Flat tops Part 2

The ongoing correspondence in the FT on the two new aircraft carriers reflects the ongoing debate about Britain’s role in the world. If Richard Bassett (letters yesterday) is to be believed,

“A Royal Navy without these carriers, limited to its present few capital ships and a submarine nuclear deterrent entirely dependent on US satellite navigation, would resemble little more than a provincial coastguard.”

Contrast this to Sir John Graham today,

“It is no good beggaring the other military forces and indeed the navy itself, in order to provide a capability of debatable value. Unless we as taxpayers are prepared to spend more on defence, as I believe we must, there is surely a need for further debate about priorities, whatever our present government may have said in the past.”

Although my money remains on the carriers going ahead, to keep jobs in Labour constituencies, perhaps the argument will be won. The problem, however, is highlighted by Phillip Stephens in his article in the FT yesterday: “the government’s reluctance to acknowledge choices”.

Selling time

My favourite New Yorker cartoon is of two large, plump cats, either side of a mouse-hole. One is saying to the other, “If we were lawyers, this would be chargeable time.” It says it all. My partners have had to put up with my constant refrain, when we discuss billing strategies, that we should not be in the business of selling time, but instead should be persuading our clients to pay for value. The problem is that time cost as a measurement seems so simple, clients may not like it but are used to it, and everyone else does it, so why should we change. Well, things are changing. Front page of the FT on Monday was the report Lawyers in UK reform hourly charges. This began,

Leading London-based law firms are reforming their system of hourly charges as they come under fire from clients who feel they are paying too much at a time of soaring legal industry profits.

Leading firms told the Financial Times that they were offering alternatives to hourly rates and making more use of cost-cutting business practices, such as putting services offshore. The shift highlights growing external pressures on the legal profession to change, after a period of dramatic earnings growth achieved through expanding internationally and exploiting the corporate takeover boom.

British firms have for the most part been slower than their US counterparts to examine alternatives to hourly billing. In the US, firms have for several years been under significant pressure to reform.

All I will add is about time to. It is not enough to argue that because it is easy, it must be the right way to do it. And if this is happening in the City, how long before it reaches the rest of us?

Another gimmick

Although James Forsyth in Coffee House had a point on Friday when he asked What on earth were the Tories thinking?, the comments on Michael White’s post Not Smart in the Guardian’s Politics Blog are instructive (those on Forsyth’s post somewhat more predictable). For example, and from Not Smart:

“On some levels, he has a point. How are these children going to be selected? Is it just going to be the top students who go, or will it be a lottery. I think it should be open to all ages (and classes) and not just sixth-formers. And what about genocide happening today in Darfur? Wouldn’t the money be better spent on providing aid to victims suffering now?”

He’s right though. Teach children properly about what happened rather than sending a couple on a tourist trip. But effective teaching doesn’t get so many headlines.

And 48 hours on, there are new headlines and new stories.

So farewell, Gorbals Mick?

The convention may be that MPs do not openly criticise Mr Speaker, but time is surely running out for Michael Martin? Although he would like us to think that the criticism he is presently enjoying is simply the result of good old fashioned snobbery, the truth is not quite so clear. Nick Robinson has an excellent post, Theories on the Speaker, which looks at why Martin has suddenly got so many friends at Westminster: and why some want him to go. Certainly he has done himself no favours, but having the Gordon Brown encomium,

When asked about Mr Martin’s predicament, Mr Brown said: “It’s a matter for the House of Commons. Mr Martin has been a very, very good Speaker”

is probably the kiss of death.

Scrambled eggs

I remember laughing at an early Delia Smith programme, that looked at how best to boil an egg. This was something I learnt to do at an early age. Scrambled eggs were much the same: watching my ma scramble eggs, and later doing it myself; and then learning how to make breakfast even better, by adding smoked salmon and cream to the eggs. It is not, however, a dish that everyone can make. I had always thought that our eldest child made the worst scrambled eggs in the world until last week, when the eggs produced at a lawyers’ Breakfast Club in Plymouth showed that were depths she had still to plumb! Don’t whatever you do ask for scrambled eggs at Future Inns in Plymouth. The rest of the breakfast was already out when the eggs appeared; crumbling, scarcely yellow with what seemed to be brown gritty sand, and looking, smelling and tasting quite disgusting. Not a dish I recall with any pleasure, and definitely one I will not be ordering there again. It was a pleasure to read Christopher Hirst’s Can’t be beaten in the Weekend Telegraph magazine. An article (sadly not on the Telegraph website) I will be sending to the eldest; although I won’t bother doing the same with the Plymouth hotel. Instead, I will just stick to the sausages.