Radio and papers filled with people complaining that the odd flake of snow has achieved what the Luftwaffe couldn’t and brought London buses to a halt . Terrible toll on British productivity. Where’s our sense of pride?
Well, mine is in the garden. We made a snow fort tough enough to withstand attack by football.
Here’s another way the press influences politics – see posts passim… I’ve been trying since November to bring in some additional support for a project I’m currently working on. This is an entirely new, very large, public sector project. It is adding massively to the output of the department and generating a lot of additional work which needs people; experienced and highly skilled people; to do properly. If we want to get it right, first time, without causing the additional expense or delay which comes when you have to rub along with the second rate, we have to spend a bit of money. We don’t have exactly the right set of skills in-house, and the people we do have are already stretched to breaking point. The fear of the press and the dreaded FOI request (and the shame of having to own up to hiring consultants (boo, hiss)) means that we have to jump through hoops of fire to even get close to justifying having extra people on board. Even if I finally get the go-ahead today it will be 4 – 6 weeks before we can get anyone on board if we go through the proper procurement procedures (which of course we will). By then it will be getting on for six months since the need was identified. When the project finally limps into public view, will it be lack of professional support at the right time, or incompetent civil servants who couldn’t run a whelk stall who will be blamed for it not being everything it could be – first time?
Ran across this on another blog – it’s a link to a request for ideas from the Foreign Office. Stephen Hale, the FCO Head of Digital Diplomacy, is looking for ideas for how social media can be used to address global economic problems. He’s gathering ideas in advance of the economic summit happening on London in April. In his own words:
Can the web can help answer the major questions of economic action? How would you like to contribute to the conversation? Would you prefer to engage with government on official websites, or elsewhere? What web tools would you use to stimulate debate? Where on the web are the lively debates already taking place? Who should we collaborate with? What lessons can we learn from similar exercises? –
More information on Stephen’s blog (see how blogging puts us on first name terms already!) which incidentally has lots of other really interesting stuff about how the web can work in government
The worst, the very worst thing about working for yourself is that there is no-one around who can help when things go wrong. No-one to stock up on pens, paper and printer cartridges; no-one to unblock the photocopier or report the fault on the phone line. And most of all, no IT department.
I’ve spent interminable hours recently not solving a really simple problem with my laptop, and building up a store of rage, frustration, inadequacy and self-loathing it might take therapy to release. It would probably take any 13-year old a moment to fix this. She probably wouldn’t have to break off texting while she did it. Sadly I don’t know any 13-year olds. I am going to have to buy in techie support at heart-breaking cost, and take it on the chin when I’m treated like the local village idiot for not being able to sort this out by myself. What does anyone else do?
As well as being Burns Night and my Dad’s birthday (happy birthday, Dad), today is the last Sunday in January, which means it’s Internet-Free day as designated by the Global Ideas Bank because – well let them explain:
Why an Internet-Free Day?
– Because there’s no replacing face-to-face interaction with real humans, we are social animals
– Because you can’t get your five a day from e-mails
– Because you can’t subscribe to an RSS feed from your grandma
– Because people’s faces are clearer in reality than YouTube
– Because your Blackberry is surgically attached to your hand…
– Because we all need a bit of R&R: reality and reflection
– Because if this has riled you, you really need it….
In case you’re wondering, I’m not here – this was set up on Friday to flip up on the site on Sunday. Now I just have to see if I can resist the temptation to log on for 24 hours. See you Monday.
I’m currently part way through Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, which highlights what he describes as a crisis in journalism, and the role that PR and political manoeuvering plays in it. So I was interested to read the report in today’s PR Week about a Reuters Institute study on the same subject, What’s Happening to Our News, which decides that, all things considered, PR isn’t a cancer eating at the heart of journalism (so that’s alright then…).
I recognise a lot of what Davies says about a crisis in journalism, driven by cost-cutting and staff shortages, and the demands of a 24-hour news machine. I think his section laying into PR is actually pretty weak. He’s much stronger on the evils of political manipulation of news and in particular the role of the CIA and the Bush administration’s machinations in the ‘war on terror’.
What Davies doesn’t touch on (unless it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet) is the effect the media has on politics. Outside Whitehall it might appear that the politicos are pulling all the strings. Inside it often feels quite different (this was touched on in Digby Jones’ evidence to the select committee. A second name check in a week for Lord Jones!) Far too often serious political issues are reduced to their simplest possible essence – who’s “in” and who’s “out” ? Was that a gaffe? Who’s been disloyal to the leader? Who’s making a leadership bid? I can’t think of anything less likely to encourage intelligent debate than the Today programme’s habit (thankfully ended) of wheeling in Nick Robinson to deconstruct political interviews immediately they’ve happened, to decode what the politician actually meant when he said X (Nick usually thought he meant Y, but sometimes he grudgingly agreed that he meant X but that X wasn’t what the Party needed to hear) The issue of the damage caused by a cynical, confrontational media constantly trying to find out “why is that lying bastard lying to me?” was explored in John Lloyd’s book What the Media is Doing to Our Politics , which makes a good companion piece to Davies.
The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of a ditty I used to mutter to myself after a particularly difficult call:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man unbribed will do, There’s really no occasion to.
Digby Jones’ comments about the need to sack half of the British civil service raised a wry cheer in our house, where for once I found that I agreed with bits of what the noble Lord Jones had to say. Anyone who has worked in the public sector – I suspect particularly those who’ve worked in Whitehall departments – will recognise his description of the jobsworth civil servant who is shunted around from department to department when his line manager should really just offer a bottle of brandy and a pearl- handled revolver. And I’ve always thought that the misery that goes with being a junior Minister can’t possbly be worth the remote possibility that one day you could be elevated to the cabinet and have a limo with a driver and a regular slot on Question Time.
There is, of course, another side to this. Without naming names or specific departments (I want to keep working), I’ve seen more bullying behaviour, bad management, poor decision-making and futile work commissioned by Ministers than I could shake a stick at. When all decisions, no matter how small, have to be taken by Ministers the decision making process becomes choked and inefficient. When civil servants know that large chunks of the work they are being asked to prepare will never be acted upon, perhaps it’s no wonder that they aren’t as mustard-keen to complete it at breakneck speed as Digby might like (not that I’m suggesting that he was anything other than a beacon of good practice in his own dealings with the service).
The truly excellent people there are on both sides of the Minister/Official divide are battling daily against business processes which don’t work efficiently for either side – and more importantly don’t deliver best value for the public. Whose fault that is, and what’s to be done about it are two questions that Digby didn’t really address.
Taking pot-shots from the sidelines won’t really change anything (and can seriously damage your career as the Civil Serf found out last year). But open debate about the issue and floating some ideas for change can’t hurt. A number of public sector blogs wrestled with this at the time and there’s a lot of public sector blogging still going on. Perhaps new media can help let in some light on this one – and for those concerned about propriety here are the Civil Service guidelines on blogging. So join the debate – we have nothing to lose but our inner-Sir Humphrey!
Suddenly remembered this blog is about to be about new media and comms rather than dishwashers, comic novels and 1970s computer games. Fortunately also just ran across possibly the first interesting use of new media in political advertising that I’ve ever seen so am posting about it sharpish before someone else does. Actually someone already has, I got the tip off here where it is written about far more eruditely than I seem to be doing (it’s been a long week already) It’s not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but at least it’s starting to grapple with the possibilties of the web in other than embarrassing Dad-dancing ways. A story on the Guardian blog reveals that traffic to the official Labour Party site doubled when the item went up. We’ve got a way to go before we Brits are doing it like the Democrats do – but you know I think we might be (starting) to get it!
My dishwasher broke down a couple of weeks before Christmas and when… Well you really don’t need or want to know the ins and outs of this story. Here I am still waiting for it to be fixed, one month and four, soon-to-be five re-arranged engineer-vists later. Idly holding on the phone to speak to the helpline again this afternoon, I googled Hotpoint Customer Service, and found a whole circle of Hell, populated with people frothing at the mouth and desperate to share their experiences. The online comments might eventually have some impact on the company’s behaviour – if enough people check things out online before they buy and are put off by what they find. But it did make me realise how very puny the power of the customer still is – there are comments on some of these blogs dating back to 2006, but Hotpoint/Indesit ploughs on serenely, not apparently seeing the need to change its ways one jot. For what it’s worth I will be adding my rants to the other blogs, but more because it will help me unload some rage than because I expect it to do any good.
Thank you for holding.
I honestly do like my job. I believe in what I do and I enjoy the people I work with (most of the time). But I’ve just picked up the first work-related email I’ve had since Christmas Eve, and the sense of prison doors clanging shut is driving me to the emergency chocolate supply.
Sole Trader PR 