Latest news with #Blob
Spectator
4 days ago
- Business
- Spectator
Why corporate wokery refuses to die
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways. Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of the state compared with pre-pandemic, what few people realise is the extent to which the private sector has been incubating its own Blob for years. To illustrate how Blob PLC can achieve its ends and – crucially – why people have gone along with it, we must follow its successful campaign to make British business bow to the diversity gods, and how it started at the very top – with the boards. The trouble began with Lord Davies, affectionately known in his banking career as 'Merv the Swerve' after the Welsh rugby no. 8 of the same name, ennobled by Gordon Brown and made a minister for business. In 2011, Vince Cable, business secretary in the coalition, published a report from Lord Davies called Women on Boards. It asserted: 'Research has shown that strong stock market growth among European companies is most likely to occur where there is a higher proportion of women in senior management teams.' The basis of this claim was a 2007 report by an American organisation called Catalyst, set up to 'expand opportunities for women and business'. Not an entirely disinterested party, then. These reports, amplified later by two McKinsey studies, became the go-to texts which formed the foundation myth of Blob PLC's diversity dogmatism. As Alex Edmans and Ross Clark have written in this magazine, drawing on research by John Hand and Jeremiah Green in the US S&P 500 index, there is actually no evidence of a link between more diversity in a company and better stock performance.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Phillipson isn't a victim of sexism, she's just useless
All governments mess up. But why is Labour so chronically incapable of accepting responsibility for the choices it makes? Everything is always someone else's fault: nearly a year into the Starmer administration our economic torpor is still the Tories' doing. So are the record boat crossings, legal migration, defence spending – as though Labour ever had any of the answers to these problems. If this is true collectively, it's even more so at the individual level. Bridget Phillipson's cheerleaders – yes, there are some – are now crying 'sexism' following rumours the Education Secretary may lose her portfolio in a reshuffle. Boo hoo. It is deeply cynical when politicians and their supporters retreat into gender politics to defend their own incompetence and duff policies. On Newsnight this week Louise Haigh accused Downing Street of 'misogynistic' briefings against 'female northern MPs'. Haigh, as you have probably forgotten, is the former Transport Secretary who was forced to resign after it emerged she pleaded guilty to a fraud offence a decade ago, and who caved into rail union demands without demanding any productivity improvements for taxpayers in return. She is also a female northern MP. Isn't it more likely these two ministers just aren't very good, than that they are victims of misogynistic smears by the 'boys' of Number 10? In political and policy terms, Phillipson's record is dismal. She pressed ahead with her tax raid on private schools despite warnings it would lead 100 of them to close. The Education Secretary couldn't even stick to her flimsy rationale that the money raised would drive up standards in the state sector. Amid accusations it was simply another episode of antediluvian class warfare, she haughtily posted on X: 'Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery... Our students need careers advice more than private schools need Astroturf pitches.' Universities are on the brink of a funding crisis to which she has no solutions (let them fail, I say, but it's hardly good news for the party which gave us the 50 per cent target). The dreadful Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill will strip schools of the freedoms that have been pivotal to their success. Pay, staffing – all would be dragged back under Whitehall's unaccountable control. When the Tories left office, English children were among the best at maths and English in the OECD PISA league tables. Phillipson isn't fixing what is broken, she is taking a wrecking ball to a system that has done more to help kids from lower-income backgrounds than almost any other because it doesn't fit into her deranged worldview. As for Labour's planned curriculum review, led by 'professor of Education and Social Justice' Becky Francis, it's less focused on excellence than it is conformity to the dumbed-down sensibilities of the Blob. Working-class children are being denied the opportunity to study classics, after Bridget Philistine decided to cut Latin funding halfway through the academic year. Free breakfast clubs are nanny statism in its purest form – expensive, unnecessary, feeding the idea the state would do a better job of parenting than mothers and fathers. Then there was the time Phillipson advocated 'working from home' teachers and tried to dump free speech protections for universities. The Education Secretary may consider herself heir to Anthony Crosland, the politician most associated with the demise of grammars. Though united in their hostility towards any school that may give some children a better start in life, the similarities end there. Many of us think Crosland was a disaster for education, but at least he wasn't in the pocket of the unions as Phillipson is; on the contrary, he opposed their addiction to strikes and refusal to reform. He was a considerable figure who had his own following and a consistent political position. And he moved on to bigger things. Phillipson is more likely to vanish without trace. Unfortunately, by then the damage will already have been done. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rachel Reeves can't outsource decision-making to unelected quangocrats
In ancient Rome, the state services of haruspices were much in demand. By inspecting the entrails of birds and animals (the sheep's liver was a favourite), these priestly officials divined whether the gods would look favourably on any important future action, such as a war. Even our secular modern world likes this mixture of forecasting, prophecy, and hieratic hocus-pocus. Twenty-first century British governments have the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It is not wrong, of course, to convene experts to test and project the figures which governments come up with, but it is wrong for political leaders to outsource their decisions to them. This may not have been the intention, but it is the effect. When he created the OBR on becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, George Osborne emphasised its independence. Its endorsement, he thought, would lend financial respectability to his policies. But such 'independence' is problematic. First, it is somewhat notional: the OBR is fully funded from the Treasury budget, so its officials will almost certainly share the establishment groupthink of the era, rather than the views of elected politicians, let alone the attitudes of the public. Worse, political power shifts, over time, to these 'independent' bodies. The public is encouraged to think they are more honest than politicians. The politicians therefore seek their approval. In response, the bodies tend to behave more politically (though not usually party-politically). They get too big for their boots. The eternal Climate Change Committee, for example, tries to lay down the law about how we should get to net zero. The Supreme Court, which Tony Blair invented, decided, with the Remainer Lady Hale wearing her spider brooch for the occasion, that it could tell prime ministers not to prorogue Parliament. In Parliament itself, the conduct of MPs, for which they should answer to one another and the electorate, is now policed by an 'independent' commissioner who can ruin careers without due process. There are dozens of such bodies nowadays. Their cumulative effect is to make Britain governed more by a permanent bureaucracy than by a parliamentary democracy. Bad politicians quite like this trend, because the buck no longer stops clearly with them. They can wriggle out of the doctrine that 'Advisers advise: ministers decide.' In a properly run government, the departments themselves, and ultimately the Cabinet, should be responsible. That very name – Office for Budget Responsibility – implies that the Treasury, which creates the budget, does not do so responsibly. What is the Treasury for, then? Towards the OBR, Labour is even more slavish than were the Conservatives in Mr Osborne's time. When Liz Truss was briefly prime minister, Labour professed absolute horror that she and her Chancellor had launched their tax-cutting mini-Budget without seeking the OBR's forecast. She did, indeed, behave in a politically inept way, which caused the 'Blob' to spread panic in the markets, but she had not committed a constitutional outrage. Caught by its own rhetoric, Labour must now beg approval from the OBR to bolster the confidence so shaken by the recession-inducing decisions of Rachel Reeves's first Budget last October. This dependence simultaneously confines her room for manoeuvre and puts pressure on the OBR to concede, un-independently, something she wants. It decided, with the bogus precision which its methods demand, to state that the Government's planning reforms, not yet implemented, could produce 0.2 per cent growth by 2029. A further problem with the OBR's dominance is that where its remit does not run, not enough work seems to have been done. It has not had the chance to forecast the costs of the Employment Rights Bill currently going through Parliament. Yet they will be big. The Bill culminates the Government's relentless campaign, which began with NI employers' increases and attacks on farmers and small businesses, to dissuade any private-sector business from giving anyone a job ever again. Hence the Spring Statement's peculiar mixture of 'everything has changed' rhetoric and nothing-very-much measures. Almost the main aim of the Chancellor seems to be to recapture the 'headroom' which her own choices have lost over the past six months. Most of the dramatic things she said were not true. 'We are building a third runway at Heathrow,' she announced. I hereby invite her to take me along and show me the diggers at work. The mostly undramatic things she is actually offering fall below the level of events. I am not saying the Government is wilfully ignoring all the evil economic omens of a world in turmoil. It is clearly very worried about them. Some of its reactions – seeing the need to increase defence spending, improve defence procurement and alliances, cut and improve the Civil Service, prevent welfare being the great destroyer of work – are the right ones. But what I do question is whether it is prepared to 'kitchen-sink' the problems. If it did so, would it put quite so much emphasis on the absolute primacy of financial and fiscal 'rules'? Rules usually do lend credibility to economic policy and increase business confidence, but if it is true, as Ms Reeves also says, that everything has changed, might not the old rules prove as irrelevant as the Maginot Line? Remember Gordon Brown's 'golden rule' – and remember that he had to break it. In her Budget speech last autumn, the Chancellor mentioned spending to help Ukraine, but offered no estimation of the vast effect of the war on global economic stability. So obsessed was she by the '£22 billion black hole' left by the Tories, that she could not look further to that much bigger, blacker and more expensive hole further afield – the spread of European war. Only now, in her Spring Statement, does she speak of 'a world that is changing before our eyes' because 'the threat facing our Continent was transformed when Putin invaded Ukraine', almost as if that were new. If the Chancellor and Prime Minister really do believe that the defence of Britain is profoundly insecure because of the Putin-Trump combination (which it is), then this becomes the first-order question, threatening both our security and prosperity. It will therefore need to be funded in a way quite out of the ordinary. As I recently argued in these pages (March 11), it would need to be something like the War Loan (though its effect would make it a Peace Loan) which began in 1915 and took a century to pay off. Such a 'perpetual' loan is normally pre-agreed with the backing of big national business institutions, such as banks and pension funds. Its size and patriotic motive, rather than frightening people off, tend to make them want to buy. It convinces them that both the crisis and the Government are serious. At present, people are unconvinced. Other things should be thrown into the kitchen sink, if not in a single speech and coming from the Prime Minister as well as the Chancellor. One would be net zero which, interestingly, was not mentioned at all in the Spring Statement. We have now reached the right moment for Sir Keir Starmer to say, at the very least, that the current timetable is unaffordable. Another topic not dealt with by the Chancellor is mass immigration, especially its economic effects, which the Treasury always, and wrongly, asserts are wholly beneficial. And yet another, already under scrutiny, but not nearly enough to make a difference, is welfare. The current phrase 'luxury beliefs' could have been invented for the attitudes of Sir Keir before he became Prime Minister. They have to go. There are no political or economic luxuries left. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Rachel Reeves can't outsource decision-making to unelected quangocrats
In ancient Rome, the state services of haruspices were much in demand. By inspecting the entrails of birds and animals (the sheep's liver was a favourite), these priestly officials divined whether the gods would look favourably on any important future action, such as a war. Even our secular modern world likes this mixture of forecasting, prophecy, and hieratic hocus-pocus. Twenty-first century British governments have the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It is not wrong, of course, to convene experts to test and project the figures which governments come up with, but it is wrong for political leaders to outsource their decisions to them. This may not have been the intention, but it is the effect. When he created the OBR on becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, George Osborne emphasised its independence. Its endorsement, he thought, would lend financial respectability to his policies. But such 'independence' is problematic. First, it is somewhat notional: the OBR is fully funded from the Treasury budget, so its officials will almost certainly share the establishment groupthink of the era, rather than the views of elected politicians, let alone the attitudes of the public. Worse, political power shifts, over time, to these 'independent' bodies. The public is encouraged to think they are more honest than politicians. The politicians therefore seek their approval. In response, the bodies tend to behave more politically (though not usually party-politically). They get too big for their boots. The eternal Climate Change Committee, for example, tries to lay down the law about how we should get to net zero. The Supreme Court, which Tony Blair invented, decided, with the Remainer Lady Hale wearing her spider brooch for the occasion, that it could tell prime ministers not to prorogue Parliament. In Parliament itself, the conduct of MPs, for which they should answer to one another and the electorate, is now policed by an 'independent' commissioner who can ruin careers without due process. There are dozens of such bodies nowadays. Their cumulative effect is to make Britain governed more by a permanent bureaucracy than by a parliamentary democracy. Bad politicians quite like this trend, because the buck no longer stops clearly with them. They can wriggle out of the doctrine that 'Advisers advise: ministers decide.' In a properly run government, the departments themselves, and ultimately the Cabinet, should be responsible. That very name – Office for Budget Responsibility – implies that the Treasury, which creates the budget, does not do so responsibly. What is the Treasury for, then? Towards the OBR, Labour is even more slavish than were the Conservatives in Mr Osborne's time. When Liz Truss was briefly prime minister, Labour professed absolute horror that she and her Chancellor had launched their tax-cutting mini-Budget without seeking the OBR's forecast. She did, indeed, behave in a politically inept way, which caused the 'Blob' to spread panic in the markets, but she had not committed a constitutional outrage. Caught by its own rhetoric, Labour must now beg approval from the OBR to bolster the confidence so shaken by the recession-inducing decisions of Rachel Reeves's first Budget last October. This dependence simultaneously confines her room for manoeuvre and puts pressure on the OBR to concede, un-independently, something she wants. It decided, with the bogus precision which its methods demand, to state that the Government's planning reforms, not yet implemented, could produce 0.2 per cent growth by 2029. A further problem with the OBR's dominance is that where its remit does not run, not enough work seems to have been done. It has not had the chance to forecast the costs of the Employment Rights Bill currently going through Parliament. Yet they will be big. The Bill culminates the Government's relentless campaign, which began with NI employers' increases and attacks on farmers and small businesses, to dissuade any private-sector business from giving anyone a job ever again. Hence the Spring Statement's peculiar mixture of 'everything has changed' rhetoric and nothing-very-much measures. Almost the main aim of the Chancellor seems to be to recapture the 'headroom' which her own choices have lost over the past six months. Most of the dramatic things she said were not true. 'We are building a third runway at Heathrow,' she announced. I hereby invite her to take me along and show me the diggers at work. The mostly undramatic things she is actually offering fall below the level of events. I am not saying the Government is wilfully ignoring all the evil economic omens of a world in turmoil. It is clearly very worried about them. Some of its reactions – seeing the need to increase defence spending, improve defence procurement and alliances, cut and improve the Civil Service, prevent welfare being the great destroyer of work – are the right ones. But what I do question is whether it is prepared to 'kitchen-sink' the problems. If it did so, would it put quite so much emphasis on the absolute primacy of financial and fiscal 'rules'? Rules usually do lend credibility to economic policy and increase business confidence, but if it is true, as Ms Reeves also says, that everything has changed, might not the old rules prove as irrelevant as the Maginot Line? Remember Gordon Brown's 'golden rule' – and remember that he had to break it. In her Budget speech last autumn, the Chancellor mentioned spending to help Ukraine, but offered no estimation of the vast effect of the war on global economic stability. So obsessed was she by the '£22 billion black hole' left by the Tories, that she could not look further to that much bigger, blacker and more expensive hole further afield – the spread of European war. Only now, in her Spring Statement, does she speak of 'a world that is changing before our eyes' because 'the threat facing our Continent was transformed when Putin invaded Ukraine', almost as if that were new. If the Chancellor and Prime Minister really do believe that the defence of Britain is profoundly insecure because of the Putin-Trump combination (which it is), then this becomes the first-order question, threatening both our security and prosperity. It will therefore need to be funded in a way quite out of the ordinary. As I recently argued in these pages (March 11), it would need to be something like the War Loan (though its effect would make it a Peace Loan) which began in 1915 and took a century to pay off. Such a 'perpetual' loan is normally pre-agreed with the backing of big national business institutions, such as banks and pension funds. Its size and patriotic motive, rather than frightening people off, tend to make them want to buy. It convinces them that both the crisis and the Government are serious. At present, people are unconvinced. Other things should be thrown into the kitchen sink, if not in a single speech and coming from the Prime Minister as well as the Chancellor. One would be net zero which, interestingly, was not mentioned at all in the Spring Statement. We have now reached the right moment for Sir Keir Starmer to say, at the very least, that the current timetable is unaffordable. Another topic not dealt with by the Chancellor is mass immigration, especially its economic effects, which the Treasury always, and wrongly, asserts are wholly beneficial. And yet another, already under scrutiny, but not nearly enough to make a difference, is welfare. The current phrase 'luxury beliefs' could have been invented for the attitudes of Sir Keir before he became Prime Minister. They have to go. There are no political or economic luxuries left.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Labour's war on waste is welcome, but can go further
When Rachel Reeves stands at the despatch box to deliver her spring statement on Wednesday, she might begin with a parable: the prodigal daughter. Last autumn the Chancellor raised taxes by a crippling £40 billion, largely to spend on public sector wage rises. The economy has been reeling ever since, with rising debt and next to no growth. Now Ms Reeves, chastened by experience, will return to the Commons with a package of spending cuts to bring bureaucracy back under control. The new target is to cut Whitehall pen-pushing by 15 per cent over five years. Gone is the cockiness of the rising star of a socialist government elected by a landslide. Instead, the public expects to see a wiser, humbler custodian of our finances, setting her own house in order rather than lecturing and hectoring the nation. To that end, Ms Reeves will delegate the efficiency drive to the Prime Minister's close ally Pat McFadden. The Cabinet Office minister will expect most departments to deliver at least 10 per cent savings by 2028-29, increasing to 15pc by 2030, delivering savings of at least £2.2 billion a year. Many readers will groan at the news of yet another 'war on waste'. Didn't Jeremy Hunt promise to freeze the size of the Civil Service just two years ago? And yet it kept on growing: the mandarin-count is now well over half a million, more than at any time since Gordon Brown was in office. Yet Ms Reeves deserves some credit for her aspirations, if not her achievements. Her colleague Liz Kendall has already announced significant economies in the ballooning welfare budget, braving brickbats from the Left. Foreign aid is being slashed. The imperative of an emergency transfusion for Britain's anaemic Armed Forces has evidently concentrated minds in Downing Street. The Chancellor must, however, beware of tried and tested tactics whereby the bureaucratic mind preserves its power while seeming to reduce headline figures. Civil servants may be replaced by 'consultants', who are just as expensive and not infrequently former mandarins. Those who serve the public are made redundant before those who serve only themselves. Its amoeba-like ability to absorb 'cuts' explains why the state is so resistant to reform. Whitehall is not nicknamed 'the Blob' for nothing. In order to help the Chancellor restore the public finances, Mr McFadden will not only work closely with her, but also with Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir's Chief of Staff. Mr McSweeney is close to the 'Blue Labour' faction which is highly critical of the top-down approach of previous Labour leaders. He has persuaded the Prime Minister that taking an axe to parts of Britain's bloated state is actually popular with ordinary taxpayers. Hitherto Ms Reeves has favoured managerialist rather than populist policies. That now looks like a luxury our prodigal Chancellor can no longer afford. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
