 55°51′N 5°58′W.
By using simple division of Longitude, you are implying the use of the Mercator projection, which as we all know is nonsense.
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
Not really. East and West are measured from a meridian. I'm not saying the easterliness and westerliness from that meridian represent the same ground-distance from that meridian at all latitudes (obviously it doesn't), I'm choosing to use an angular separation as my measure. Nothing wrong with that.
If you wanted to do a different analysis, in terms of ground distance from a meridian or some defined point, that would also be a fine way to do it. But emphatically my analysis is nothing to do with projections, it's all based on spherical coordinates.
Hmm, OK, fair enough. I know it is just a bit of fun, but this is PB...
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
Intderesting to see that London is just as much on the fringes of the UK as, say, Lochmaddy geographically, but also still a fair bit off centre by population.
Edit: an excellent argument for a Birmingham relocation of the Westminster Parliament. Or perhaps rather Nottingham/Leicester.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
Worth another go, they seem to have dropped that requirement.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
Worth another go, they seem to have dropped that requirement.
The tricky requirement would be having to know what the core distinguishing principles of Toryism are.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
Worth another go, they seem to have dropped that requirement.
The tricky requirement would be having to know what the core distinguishing principles of Toryism are.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
As opposed to knowledge, understanding and an ability to learn which you clearly possess? No wonder we are in the mess we are.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
I was encouraged to apply to The List once, but I'm glad I didn't.
I think it's a terrible job, and it's gotten worse.
Yep. My job involves Judges shouting at me in a public court for things that are, more often than not, not my fault. That’s bad enough but at least most the judges don’t slag you off on X or Twitter.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
As opposed to knowledge, understanding and an ability to learn which you clearly possess? No wonder we are in the mess we are.
Sean probably doesn't remember it but we have met, and I would vote for him regardless of his politics.
It speaks volumes of the system that someone like him cannot even get to first base on the Parliamentary election circuit.
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
Competence, common sense, probity, wit, wisdom and honesty would have been more helpful. Although looking gorgeous for the camera hasn't got us the politicians we desired.
How did Johnson pass the "media skills test? Or was "a slapstick comedy turn" qualification enough?
Having said that I came across a brilliant exchange this week. Our Dean of Faculty wrote, as is customary, to Lord Sandison on his appointment as a Judge congratulating him. He did a PS saying that he was glad he would no longer have Sandison as an opponent in his cases. Sandison replied with his own ps: “what on earth made you think that?”
"This is the man the Democratic Party says will be fully able to function as president for five more years through the age of 86. No one rooted in human reality believes it, or should believe it."
I can’t see Hall winning under any circumstances. She’s not up to the job, and that will become clear under any sort of scrutiny.
The Tories are desperately trying to make ULEZ an issue, but it’s a core vote strategy. It won’t add much beyond it.
Tend to agree. If they’d chosen a decent candidate, who knows?
'Tories' and 'decent candidates' waved farewell to each other quite some time ago.
The Tories won’t really get fixed until there is a clear out of CCHQ I think. They keep making really bad decisions and either don’t do serious due diligence or seem enamoured of candidates where the man on the street just thinks that person is an idiot or unpalatable.
I don’t know how it works there internally but I guess it’s a group of long standing party members who simply just don’t live in the real world so they have a group of other like minded weirdos who put their names forward and they seem like good choices as it’s all they know.
CCHQ needs to bring in a wide range of new people from all backgrounds to make a panel for selections and someone like cyclefree to dig deep into any candidate before their name is put on any list.
When I applied, back in 2002, I was told that the overriding priority for candidates was "media skills", which I did not possess.
Competence, common sense, probity, wit, wisdom and honesty would have been more helpful. Although looking gorgeous for the camera hasn't got us the politicians we desired.
How did Johnson pass the "media skills test? Or was "a slapstick comedy turn" qualification enough?
Let’s be real, Boris is absolutely brilliant at dealing with the media. He’s quick witted, funny and knows when to give a non answer. It’s running the country he was rather more average at.
Saturday morning on Brockley’s Coulgate street. The two cafes present contrasting versions of inner London middle class hipsterdom. Both serve good coffee and pastries. (Nb this isn’t a summer/heatwave thing, you’d see the same scene on a sunny Saturday in February).
In the foreground Browns of Brockley. Slick, professional, quite expensive. Muted browns and beiges in the decor. A Starmerite and Lib Dem clientele. A smattering of FBPEs. Gen Xs and Millennials who yearn for the good of days of Blair.
In the background the Broca. Plastered floor to ceiling with sweary political stickers and posters. Trans and queer imagery, cheerful cafe manager has a ponytail and eyeliner and a fetching singlet, vegan menu, posters bemoaning capitalism and the patriarchy. Corbynites and Green clientele (plus me today, I alternate depending on seating availability).
Fascinating the wide spectrum that the woke metropolitan remainer hipsters actually span.
Brockley is not Inner London. For those of us actually in “inner London” it’s basically Kent
Disagree (I may regret this...)
...
Well, according to Wikipedia, the London Government Act 1963 distinguishes between inner and outer London boroughs.
Brockley is in the borough of Lewisham, which is classified as Inner.
What was Brockley like in the 1970s? Probably not a lot of cafes with tables outside.
Brockley was a bit of a hole as late as the 1990s, there used to be a NF pub close to the bucolic scene that my neighbour Tim posted. Nowadays Brockley's gentrification is almost complete although it hasn't gone full on Clapham yet - nor do I think it will, the SE postcode will keep out the rugger top set, thank God. I think a lot of people's mental geography of our patch of London is woefully out of date, like Leon's view that we're some dreary suburb, or the Del Boy gags. I was out in Peckham last night having a birthday meal for my daughter with the family, at a fantastic, bustling and buzzing Bao restaurant. The streets were heaving, with people sat outside bars and restaurants up and down Rye Lane. SE14/SE4/SE15 have become really very nice places to live for meterosexual centrist dads like me. Personally I can't think of another place on earth I'd rather be living right now.
This is fair. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually BEEN to Brockley. I just look at it on the map and think “ugh”
I have been to Peckham but it was decades ago in pursuit of William Blake. I remember it as extremely multicultural; with hints of promise and maybe the first signs of gentrification
Still fuckin Sarf Lunnon tho, innit
Check it out. I suspect you will like it. It is still Sarf Lunnon, which gives it its own unique character. Get the Knappers Gazette to send you South. The archetypal North Londoner swallows his pride and heads south of the river to explore the liberal elite's new Elysium, something like that. The Daily Mail has done a piece about all the It Girls making SE London their home, calling Telegraph Hill the "New Hampstead Heath". Time Out has named our local the best pub in London. Something is stirring in this neck of the woods that your readers might appreciate your insights into.
Just came right around South London on the M25 / M 40 to get to Oxford. They didn’t half tone it down for Matrix 2. Presumably to keep some element of realism.
"This is the man the Democratic Party says will be fully able to function as president for five more years through the age of 86. No one rooted in human reality believes it, or should believe it."
There's a disaster coming if Biden runs I am increasingly feeling.
Well, to be accurate they might say he will be fully able to function for five more years, but they are only really concerned about managing the next 1.5.
Having said that I came across a brilliant exchange this week. Our Dean of Faculty wrote, as is customary, to Lord Sandison on his appointment as a Judge congratulating him. He did a PS saying that he was glad he would no longer have Sandison as an opponent in his cases. Sandison replied with his own ps: “what on earth made you think that?”
The ghost of Mr Justice Cantley nodded with sage approval.
Comments
You can just about get away with that for Latitude.
I did do a demographic N/S division once, I'll see if I can dig it out.
I'm sure the next Mayor of London will have more impact on your life than whoever will be the next MP for Mid-Bedfordshire for roughly one year.
By the way the thought of belonging to a smart expensive operation of whatever size that doesn't already know what it is for is mind boggling.
And if you get why people are suspicious of jargon, why annoy a whole group of people (which may at a guess include Beethoven, Einstein, Socrates and Darwin) by using it?
Admittedly I work out in the wilds of brand marketing which deals in powerful abstracts but also attracts hordes of low-wattage intellects who talk utter bollocks. It can be difficult to pick apart the pseuds from the genuine experts (a top tip is the latter tend to speak with less jargon and get drunk more).
It's hot here
(Dog's ear for scale)
Nowadays the uniformed children have been replaced by retirees and weekend railway enthusiasts, but they still play the jolly tunes and salute each train as it comes in.
Nostalgic emotion about such things is only useful if covering for deficiencies. If its broadly ok despite some issues, then the emotion is just a distraction.
I attended a corporate induction once where the poor (not in a literal sense) Chief Exec was dutifully droning on about the values, which included something about being against silo thinking or similar buzz phrase of the day, when one of the new starters had the temerity to ask about it, saying they had been at the same organisation 10 years earlier and was now rejoining, and they had the same basic values then, was the Chief Exec saying they had failed to deliver on it in all that time.
For all the management speak about open doors, always being willing to listen, no wrong answers etc, it was abundantly clear the Chief Exec was both flustered and pissed off to have someone interrupt the ritual lip service exercise.
The best boss I ever had taught me always to define the aims and scope and objectives of whatever project I was developing. What is it intended to do? How to do it? How might success be defined? It was enormously useful in focussing thinking - for one thing because one could instantly dump the irrelevant stuff. (And it could always be adjusted as one developed one's thinking, saw some bright ideas or had to dump some dead ends, etc.) It wasn't actually an official corporate form. It didn't actually matter very much if the higher bosses saw it or not - but it was always good to have to show them if needed.
In my next job I was assigned almost at once to lead a section of a keynote project, taking over from the existing leader who was retiring (unexpectedly, and for reasons unconnected with the project). I asked him for the statement of aims etc. Blank look ... I had to write this key document retrospectively in the middle of the project while familiarising myselof with it - but without it I could never have got it under control, and completed to time and budget.
Get the Knappers Gazette to send you South. The archetypal North Londoner swallows his pride and heads south of the river to explore the liberal elite's new Elysium, something like that. The Daily Mail has done a piece about all the It Girls making SE London their home, calling Telegraph Hill the "New Hampstead Heath". Time Out has named our local the best pub in London. Something is stirring in this neck of the woods that your readers might appreciate your insights into.
Even if one calls it a Common Spotted-orchid rather than Dactylorhiza fuchsii, that *is* a formal agreed botanical name (just the English vernacular name).
Edit: but in fairness one thing one learns in competent science writing for the public is to dump or explain *any* jargon at once. Not least because the same word can have very different meanings - one favourite being 'fetish/fetishise' (anthropology, sociology, common parlance).
As to the point about potentially useful tools, that is a fair one, but I think a lot of people's experience is that too much of the time those deploying the tools do not know how to use them effectively. Instead they are treated like something you are just supposed to have, shorn of context or understanding, and so implemented because it's what you do in an organisation dontchaknow, rather than to attain any benefit.
Performance indicators which don't actually measure anything useful, objectives and values so broad as to be meaningless, visions which are never referenced again, constant reorganisations, and misusing the concept of agile working because they heard it at a conference once, the list goes on.
A shovel is a useful tool as well and they should not be maligned en masse. But if it was deployed with no intelligence or subtlety in place of any garden instrument, the workers would struggle to see the worth of it.
If something is done poorly a lot of the time, of course people have a negative view of it.
Anyway, here is the demographic N-S version (population, split by current constituencies). Primary colours have roughly the same population, shading by population density.
I think it's a terrible job, and it's gotten worse.
Edit: an excellent argument for a Birmingham relocation of the Westminster Parliament. Or perhaps rather Nottingham/Leicester.
It’s bloody boiling.
It speaks volumes of the system that someone like him cannot even get to first base on the Parliamentary election circuit.
How did Johnson pass the "media skills test? Or was "a slapstick comedy turn" qualification enough?
Sandison replied with his own ps: “what on earth made you think that?”
It's Time For Biden To Leave The Stage
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/its-time-for-biden-to-leave-the-stage-cdb?r=7xfnp&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
There's a disaster coming if Biden runs I am increasingly feeling.
Fricking perishing when I went there six years ago but it was Christmastime.
(As it happens, I don't drink beer anyway.)
Guess where I am
NEW THREAD
i first pointed up this horrible dog video at about 3am last night, as being highly notable
“ LeonLeon Posts: 37,074
2:59AM
As I predicted. Sadly
An XL Bully captured on camera savaging multiple people
https://x.com/bullywatchuk/status/1700617924321443985?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
The next video will show one of these dogs ripping a child to shreds. Perhaps multiple children: killed
Maybe then the government will act. Fucking morons“
15 hours later the Home Secretary has banned these dogs. The power of PB, eh