Our Chief of men

A knowledge of history is clearly not an employment requirement for government service in Canada, if the remarks of Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s spokesman, are anything to go by. Referring to the decision to ban George Galloway from Canada, Velshi is reported as saying

“We’re going to uphold the law, not give special treatment to this infamous street-corner Cromwell.”

I have some sympathy with the Canadians, as Galloway is a far from likeable character, but a Cromwell? Hardly. For the real Cromwell you can do no better than Blair Worden’s summary in The English Civil Wars 1640 – 1660

His later victories, inside and outside England, were still more remarkable [than his exploits at Marston Moor and Naseby]. Through them, but also through willpower and political dexterity, a provincial gentleman-farmer, an obscure figure until his forties, rose to conquer three nations and to awe the courts of Europe.

Whither Plymouth?

I have just finished reading Justin Webb’s Have a Nice Day. In it the BBC’s North America Editor gives us a very different take on the US from the one we often get. It made me want to go on-line immediately and book our next holiday in the States. Read it.

Early on, in his Introduction, Webb quotes the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland on what he calls the culture question,

That sense that Americans believe they are masters of their own destiny, responsible for their own country, town, village etc., that sense is still largely missing in Britain. It’s better than it was – there is more of a can do culture, partly fostered by the cult of business and enterprise etc. – but the semi-feudal passivity remains, I fear. You see it in the habit of looking upward, waiting for those in charge to sort things out.

The news last week that Paul Carroll is to leave Plymouth, and the Plymouth CDC, at the end of April had me wondering whether our failure to understand what makes Americans tick had anything to do with what the Western Morning News headlined as a ‘Bitter blow’ for the city’s revival.

One thing for certain is that despite the fighting talk by James Brent, CDC’s chairman, that “We have every intention that the CDC will survive and flourish and execute the work plan”, it will be that much more difficult without that American drive brought to Plymouth by Paul Carroll.

20,000 leagues and all that

Perhaps I should have kept up to speed with the feeds on my Netvibes page. Had I done so, I would have read Alex Barker yesterday afternoon, and his post Hunt for Red October and the sub-nuclear crash. He posted that

The New York Times raises the intriguing prospect that the submarine crash in the mid-Atlantic was actually the result of a war game.

But then finished with

Sadly, officials tell me this wonderful theory is completely untrue. Improbable as it may seem, the submarines really did just bump into each other.

I am still not sure I believe that.

Martin Lukes, where are you?

As always, a thought provoking article by Stefan Stern in the FT this morning on the trials, tribulations and place of HR. My eye was caught by this,

Also attending the meeting was Patrick Wright, professor at Cornell university’s school of industrial and labour relations, in the US. In his many discussions with business leaders he has found that there are concerns about the way ethical issues can get downplayed, or even completely ignored, because nobody else in a senior role will raise them. Guess who gets volunteered to do so? “The HR director is told: ‘You need to get this on the table’,” he says. Not easy – especially when you have little idea how much public support you will receive from your colleagues.

Perhaps, Prof Wright suggests, the HR director needs to become a kind of “chief integrity officer”, who could avoid being penalised if the chief executive’s appetite for integrity turns out to be limited.

It’s a very short step from here to Integethics™.

Submarine grandmother’s footsteps

Much has been made of the fact that the British and French nuclear submarines that collided in the Atlantic sometime last month were somehow unaware of each other’s presence. The FT this morning reported that

One defence insider suggested the French were genuinely unaware that Le Triomphant hit a British submarine until a routine information exchange with the Royal Navy.

Isn’t it more likely that one was stalking the other? If Sandy Woodward in The Independent is right that the chances of a collision such as this happening are the same as winning the lottery four times in a week, then it wasn’t chance. Equally, however, actually touching each other probably wasn’t by design either.

I rather doubt that we will ever find out, despite political calls for an explanation.