The organ-grinder’s monkey

The non-dom story that has been running all week points up a couple of unattractive features about the present government. First is the impression that senior ministers are mere cyphers, and that the only person who counts is Gordon Brown. Secondly, that when things go wrong, the responsibility is never the government’s. Rather, it is invariably portrayed as the failure of a government servant, and usually a very junior one at that. Fessing up is not something this government does.

For a balanced view about the matter, read What did you do in the non-dom wars in this week’s Economist.

“Calling the retreat [as Alistair Darling ‘backed away from the most contentious of his plans to tax rich foreigners living in Britain’] a “clarification”, the Treasury claimed that many of its proposed new rules had been drafted in error. The deflection of responsibility was reminiscent of earlier attempts to make an unidentified “junior official” a scapegoat for losing millions of citizens’ tax details.”

and

“The crisis may have passed, but the non-dom wars have left their mark. Foreign financial folk do not feel quite as welcome in London as they did, or quite so sure that the government knows what it is doing. One casualty may yet be Mr Darling himself, whose reputation for competence has been sorely strained. But was it really his fault or Gordon Brown’s?”

The problem for Gordon Brown is that the buck for a lot of what is happening, will eventually stop somewhere. Like it or not, it will be with him.

Catching up

One result of an over-busy week is catching up with posts, mine and others. Time runs away with me and it is only on a Sunday morning that I pause long enough to catch my breath. Among a whole raft of interesting press reports, feeds and posts, I really liked John Naughton’s post What – no comments? on 10 February on Memex 1.1. One of the questions my family asks me is why I blog, and whether anyone reads what I post (the answer, courtesy of WordPress’ Dashboard gizmo, is very few). John Naughton’s second reason for not allowing comments on his blog is:

“Secondly, although it’s nice to have readers (and I have no idea how many there are, because I’ve never done any kind of tracking) and I’m glad that people find this stuff worth reading and linking to, fundamentally I keep a blog for myself. I started blogging in 1998, and for the first three years or so, my blog was private. It was a personal notebook in which I kept stuff that I thought was noteworthy or useful. Because it had a search engine, it meant I could always cheat my poor memory by retrieving stuff instantly. (This, incidentally, is what started Tim Berners-Lee on the path that led to the invention of the Web.) I knew that if I had blogged about something I would always be able to find it again. This philosophy survived the switch to public blogging which took place, I think, sometime after 9/11. It’s just now that my personal notebook is publicly available to anyone who wants it.”

I go along with that.

Breathing life into corporate responsibility

For a number of years I pestered my partners to consider corporate social responsibility. I prepared papers and advocated our involvement at board meetings. They were reluctant, and unless able to identify a definite return (profile raising, marketing opportunities etc.), very few initiatives got through. What they considered as simply doing good was left to individual involvement. We had a line in our corporate brochure about it, but this was in truth mere lip-service. Recently two things have occurred. First I too began to question CSR, and whether there are better ways to engage with the communities in which we live and work. When law firms involve themselves, or more usually their junior fee earners, in pro bono work (as for most lawyers in private practice this is what they think about when they do think about CSR), there usually has to be a payback somewhere. And secondly, my partners have warmed to the idea, and a recent Strategy Board minute confirmed that CSR is now on the radar. So it was with interest that I read Michael Skapinker’s column Corporate responsibility is not quite dead in yesterday’s FT.

“Is corporate social responsibility dead? Yes, says Harvard Business Review’s “Conversation Starter” blog. CSR will increasingly be seen as a public relations sham, the bloggers say.

Yes, says my colleague Stefan Stern, who recently predicted on this page that companies would abandon CSR in favour of “sustainability”.

No, says the European Commission, which commends companies that “go beyond minimum legal requirements to address societal needs” and has just spent three years and €1.4m ($2m) producing a 108-page report on CSR.

Many will regard the Commission’s endorsement as a sure sign that CSR’s time has past. Its report, written by academics from Insead and other European business schools, certainly contains a fair amount of nonsense, including the “finding” that managers become more socially responsible if they meditate. Doing yoga, according to the report, seems to produce a broadly similar result.”

Skapinker is upbeat about corporate responsibility (you need to read the whole article) and I am rethinking my position.

Quite enough on Rowan

I had hoped I would resist the temptation, particularly as it is Lent, to post again about this matter. However this morning’s reports of Church of England representatives ‘rallying around Rowan Williams’, and in particular the endorsement of the Bishop of Blackburn, proved irresistible. Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn said:

“Dr Williams has shown outstanding leadership and signalled that the Church must move on from this controversy”.

I remain to be convinced that the ability to find the paddle when up S*** Creek marks someone out as an outstanding leader; not least because in the real world we apply a slightly more stringent set of criteria. But if the bishops are happy (and clearly they are easily pleased), then so be it. My view is that once again Rowan Williams has demonstrated that he is exactly the opposite.

I fear that Mathew d’Ancona was right in his Coffee House post The Archbishop of Cant , when he wrote:

“It has been said by one or two more astute commentators since the row over sharia began last Thursday that Dr Williams’s whispering diffidence conceals an intellectual arrogance that lies at the heart of the problem. . . This [his explanation] was peevish stuff, dressed up as prayerful thoughtfulness. Dr Williams has a lot more explaining to do.”

I will do my best to make this post my final comment on this subject , as there are so many other more interesting and relevant things to write about. Which doesn’t say much for the Church of England.

Uphill all the way

Very much cheered this evening by reading Lucy Kellaway’s latest FT column, Happiness is finding your inner receptionist. She writes:

“A couple of weeks ago another cheering piece of work was published by scientists at the University of Warwick showing that happiness over a lifetime is U-shaped. It looked at thousands of workers in 80 different countries and found that most people start off happy, and then slide towards misery, reaching a trough at 44. By our early 50s we start to get happy again and by our 60s and 70s happier still.

It isn’t altogether clear why we get cheerier as death draws closer. I suspect it is mainly because the burden of ambition and expectation slips away. We no longer hanker after what we are never going to have. I’m not quite there yet and neither are most of my contemporaries. Ambition still rages, and prospects are intolerably uncertain. But if we hold tight, the upward curve of the U will carry us along soon. We don’t need career coaching. We just need time.”

I read this to my youngest (a confirmed pessimist at 18) and his response was the title to this post. I am next going to email the link to my eldest!