The debate about the Eurozone crisis has moved onto issues of political accountability and responsibility.
We have the governments of two historically important countries – Greece and Italy – in the hands of technocrats rather elected politicians, and many, including Aditya Chakrabortty in the Guardian , are asking: is this right?
In many senses, it isn’t. No public mandate exists for technocrats to lead a democratic, nation state.
But at this moment of crisis, the operating principle is ‘needs must’, and the real question is whether or not sufficient expertise can be brought together to allow the European project to do its job in investing in, and providing for, its citizens.
Technocratic skills are vital if Europe is to be able to effectively target and move money to address [...]

Currently, there is a real shortage of public capital, but at the same time there is a lot of private capital currently sitting on the sidelines waiting for the right moment to recreate the 2002-08 economic situation before the crisis.
What the country really needs is to unlock this capital against long-term strategic investments. In order to make this happen, there is a need for an independent report on what the infrastructure concerns within the UK are, which would have to be a broad, systematic review of where we have deficiencies in our society. This would have to call upon the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to bring to the surface the levels of poverty, vulnerability and deprivation that we have in our society – particularly for the elderly and children.
The efforts of chancellor Osborne to persuade the private sector to invest is ‘too little, [...]

This article by Luke Johnson on the Financial Times website on why big businesses are bad for business, with the point made that the senior executives of these large organisations are very similar to public servants of large government departments, strikes a chord with me.
We are in a situation of assets being slowly controlled by fewer and fewer hands. More and more companies are interlinked through shared ownership structures, and are plagued with the bureaucracy of governance which is emerging more as protecting directors from prosecutions than actually following through on whether governance is really adding value.
Issues such as risk, vulnerability, bribery and corruption that occur outside the usual Anglo-American governance regimes is a major problem. All our studies indicate that 80 percent of business transactions outside European or American boundaries involve more than one bribe, or a substantial amount of bribery, [...]

The article on BBC News ‘Occupy London – Protest continues for a second day’ on the anti-capitalist protest in London’s financial district is interesting.
The first point which springs to mind reading this is the ‘anti-capitalist’ nature of the protest. Is it really anti-capitalist, or is it the restricted and centralised control of resources, that is the problem? If we really had capitalism in the sense of free and open markets, I doubt we would have such drastic downtimes, deep unemployment and a demotivated community as more capital would flow freely in the market.
It is unfortunate that the previous estimate I made regarding how much money is available in the city in close-to-liquid form of £450bn seems to be inaccurate, as the estimate currently is about £500bn and in Wall Street it is around $3.7trn of capital that is essentially not circulating. However, [...]

The way I first came across the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) and its Chairman, Bernard Jenkins , was by accident. I was called to give evidence to the PASC on how to structure organisations and the relevance of leadership to government.  The evidence I gave ended up playing a far more prominent part than I expected. The PASC became highly aware that the design of policy is one thing but its implementation is where policy succeeds or fails. We began to examine what it means to structure government to deal with some of the concerns that we are currently facing in society.
It became clear to me whilst working with the PASC that up to the present Conservative Government, civil servants have had to display three core competencies. Two of these had been around for a long time. The first of these skills [...]

An interesting article by Martin Wolf draws attention to that fact that Britain must escape its longest depression – a depression which has continued as long as, if not longer, than the depression of the 1920’s. The question is, how? There is without doubt a parallel with the 1920’s; when the banks stopped lending money to each other, we saw the collapse of the financial structure, which is fundamentally the issue now.
If we as a country are going to continue to invest in the short-term transaction instruments, then I think we will see another financial collapse within four to five years. However, if we changed our philosophy and started investing in long term infrastructure projects, socialising the capital that we have, then we would have a situation of full employment, far less poverty and an overall wealthy society. But is there any sign of [...]

Two interesting articles in the Guardian and the Independent address the issue of why people rioted in the month of August 2011. The Guardian article raises the concerns that David Cameron is trying to restrict access to Twitter and Facebook for individuals who have taken part in the August riots. The Independent article says that an explanation for the riots is that communities do not trust politicians.
Reading these articles, for me the greatest concern is that of restricting information, and entering into a world where for political reasons information is prevented from going to individuals who are seen to take politically unacceptable action. Under the Labour administration, which was a period of high employment and income in the city, a lot of money was put into health and education, but it seems that things have not really improved.
I have seen [...]

The focus of the recent phone hacking scandal on Murdoch and the News of the World is not misplaced. The reality behind tapping into people’s privacy has been long on-going. But is it right that Murdoch receives such negative press? In my opinion, no.  So many others should also be under scrutiny.  The scandal of London’s press intrusion into the lives of the rich but also the ordinary has been on-going for 30 years or so, or at least that is the word on the streets.
Murdoch was one of the few press barons who actually reorganised the newspapers to become more functionally viable business entities. He repositioned the press on a new technological basis to become businesses concerned with the capture, packaging and distribution of information. All of the newspapers benefited from his revolutionary action.  Rather, all of the press should also [...]

I was very pleased to see reported in BBC news on March 29 th that 71% of the British public do not believe that we are in Libya to protect Libyan lives, but that we are essentially there to get oil. There is a growing sense amongst the general public that these regime changes have not been about freedom, but rather about resource capture—a short-term gain strategy which has only served to make freedom more vulnerable.
What we are seeing right now in the debates on regime change in the Middle East is the application of a well-worked, long-term strategy that has been on the cards for the last twenty-five years, having started under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. The Anglo-Americans have invested multi-billions of dollars into regime change and political change to create their own markets first in Eastern Europe through the coloured revolutions [...]

We have a major concern of inequality in the UK. The recent Financial Times article, “ Unequal Recovery: middle feels the squeeze ” notes how in the UK, inflation is outpacing wage growth and income inequality continues to rise. Much of the attention and research has focused on the struggling middle classes and the growing income gap, but the real squeeze not being talked about is on children and the elderly.  The UK has the worst figures for child incarceration, child poverty and poverty of elderly in comparison to any other Anglo-American economy.
Figures coming out of one of the most right wing think tanks in the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and also from the National Statistical Office indicate that 33-34% of children in the UK are living on or below the poverty line. The statistics also indicate that in any month there are 3,000 [...]