What was interesting for me was listening to the three keynote speakers.  We had (Baroness) Sally Morgan from Labour, David Laws from the Lib Dems and Michael Gove from the Conservatives.  There was a surprising amount of consensus between the three.  I don’t think I am misrepresenting any of the speakers if I pick out the following common themes:

• The Academy Programme has broadly been a force for good.  As with any programme there are known exceptions but they should not distract from the overall picture.
• Whoever wins we will see a development/evolution of the thinking that went into Academy approach in the way we consider new schools
• Whoever wins we can expect to see more disparate groups – including possibly ‘for-profit’ organisations and more parent-led collectives – joining the roster of providers
• School Autonomy is a good thing.  Nobody on the panel said it directly but the implicit flip-side to this is that Local Authority meddling can be a hinderance to good school governance.

The disagreements between the parties were more around the implementation details than the ‘big idea’ of letting more schools run themselves.

The thing that really struck me though was Sally Morgan’s seeming reluctance to press ahead with new schools unless the capital was identified to support them with best-in-class building provision.  She hated the idea of schools opening in ‘converted office buildings where children cannot enjoy the richness of the broad curriculum that only a properly equipped school can offer’.   This bugged me at the time, and having reflected on it for 24 hours it bugs me even more now.  It is as if Labour believe that you cannot possibly be solving a problem unless you hurl money at it.  Her argument boils down to that she would rather have kids in adequate buildings so they can have a wide curriculum albeit with the crumby teaching, poor leadership and sapped morale that is present in failing schools; rather than have a narrower curriculum in less ideal temporary buildings that do at least have quality teaching, strong school leadership and a sense of mission and purpose in the institution.   Actually Sally, I would rather my children went to the second and how dare you and your lot deny me that choice.  Quality of teaching is far more important than the shiny new facilities.  Don’t get me wrong – ideally we aim for having both, but if the capital isn’t there now then let’s just get the quality of teaching and leadership up and get moving – the shiny new toys can follow as institutions start to prove their success.  Gove gets this.  You could see him bursting to just get on and get started.  So whilst there may be consensus on the overall direction of educational reform, there is difference about the appetite for the pace and depth of it.  This whole area is too important to pussyfoot about with for fear of hurting teaching union sensibilities.  My vote is going to the chap with the hunger and sense of urgency to tackle this head on: Michael  Gove.

The ‘big idea’ is that if you open up Government data to the masses then inevitably better decision-making, better behaviour and thus better government will follow.  The more you think about it the more compelling this becomes.  Remember what happened when the expenses data reached the public domain?  Think about the change in behaviour from MPs that has driven.  Reflect how much better a job the public and press did at auditing that data than the civil service ever managed. The tragedy is that none of it would have been possible without an illegal leak.  The Government has always contrived to protect data from the taxpayer and the taxpayer has always been the poorer for it.

Openness of Government data changes the very nature of government.  It empowers the citizen.  It gives us the tools to make decisions locally based on facts rather than instinct.  Anyone who has worked at  senior level in business  will have been taught that, yes, good decisions can be made by people with no more than good judgement and good instincts but the very best decisions are most often made by people with good judgement  and a credible fact-base (i.e. data).   Inversely, poor decisions are made when you swap the word ‘good’ for ‘poor’ in any one of those three variables (judgement, instinct, data). Sharing the whole fact-base rather than a cherry-picked sub-set of it gives us transparency. Transparency removes the political elite’s monopoly of access to ‘good’ data.  This gives us the power to better assess politicians judgement and instinct. I’m sure that will terrify them.

For Cameron this new age isn’t just about technology or having ‘government data’ (really ‘taxpayer’s data’) available to us all on-line.  He was careful to link this ‘big idea’ to his wider theme that it is not the ‘state’ that should try to solve our problems – it’s ‘society’.  There is a big difference between the two.  We are all passive slaves to the ‘state’ – we are all empowered leaders (if we wish to be) in ‘society’.  His policies are aimed at allowing a renewed sense of ‘society’ to flourish after years of abrogation to the State.  In much the same way he wants groups of parents with a coherent plan to set up their own schools outside of Local Authority control he now plans employee co-operatives taking over various other local services such as libraries and job centres.  He also sees a revolution in planning law to let neighbourhoods have first call on their own development plans and greater use of technology to speed these processes up.

When you listen to these disparate policy threads being pulled together you realise that Cameron really does have a vision for Britain which has far more substance and genuine philosophy than his critics would dare admit.  This philosophy is attractive to me because it is so closely aligned to my own. Unfortunately, only the geeky dweebs like me intuitively ‘get’ this stuff.  The big problem is that Cameron hasn’t yet mastered the best language or killer phrases that lands the enormity of these ideas and this coming new age with the majority of the electorate.   Cameron is often charged with being sound-bite over substance.  The irony here is that he has real substance and he hasn’t yet found the sound-bite!

You cannot roll back technology.  Make no mistake these changes are coming. We will either get there quickly because of government or we will get their slowly despite government.   Change is difficult – you can embrace and adapt, or take the King Canute route.  David Cameron’s instinct is to adapt and embrace the times he lives in. Just one example of speeding us down the right path is his x-prize style competition.  Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has central control instincts to his core and he would continue to resist these forces and Britain would suffer for it.

The Conservatives  need to work harder to get these messages across.  Predictably, despite Cameron talking for 45 minutes on the subject today the only reportage of his appearance in the media I’ve seen is his reply to an off-topic question on the bullying PM.  The vision thing doesn’t seem sexy enough for for the main-stream media to cover – we need to change this.  This is ‘progressive’ politics in the purest sense of the word.  We are talking about fundamentally shifting power from the state back to the citizen – that is the very essence of liberation.   The new society we build can be an engine for solving many (not all) of the nation’s ills at very low cost to the taxpayer.  The same way technology has lowered the barriers of entry to, and cost of doing business – it can be just as transformative on government.  It is a new age, whilst our first steps into it may be ugly, painful and chaotic – on the other side it will be a golden age – but only if we have the bold leadership and the right policies to shepherd it in.

About five years ago someone broke into my car nicking the stereo and a credit card. I knew nothing about it ‘till I got one of those security phone calls from my bank asking if I was in a certain shop trying to buy x amount of goods. I told them I wasn’t and they stopped the card. The thief was turned away at the till in a minor victory for computerised fraud detection. I knew that if someone had the card they must have been in my car and rushed to the garage to find the damage.

I rang the police to report it.  They saw no reason to send anyone to me but did say that if I could be bothered to drive the car myself to the police station they would dust it for prints.  I told them about the credit card “We’re less bothered about credit card fraud than we are about breaking into the vehicle – the credit card is a matter for the banks”.  I protested that the two were directly connected – the card was stolen from the car, and suggested that given the bloke had been standing in the shop for some time whilst the card was refused maybe someone in the shop would remember him.  “We might send someone around” the officer told me.

A couple of days later, having heard nothing, I rang the shop myself and spoke to the manager.  No policeman had been round.  However, he did say that he remembered the chap well.  “Everything about him had been ‘dodgy’”– he had been so struck by the thief’s behaviour waiting for card authorisation he had even saved and printed CCTV images of him!

Triumphant – I went round to the shop, picked up the 4×4 clear mugshot – took it to the police station and declared ‘There’s your thief!’.  I don’t know what reaction I was expecting: at best maybe them to bang an alarm bell which instantly gathered the crack anti-theft squad who knew all the villains on the patch to ID the photo then charge off on an instant ‘knock’; at worst at least some begrudged gratitude for doing some of their job for them.  What I actually got was a weary sigh and that “I probably shouldn’t have picked up the photo, with data protection and that” and an “I’ll pass it on to the investigating officer but just because he had your card doesn’t make him the person who broke into your car.  It’s circumstantial”.   I never heard another thing.

A full photo, fingerprints, a witness.  None of it of interest.  They weren’t bothered about me, they weren’t bothered about solving the crime – they were just bothered about completing the paperwork and logging the crime for their metrics.  The whole episode was a depressing experience.

Fast forwards to 2010.  I had been away for the weekend can came home to find a letter from an electrical store – it was a receipt for about £2k worth of computers, all bought on my card but with a different delivery name and address -  someone, somewhere I had never heard of in Nottingham.  Thankfully, the electronics store had a policy that whenever someone ordered something for a different delivery address they also send a copy of the receipt to the billing address.   A quick phone call to the bank and it turns out this joker had run up £6k in total elsewhere over the weekend.  Card stopped.  Another phone call to police.

This time, the police where surprisingly polite and interested.  They said they could send an officer over right then, but with it being 10:30 at night would I rather wait until morning?  If so what time? Oh, we’ll send a text message to confirm the appointment.  Great.

Sure enough at bang on the agreed time the next day a uniformed officer turned up.  Polite, courteous and reassuring.  She took notes, gave me advice about the National Fraud Reporting Centre and took the name and delivery address of the fraudster.  So far, so good -  I would say I was very impressed.

“What happens now?”, I asked. “Well, I pass these details on to our control room, who will probably pass them onto the intelligence lot, who may then get in touch with Nottingham – they’ll wait for a report from the bank who will put together a full pack on when the card was used – it is actually the bank that is the victim here, not you.  On the basis of that info they’ll decide if there is anyway to proceed.  It’ll be weeks”.

My heart sank.  They have a name and delivery address – the goods are due to be delivered that day.  A quick phone call to Nottingham police, who could in turn ring the courier company to find out when the goods would be delivered, the police could then wait outside, watch the goods signed for, and then grab their fraudster.  Another toe-rag who is probably a one man crime wave off the streets.  Job done.  You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to sort this stuff out.  It is common sense.

Sadly though, common sense does not trump ‘process’.

For all the obvious improvement in ‘customer service’ and in making me, the victim, feel like I am being taken seriously, it is apparent that everything is about ‘process’ and not about ‘outcome’.  I am sure that this process has been carefully designed, and will have been executed as intended and if audited they’ll get a great big tick and be rewarded for doing an ‘excellent job’.

But if the outcome isn’t ‘the thief is caught’, then really what is the point of the process?

Both these cases were relative open goals for the police.  They failed to score either.  Yet the paper shuffling and form filling have created a taxpayer funded industry to give the illusion of action and crime fighting.  I’d honestly sacrifice some of the touchy feely ‘customer service’ improvements just for the sense that someone was empowered to use their common sense and circumvent the ‘process’ to get the bad guys quickly when any obvious opportunity arose.  Such agility of thinking it seems is not allowed.  We will all remain more vulnerable until it is.

I’ll not bore with the specific details of what was said.  Suffice to say the questions jumped around topics as diverse as ‘Sure Start’, the NHS, Wars, Student Finance, Capital Punishment with a few very testy moments on unemployment and immigration.  Those who went would have learned nothing about policy that they could not found on the Conservative website.  But this isn’t about policy announcement – this is pure campaigning.  The attention spent in Edgbaston is another boost to the campaign of Deirdre Alden who is well on course to reclaim this seat.

What interested me was deciding if this is a good way of campaigning?  Is it a good use of Cameron’s limited time?   On reflection: You bet.

Insofar as Cameron has an image problem it remains his background.  People hear he went to Eton then hear he is loaded and for many that makes him from Mars.  He cannot change those things and is always upfront that he wouldn’t if he could, they are part of what makes him who he is – but he can try and get across that ‘despite’ his background he is not totally removed from humanity in Britain.  Whilst he makes a reasonable fist of getting this across on telly the small screen still shows ‘another’ world in our perceptions.  When we want to really judge the character of a person we want to look them directly in the eye and see them in the flesh as they interact. Without the human contact we feel we are being ‘spun’.  These flesh pressing events are therefore the perfect vehicle for Cameron to help shed the last doubts of the floating voters:

• The venues are intimate: Voters see him from a few yards away, hear him speak with no pomp, and can see the event is not stage managed.  This is him – for real.
• People will make their own judgement if he is sincere.  Mine is he is.  And I believe that most people who attend make that same judgement.
• That judgement will be passed onto friends multi-fold.  Mary will tell ten friends like Jane “I went to see Cameron.  He surprised me.  He came across as genuine.’ – Jane will tell ten friends like Sid “A mate of mine met Cameron – he isn’t actually that bad”, Sid will tell ten friends like Paul “A friend of a friend of mine has spent time with him.  He’s OK”.  Multiply those conversations by many, many thousands and you begin to chip away at the doubts that may linger.  This is human engagement  with thousands directly and then with hundreds of thousands only a step or two removed. Social networking actually doesn’t always require trendy new social media tools on the ‘interweb’ – human networks can be powerful enough.

Wisely, to get most bang for buck, they’re scheduling as many of these as possible in marginal seats.  It is simply impossible to imagine Brown being able to pull off a similar level of human engagement.  Every attempt Labour has tried at this has been a disaster (the best one being the classic youtube video HERE).  Although Cameron Direct probably seems to immediately hit fewer people than other gimmicks like joining twitter could (see here for why that is a bad idea) – for all the reasons above it has far more tangible impact.  His campaign managers have got this spot on.

Of course, gaining public trust isn’t the be all and end all.  It is just an enabler. Cameron does carry extra disadvantage in his pursuit of trust because of people’s experience of Blair. Let’s face it Blair was the Crown Prince of ‘trust me’ politics.  There is a huge element of ‘once bitten’ that makes the hurdle Cameron has to overcome much higher. The good news is that through these events he is clearing it.  Cameron Direct works.  Let’s ramp them up in the run up to the election.

Ultimately, ‘being trusted’ is to seek to do the job.  ‘Judgement’ and ‘delivery’ is to actually do the job.  And it was the judgement and delivery where Blair failed.  Cameron does need to build trust – it is his permission to govern.  But he must never lose sight that earned trust can be easily lost.  He needs to follow up with judgement and delivery and I trust that from May this year – he will.

Cameron in Edgbaston

As background, Evan Davis tried to give Chris Grayling a bit of a kicking this morning on the Today program.  The target was the Shadow Home Secretary’s use of the Home Office’s crime figures. You can listen to the exchange here but in a nutshell Grayling was accused of gaining some political capital from comparisons of year-on-year violent crime, missing the notes in the dataset which said such comparisons cannot be valid.  If you’re geeky and interested the dataset in question can be seen here.  The rights and wrongs of this issue are well covered elsewhere – my perception was that Grayling got a bloody nose before recovering at the last (despite Davis being in full attack dog mode).

Vultures smell blood and circle.  And sure enough this afternoon a Lib Dem press release, with all the faux outrage that could be mustered tried to sustain the attack:

Liberal Democrats

Contact: Louise Phillips
Embargo: Immediate, Wednesday 3 February 201

Tories should think of policies, not fiddle figures – Huhne

Commenting on reports today that the Tories have distributed misleading figures on violent crime, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:

“It seems that the Tories will go to ever increasing lengths to make David Cameron’s ridiculous claims about broken society seem credible.

“Before they start to point the finger on violent crime, the Tories should consider their own record – violent crime rose every year between 1979 and 1997 and nearly doubled overall.

“Instead of fiddling figures, Chris Grayling should think of some policies.

“The Liberal Democrats are the only party committed to putting more police on the streets, and have the best record of cutting crime in Lib Dem controlled council areas.”

The trouble for the Lib Dems is that nowadays anyone with Google (like me) can very quickly check if those proclaiming to be holier-than-thou on an issue pass the sainthood test.  And lo-and-behold it seems that Mr Huhne himself has had no problem in the past applying the same interpretation of the crime figures as Mr Grayling .  Take a look at the first two lines by Huhne in this speech here.   I quote: “Clearly, there is serious concern among the public about crime. There is excessive violent crime, which has doubled since the Government came to power. “   Now he could only have come up with that ‘doubled’ bit by using the exact same analysis he his now savaging Grayling for.

His leader Clegg has also been quite happy to read the figures with disregard to the comparatives notes – and in Parliament no less.  A quick search of Hansard here shows Cleggy declare: “In contrast to non-violent crime, violent crime has doubled since 1998.” Further down he also points out gun crime has doubled.  Again, both these claims use the same reading of the stats that they attack Grayling for.

So you can take this Press Release as a cynical, hypocritical piece of opportunism that the yellow folk like to pretend they are above.  They are not.  Mr Huhne is in a great big glass-house whilst chucking those stones….

I’m prepared to accept his word on a couple of points (thousands aren’t!):

• He genuinely believed that Saddam had WMD.
• He genuinely believed he was acting in the best interests of the UK.

I also totally get his point that at the end of the day he had to make a judgement, and he did.

What bothers me though is the lack of recognition anywhere that those beliefs and that judgement, although sincere, look to have been wrong.  It mystifies me that he kept trying to get the panel to ‘ask the 2010 question, not the 2003 question’.  The 2010 question he wanted asking was about a ‘hypothetical world’ where Saddam had WMD.  The 2010 question we are all asking is the real world question where Saddam did not have WMD.

The thing that really, really bothers me though is this:  When you are a leader, yes, you have to make judgements.  You make judgements (hopefully) on data more than instinct.  In national security issues the data you rely on for the judgement calls is ‘intelligence’.  Let’s say that the Inquiry decides to cut Blair some slack and say that given the intelligence he was given at the time, the call was reasonable.  He had to trust the intelligence that proved wrong.  If I was Blair my fury with intelligence services would know no bounds.  For the hundreds of millions of pounds we spend on our intelligence they got something we had been on the case of for over a decade dreadfully wrong.  The consequences of their failure was:

• Millions (billions?) spent on a war
• Huge loss of life of Iraqi Civilians
• Significant loss of life from our own armed forces
• Distraction from the task at hand in Afghanistan
• Removal of the one regional counter-weight to the ambitions of Iran
• The entire quartermaster stores of the Iraqi army passing into hostile militias to be used god knows where
• The radicalisation of certain British youth introducing a new domestic front for terror

But on the plus side we did get Saddam.  Not sure the debit and credits work in our favour though.

So given the consequences of this judgement, I am baffled that the chap who provided the data to the PM from which he made his judgement, John Scarlett – instead of getting hung out to dry – gets promoted.  As with Goldsmith the questioners gave Blair a chance to hang some of the blame on them and he loyally stuck up for them.  The mind boggles.

Anyway, I stand by my predications as to the Inquiry’s findings: HERE

16th August 2002,  To:  Colin Challen MP

–cut—-

Saddam Hussein is a butcher.  He is a madman.  He shows scant disregard for common humanity.  He has proved in attacking his own people in Halaja in 1988 that he is willing to use weapons of mass destruction.  He proved in his invasion of Kuwait he has no respect for the norms of international behaviour.  He has proved throughout his reign of internal repression he has no respect for international expectations on human rights.  On balance, Iraq and the world would far be better off without him.

I therefore have every sympathy with the Bush regime that the ‘ends’ of a regime change within Iraq is desirable.  My issue is with the ‘means’ of achieving that ‘ends’.

Since the end of the second world war international law has developed to allow the use of force in (broadly) only one of two circumstances: self-defence or with the support of the United Nations Security Council.  The world has been more secure for the development of these rules.  It was the international consensus on exactly these principles that originally gave such weight to the international effort to remove Saddam from Kuwait in 1991.

Before nations reached this understanding justification for resorting to state violence was broadly understood to lie with ‘Jus Bellum’ or ‘Just Cause’.  This dates pretty much to the Crusades.  The problem with this is that “Jus Bellum” has no arbitrator.  The victor will always declare a “Jus Bellum”.  Hitler certainly saw a “Jus Bellum” in taking on Poland for instance.   Yet it seems the US administration is hell bent on taking us backwards to this medieval concept.  They are convinced of the morality of their case and will push ahead regardless.

I reiterate that I agree that in isolation there is a strong moral case.  However, for the love of god, can they not think through the consequences of setting this precedent?  When the only remaining super-power abandons a ‘norm of international behaviour’ then that norm can no longer be considered to be part of the fabric of international law.

Once this genie is out the bottle, what if China sees a clear moral cause in stopping Taiwan?  What if India sees a just cause in taking out the Pakistan leadership?  Do we really have no joined-up thinking on this?

The Prime Minister has been a remarkable and brave ally to our American friends since that terrible day a year ago.  In observing his response throughout I was genuinely proud to be British.

Sometimes though, a friend needs guidance.  Sometimes, a friend needs restraint.  Sometimes speaking ones mind can be a greater show of true loyalty than blind obedience.  I pray all those who influence the Prime Minister will impress upon him the importance not to sleep walk into a war.  I pray that he will use the influence and trust he has with the US administration to put forward another way.  If the moral case for removing Saddam is so compelling then take it to the UN, get approval, and use all the might at our disposal to get the job done.  If the UN cannot be convinced then may I suggest that we take a step back.  The sum intelligence and consideration of all other nations is probably wiser than we give them credit in our western arrogance.  If there is not support for our ‘cast iron’ moral case then maybe the case isn’t as strong as it seems to us here and stateside still so angry about events last year to those who can remove emotion from their thinking.

The undoubted benefit and extra security brought by the US unilateral forced removal of Saddam to the globe, would in my opinion be dwarfed by the insecurity created by the abandonment of international law and a return to a ‘might is right’ nuclear era of international relations.”

—————————————

On the one hand I am amused at myself for thinking that a letter to a backbench MP was a constructive use of my time.  On the other I find this pretty strong reading.  Between my writing this letter and the start of the actual War – Tony Blair somehow managed to convince me that we ‘had to do it’ – and somehow his ‘trust me Tony’ chutzpah had me as a supporter by the eve of the War.  I’ll watch proceedings today with great interest and try and figure out how he managed to do that.

Whilst I have nothing but respect for Montgomerie and his ability to use the internet to enthuse & engage Conservative activists I think he’s dead wrong on the value of Twitter.  Cameron is right not to waste his finite time on this fad.  Cards on the table: I’m a relative newbie to Twitter, I resisted the hype for a year or two but when I started blogging I joined hoping to drive some traffic to this blog.  I suppose from that point of view it has been successful. I haven’t sussed it out all the etiquette yet, but there are a couple of things I have learned – all of which for me suggest DC should stay away:

• The oft-published league tables for ‘number-of-followers’ are nonsense – any quick Google search will show you how to quickly ‘buy’ followers, and there is a juvenile (yet compelling) culture of ‘I’ll follow you if you follow me’.  Look at the million plus followers C grade Radio 5 DJ Richard Bacon has signed up.  If you believe the headline then one in sixty people in the UK is clinging to his every 140 character utterance.  If you actually look at his account you have to scroll through literally thousands of Far Eastern sounding names before you find a single person who appears to be a potential 5-live listener.  Either he has a huge cult following in China and the Philippines or his PR agency have recruited a decent ‘follower farmer’.  It can only be a matter of time before the Media suss this out and ‘number-of-followers’ stops being a measure of digital credibility and gravitas – and actually becomes the reverse.  You also need to drop the assumption that because someone ‘follows you’ they actually bother to read your tweets.  A quick look at a sample of twitter accounts shows many follow hundreds or even thousands of people.   Once people are following that kind of volume, you realise your most profound tweets are lost to many in the sheer noise of the place.

The magic is having quality followers not the quantity of them.

• For Cameron a ‘quality’ follower would be a swing voter who is only following a handful of other people. The reality is that most people on Twitter are either IT Geeks, Media/Marketing Types or Political Animals – the vast majority of this crowd are dead set in who they will vote for. Those who aren’t political are unlikely to be inclined to follow Cameron.  He would either be preaching to the converted or the lynch mob.
• Staying off also avoids the potential banana skin of the ill-advised tweets after a shandy or two. I actually follow our local Labour MP in the hope she drops a clanger.

It is therefore simply not a good use of the man’s time and a distraction from methods of campaigning that could engage the people he isn’t currently reaching. Don’t get me wrong Twitter is a neat communication technology and it has its place – but it aint the game changer its proponents think it is and DC is right in sidestepping it.

All that dissing Twitter said, if anyone wishes to follow me I’m @guythemac – I tweet rarely, and only use it to draw attention to new material written on here – I’m sure most of my few tweets are drowned out in the ether – but that’s OK –  I have some time to waste – David Cameron does not.

*This article is a tidy-up of a response I left on Conservative home – that debate there can be seen here.

For the majority of the last decade (until November) I worked for Cadbury. I still live in Bournville only a few hundred meters from the famous factory.  I’ve been thinking how I feel about the news.  Cadbury was, in the main, a wonderful employer.  The pay, terms and conditions and pension were all good.  The people were all lovely.  The heritage of the company ran deep.  They were very supportive of work in the community; I am a governor of a local school and regularly carried out related duties in work-time with the full blessing of the company.  In comparison to my previous employer (one of the ‘big five’ management consultancies) first joining Cadbury felt like moving to a holiday camp.  Very flexible working and a big commitment to work/life balance.

Over the years the culture sharpened (and the work/life balance vanished!).  Make no doubt that despite the history, image and corporate good deeds Cadbury has been very capable of playing hardball in the market.  In the UK over the last couple of decades it bought out Trebor, Bassetts and Green & Blacks.  Overseas the shopping list has been far longer.  Brands like Halls and Trident chewing gum may only be bit players in the UK but overseas they are huge.  Although there is much made about the company’s ‘Britishness’ – it was first and foremost a multinational – the chief exec was American, my boss was based in Switzerland, and my Boss before that based in the US.  I have seen numerous reorganisations and watched colleagues with long service let-go, I also watched manufacturing be shifted from country to country as the company chased higher margins. The company may have had paternalistic instinct but it also had an aggressive streak. Cadbury built itself into an international heavyweight by smart acquisitions and business savvy.  The age old saying applies that if you live by the sword you die by the sword.  Kraft is doing to Cadbury what Cadbury has done to many others.

Some of the hysteria has been bizarre.  It is a statement of apparent absolute fact to the British that American chocolate is inedible. This has conjured up fears about Kraft messing with recipes.  Let’s apply some common sense here – Kraft is spending £11.5 bn because it recognises the strength of brands like Dairy Milk.  When you spend that much money you are not going to waste it by destroying the brand.  There will be no fiddling with the recipes.

Some of the concerns are valid though.  The obvious one is jobs.  With any take-over in the first instance your corporate functions (finance people, HR people, IT people, Legal people, etc.) end up ripe for headcount reduction as you suddenly have two of everything and these tend to be your highest payroll costs.  The people in the company taking over fair better.  Then as you merge your routes-to-market your sales force and marketing departments begin to feel the pressure.  Kraft has to make that £11.5bn back and I do fear that many of my former colleagues will suffer because of this.  It’s going to be a tough time of uncertainty for many hundreds of people and I wish them all the best.  I suspect there will be no change to manufacturing arrangements for a number of years (when the merger is complete) but even then I would expect any changes Kraft makes to be similar to what Cadbury would likely have done to itself if it remained a standalone company.   I’m sure this may include the shifting of yet more chocolate production from Birmingham to Poland.

I believe in the free market and therefore should be shrugging my shoulders about this deal.  I sold all my shares in the company last week so have lost the moral right to moan.  However, one thing still bothers me about the whole story.  The free market only works properly if everyone plays by the same rules.  About five years ago Cadbury very seriously looked at buying Hershey.  One of the key reasons that deal did not go ahead was that, although stockmarket listed, Hershey has articles that empower its controlling Trust to veto any takeover against the will of shareholders.  If they hadn’t had that legal protection Cadbury would have bought them and would now be too big for Kraft to buy.  Yet when the boot was on the other foot and the Americans come buying – Cadbury cannot play the same card.  That doesn’t seem right.  The British being beaten by our own sense of ‘fair play’.

So I am philosophical about the deal but my mood is tinged with a little sadness and frustration.  A deal with Hershey would have been a far better cultural, geographic and product fit.  I will watch carefully how it now plays out.

*As I have been typing this up my post has just arrived.  Ironically, there is a letter from Cadbury containing a brochure entitled ‘Further Reasons to Reject the Kraft Offer’.  It is actually quite a convincing read. What comic timing!

As innovative tax breaks go the one I always loved the most was the childcare voucher scheme.  Now this isn’t just because I was once an enthusiastic recipient (consider my interest therefore declared), it was because I loved the principal of the thing – of all government attempts to socially engineer through the tax system this was the one that hit the mark:

• Vouchers mean you can assure that the tax-break really is used for the purpose it was intended.  This isn’t money direct in the bank account like every other benefit and government hand-out – this is the right to buy, from pre-tax pay, a voucher for a specific purpose.  Unlike, for instance, child benefit which has nothing to stop you spending your eighty quid a week or whatever down the bookies rather than feeding your child – if you don’t use childcare  you cannot gain any fiscal advantage through the existence of this scheme.
• These vouchers can only be spent on OFSTED approved childminders or nurseries.  Whilst you and I may, or may not, have philosophical reservations about the burden OFSTED places on pre-school providers we taxpayers have now invested a great deal of our money in setting up this inspection regime.  We therefore have a right that we benefit from our investment.  Personally, I would wish for lighter regulation for this age-group, but any regulatory regime is only worth jack if people work within it.   If there are not incentives to work ‘legitimately’ then you will always have people working outside of the regime and a skewed market.  Linking the ability to receive voucher payments to compliance obviously improves compliance dramatically.  This is a good thing.  How we lower the bar of compliance requirements is a debate for another day.
• Because the money can only be spent on childcare (per above) – you guarantee jobs for tens if not hundreds of thousands in the childcare industry.  Those folk who work at nurseries or as independent childminders  provide a valuable service – and also, obviously, pay tax on the money they earn through receipt of vouchers making the overall cost to the taxpayer less that it may seem at face value (more on this point in a moment).
• The pre-school providers funded in part through this money are largely private, this gives parents greater choice and a more efficient market bringing overall better quality provision.  This competitive drive for quality can only be in the best interests of our infants.
• Having private companies administer the back-office side of the scheme kept the administration costs down through competition.  Again, a win for the taxpayer compared with other policy implementations.

It is now a few months since the Labour party scored a whopping own-goal by announcing they would dump this, possibly one of their best implemented ideas.  The first toe-dip in the language of ‘class war’ ahead of the election was probably the branding of this a ‘posh-parent tax-break’.  The spin seemed to be ‘Why should Joe public subsidise the childcare of accountants and solicitors?   We’re in a recession, we have huge debt, this is one area of spend that can go.’

The masses arose.  Web forums like ‘mumsnet.com’ showed a level of digital militancy that caught ministers on the hop.  A U-Turn came.  Of sorts.  In the unlikely event Labour win, the scheme would remain with tweaks.

Dumping the vouchers was a stupid idea on both a political level and for macro-economic reasons.

• For many so-called ‘middle-class’ women even very high earners, the sheer cost of weekly childcare (well over a hundred pounds a week in most cases) made the choice of going back to work uneconomic without the tax discount.  If woman are not going back to work you get less tax revenue from their earnings – the money forfeited as income tax revenue would likely be more than the amount sacrificed to provide the break.
• To compound this the fall in demand would inevitably result in a loss of jobs in the child-care industry with a consequent loss of tax income and increase in welfare burden from those child-care assistants impacted.
• We go on and on about trying to create a society where families make their own choices about the way they balance work/life and that we should shy from the automatic assumption that ‘Mum stays at home’.   Instead we have been angling for a time where mum (or dad) can stay at home if they want to OR if they want to return quickly to their career then there is no monetary barrier to returning to the workplace.  This policy was the enabler of that choice-led ideal.

Admittedly, the voucher scheme did have one valid flaw which does leave it open to charges of unfairness.  The Achilles heel was that it was entirely optional for employers to provide it.  Big forward thinking employers did.  Most small companies, presumably put off by perceived red-tape, did not.   That you do or do not get such a tax advantage depending on your employer doesn’t seem quite right.  The answer though is not to simply close the scheme – no, the answer is to extend it. The take-up level by employees at companies that did offer the scheme was high enough to prove the popular demand.  It cannot be beyond the wit–of-man to empower the private administrators of the scheme to collect national insurance numbers of those buying the vouchers regardless of employers and then providing the data on the actual vouchers bought back to HMRC for future reimbursement through the tax-code or some similar simple innovative solution?  I came up with that with about five seconds thought, it may have flaws – but I am sure bright people put in a room for a few hours could come up with a way that would work.

In all the talk this week of cuts – and I do not dispute the need for very many, very swift, very deep, very painful cuts in public spending– I am still not clear where the Conservative Party stands on this particular area.  I can come up with many ill thought out tax breaks which miss the mark and are ripe for the axe.  This is not one of them.  The Party would be foolish to swing at it.