How will the Coalition partners go their separate ways?

Summary

How will the Tories and Lib Dems make a clean break?

The kicking in the polls the governing parties took at the local government elections in May 2012 made things more than a little awkward for messrs Clegg and Cameron. Politicians from both parties have mentioned that mid-term elections tend to give the governing parties a rough ride. Recall too that the last local council elections before the 2010 general election for Labour were particularly difficult for Gordon Brown. Does this point to an implosion for the Coalition?

Fighting for fewer votes

Part of me still wonders what impact the weather had both in the run up to, and on the day of the local elections. Does rain really lower turnout? Given the prolonged economic crisis, I would have thought that more people might have wanted to have voted. But then I live in a political Twitter bubble.

Ed Miliband was right to highlight the issue in his recent speech in Harlow – noting that over 70% of voters there did not vote.

“I want to reach out and understand why you don’t trust any politicians, why you don’t believe any of us can answer the questions that you are facing in your life.

“I think there is a crisis of politics in this country, there is a crisis of people thinking ‘I’m not going to engage with politics, you’re all the same, you all break your promises’.”

The thing is, low voter turnouts are not new. In the 2001 general election the figures fell to a dreadful 59.4%. Will those voters come back, or are they lost for good? Should political parties read much into the percentages of the local election results given the low turnout? Can Clegg and Cameron take some heart in some of their traditional voters choosing to stay at home?

Restless backbenchers and activists

Anecdotally, Tory backbenchers seem to be more restless than their Liberal Democrat counterparts. Maybe it’s because there are more of the former than the latter. Tim Montgomerie’s article for ConservativeHome Tory MPs at war with each other makes for interesting reading – as do the comments about the site giving too much publicity to disloyal MPs. Should such discussion be aired in public or behind closed doors – as alluded to by Claire Perry MP? Brian Binley MP – a backbencher who sits on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee also had some choice words for the Conservative leadership in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

As far as the right of the Tory party is concerned, the Coalition isn’t right-wing enough. As far as their Coalition partners are concerned, it’s made for some difficult times for activists on the ground – especially on issues such as the NHS and higher education where in the mindset of some voters, they didn’t expect the Lib Dems to sign up for such policies and legislation. One notable victory for Labour in my neck of the woods was the defeat of Amanda Taylor in the Queen Ediths ward. I was still at secondary school and still had a paper round when Amanda was first elected, and was in what we all thought was a safe as houses seat…until the Tom Watson roadshow rolled into town. But the same could have been said for my ward – Coleridge (safe Labour) – until Chris Howell (who stood down in 2010) was elected for the Conservatives.

Understanding Kilroy’s Image Problem

For those of you familiar with Dead Ringers from 2004, that was the acronym they gave UKIP when Robert Kilroy Silk joined and took part in this party political broadcast. (He was gone in less than a year). Yet the party continues to be a thorn in the side of the Conservatives. Whether this will lead to MPs defecting – as indicated in this Andrew Neil interview - remains to be seen. Cameron’s managed to keep the right of his party in check for now, but for how much longer?

A handful of MPs defecting would not make a huge difference to parliamentary majorities – the Coalition still has a working majority of 83. Having recently red Gyles Brandreth’s diaries, unless the Coalition imploded I can’t see there being the problems that befell John Major in the mid 1990s, when MPs were being wheeled into the Commons on hospital beds or in dressing gowns to vote, in order to face down rebellious MPs. It therefore might be the case that defections by the most rebellious MPs might make the Coalition more stable as ministers would feel they no longer have to placate such MPs, while mindful they still have a workable majority.

Yet as we head closer to an election in 2015, will the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats want to make themselves more distinguishable from each other, and if so how?

Warsi Warsi everywhere…

I kind of feel sorry for her, being wheeled out onto every other news and current affairs programme to defend all this bad news. In part it’s due to the nature of our political system which formally separates “Government” from “Party Politics” – especially when it comes to civil service support. Hence on overtly party-political debates, the Tories wheel her out, and the Lib Dems turn to Tim Farron and Simon Hughes. Puffles’ Twitter feed last night showed a stream of tweets frustrated at Warsi appearing for what felt like the umpteenth time on Newsnight. It just feels like she’s being hung out to dry with next to no support from her fellow party members as far as appearing on the media circuit is concerned. Is the party that lacking on confident cerebral media performers who can engage in debate with journalists and a studio audience?

Similar points can also be said of the other political parties as far as national media coverage is concerned. For example I’d like to see both Julian Huppert (my local MP – Lib Dem for Cambridge) and Stella Creasy (Labour MP for Walthamstow) appearing far more regularly. I guess party organisers may not like that idea as the more politicians appear in the media, the harder it is for them to ‘control the message’.

A managed break up

This is where it’s going to get tricky for both Coalition parties. How do you try and distinguish yourselves from the other party without kicking sand in their faces? For the Lib Dems, the more flack they take from their Coalition partners, the less likely they will want to see the course – especially if at the same time they are taking further flack from the policies that they otherwise would not want to back. At the same time, there is still the convention of cabinet government, making it difficult for Conservative ministers to go public saying ‘We would love to do this but we are in a coalition so we can’t.’ There’s only so far in private that ministers can use this line to placate backbenchers – especially in the face of bad election results.

Separating party functions from government functions

The Lib Dems sort of do this with the role of Tim Farron. Less so with Sayeeda Warsi for the Tories who sits in the Cabinet. As well as being president of the minority party in the Coalition, not being in Cabinet may give Farron a freer rein to criticise Coalition policies than Warsi does.

One possible solution for both parties is to appoint/designate MPs who are not ministers with the responsibility of leading policy development and debate for the next general election and beyond. This may mean asking some ministers to step down for this purpose – but at the same time giving them the freedom to constructively criticise existing Coalition policies and their Coalition partners. e.g. ‘We haven’t been able to do X,Y and Z because we’re in Coalition, but if we win a majority then we will implement X, Y and Z’. What becomes tricky is if X, Y & Z involves repealing things that the Coalition implemented – tuition fees being an example.

Such a set up would make things tricky for Labour – who would you target and how? Do you go for the existing Coalition or do you go for the individual parties? While the results of the recent local government elections were nominally good for Labour, their challenge is to demonstrate they are an alternative administration. In particular this means individual politicians demonstrating they have the competence to hold ministerial office, and a series of policies that sit well together and are consistent with each other. There might be some individual strong performers and strong performances, but I’m not yet seeing an alternative government in their front bench.

Flushing out dragons and foxes

Summary 

On tweeting and blogging anonymously

I spotted today that one of my favourite bloggers FleetStreetFox had been unmasked on Twitter. Everyone seems to have had their opinion on this so here is mine – on what it’s like going through ‘unmasking’.

Both Foxy and Puffles tweeted under avatars. Both foxes and dragon fairies have paws and tails too. Foxy’s real identity Twitter tells me was fairly well-known in Fleet Street just as Puffles (and myself) were fairly well-known in the digital and social media circles in Whitehall. But seldom beyond. The purpose of tweeting under an avatar is that you have that little bit more freedom to comment than you otherwise would under your own name. In an ideal world we’d all be free to comment under our own names without having to worry too much about the boss over our shoulders, but in a world where personal insults were not thrown around with such abandon.

One of the things that worried me during my civil service days was being unmasked as part of a tabloid sting. Having seen it happen to other colleagues, I did not want to go through the stress of dealing with it. In the early days of Puffles, Twitter was a bit of fun as well as being very enlightening. Fun because people liked interacting with a dragon fairy persona (you should have seen the reaction to Puffles’ first night out on the tiles & coming back sozzled) and enlightening because I was able to find the views and opinions of people far beyond the mainstream.

One of the best things to have come from my Twitter experience is that ‘personalised news feed’. In my case, the majority of personal accounts (i.e. non-corporate ones) that I follow are of women – mainly because they are the ones that followed first and have interacted. As a result, my Twitterfeed contains news and opinions through a lens of a number of very bright and intelligent women. The difference between what comes out of the mainstream media and my Twitterfeed is noticeable.

But I still didn’t want to be unmasked. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a hatchet job – for the sake of my own mental health. I was in somewhat of a mild panic when Polly Curtis, Tom Clark (of The Guardian) and Mark Henderson (then of The Times) started following in quick succession. What did they know that I didn’t? Had I retweeted something that was going to get me into trouble? Was it because I was following and being followed by someone who had sent out a pro-anarchy tweet? “Whitehall Twitter dragon is anarcho-nut-job!” and similar headlines were flying around my head.

In the end, nothing of the sort happened. Even as more journalists started following – especially towards the end of my time in the civil service, my reaction was more *Ooh, that’s nice * rather than **OMGz they wanna destroy me and go through my bins!!!*

You could say that not being a target was the result of not being particularly offensive or dangerous to anyone in particular. After all, how many of you have heard of a baby dragon fairy harming anyone? Puffles may run off with your jellybellies but is hardly the sort of creature to bite your arm off. Yet at the same time, it wasn’t until this year that I allowed my mask to slip. Enough water had flowed under the bridge to allow the institutionalised reins to slip away. It’s amazing how long they seemed to stay on even long after I had left.

It was only after some tweets of a digital video I took part in started doing the round on Twitter that I thought there was no time like the present. Hence incorporating the video into a short post on my official website and tweeting it to people to see if they would notice or comment. Interestingly, few did. It was sort of an anti-climax – partly because I was in the process of preparing a feature with a local weekly paper that closed the week before I was due to feature, and also because I had sort of prepared myself emotionally for a social media storm that never came. (Thus far, anyway). It’s the opposite of something unexpectedly going viral – you think it will go viral, and sort of want it to go viral yet it doesn’t.

There was also a sort of inevitability about unmasking too. At some stage it was going to happen, so I thought it best to try and stay in control of it. By the time the digital video went flying around, many of those that I had been interacting with regularly knew already. Unmasking wasn’t a story.

The reaction (outside the worlds of Fleet Street and Westminster) to Foxy’s outing? More a case of “That’s nice, what’s on telly?” rather than “OMGz – HOLD the front page!” The transient nature of social media means that many people will have forgotten in a few weeks time. What was all the fuss about? Those who missed the tweets or who were away on holiday/having a social media break may also be none-the-wiser that anyone was unmasked in the first place. A reminder to me that the world of social media is one full of bubbles. Some big, some little, but still bubbles.

What happens when you take your dragon to the polling station?

Summary

On May’s local elections (2012)

Puffles likes to take the little ones out and about. None of the staff seemed to have a problem with a couple of dragon fairies buzzling around the polling station – not that anyone else seemed to be around at the time other than the Labour tick-box bloke asking for numbers.

18 months ago it was George Owers (Lab) and Andy Bower (Con) who went head-to-head in a by-election – George coming out on top. This time around, I found only one of my four candidates on Twitter – George, and he seemed to be the only one who knocked on my door. As nothing seemed to come from the Lib Dems or the Greens, I couldn’t really pass judgement. With no social media outlet either from the local Conservative candidate, I couldn’t grill him in the way I had given Andy a hard time in past elections.

In recent years I’ve gotten into the habit of scrutinising and questioning local candidates. In the 2010 general election I did exactly this – emailing each of the candidates standing in Cambridge. Julian Huppert (LD) and Tony Juniper (Greens) came back with very detailed responses. Martin Booth (Socialists) responded, while Old Holborn (Ind) posted responses on his blog. Nick Hillman (Con), although first to respond I felt rushed his responses so got back to him on a number of points, inviting him to “try again”. Peter Burkinshaw (UKIP)’s one-liners left me less than impressed, and Daniel Zeichner (Lab) failed to respond at all. On the basis of the responses it was a close fight between Julian and Tony. (Remember this was pre-Coalition).

Since 2010, the Cambridge political scene has changed somewhat. The Greens seem to have imploded from their 2010 peak when they secured nearly 4,000 votes at the general election – also returning a couple of councillors. Adam Pogonowski I found out today has switched allegiance from the Greens to Labour, meaning that there is no Green Party representation on the City Council. Despite this implosion and what felt like almost zero campaigning, the Greens still picked up nearly 3,000 votes throughout the city. Does this show that there is a core of support that a new competent local organiser could rebuild around? The Liberal Democrats in Cambridge meanwhile have lost control of the Council – now nominally in no overall control.

In my blogpost What things affect how a person votes? I listed a series of different things. When George turned up at my front door, it was my Mum who he first started speaking to – asking about what her local issues of concern were rather than “Hi, I’m George! Vote for me!” I hope he won’t mind me saying it but this style of community engagement has slightly mellowed (in a good way) the firebrand tribalist of Labour’s left. You can imagine the shock he got when he turned around to find a big purple dragon fairy peering over my Mum’s shoulder.

My decision to vote for George was a fairly straight-forward one. He was the only candidate in my ward who seemed to have made an effort. He was also the only one who seemed to be reasonably accessible via the social media means that I use. It’s a particular shame for the Greens and the Conservatives because I think a strong visible local candidate for either could have given George a run for his money – as Andy showed in 2010. But let’s be clear – my vote for George was because of George, not because of national Labour; it was inspite of. This for me was about who I thought would be the best individual to represent me and the area that I spent much of my childhood in and around. By reaching out to the community and making himself accessible – and by the others not, that decision was relatively straight forward.

That’s not to say George is guaranteed my votes in the future. I’m a floating voter, making up my mind dependent on the circumstances I face. Knowing that I have an interest in politics and that my vote is there to be competed for provides an (however tiny and minuscule) incentive both for parties to select stronger candidates and for said candidates to reach out more.

I guess tomorrow we’ll be hearing politicians saying that the vote ‘sends a message to the Prime Minister/Deputy Prime Minister/Leader of the Opposition’. Personally I don’t think they can make that claim unless they’ve done some decent research into why people voted the way that they did. If the data says people voted predominantly on national issues then fair enough. But saying so without the data means that strong local candidates and activists are not given credit for their work in securing the results that they did. Given that fewer people are members of political parties/have weaker allegiances to them, are more votes up for grabs or are we living in de-politicised times?

That’s not to say it’s any easier for independent candidates – as Suzanne Moore’s experience in 2010 shows. I gave my own thoughts in MPs and political parties – and the advantages of being in the latter. One of my observations there was that in a larger party you know there is someone with similar values who has expertise in almost any given area who you can ‘fall back on’ if you don’t know the answer. The problem in recent times is that the system of centralised control has taken away the ability of too many politicians to think for themselves – leaving them being seen as automatons re-spouting lines to take. We see these on TV political debate shows when politicians recite their key points and lines to take. I used to write some of these for ministers. “Key points” “Lines to take/Q&A” and “If pushed”.

As more and more people start using social media, the ability for ‘top down’ control of politicians becomes that much harder. We get to see more of the warts, foibles and rough edges rather than the smooth, polished products of the political machine. Good. We’re all human. (Apart from Puffles who is a dragon). This inevitably means the centre having to let go of the reins. No longer can they rely on the cash-heavy people-lite advertising campaigns and billboard posters. Such things are far too easily lampooned in social media world, meaning the hoped-for impact is otherwise lost. 1997 this isn’t.

But while more people are using social media, it doesn’t mean they are automatically using it (or want to use it) for politics. There are also lots of people who don’t use social media too. When George and Andy told me how little correspondence stems from their websites I was a little disappointed – though reflected that this might be part of the local political culture here: One that’s still face-to-face or old-media-based.

I’m going to try and do my bit to help turn things around. In one sense I already have with the workshops on social media I’ve done for local councillors in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire – ones that I hope to run again for the new intake of councillors. As I said to the local Community and Voluntary Services today, with social media you have to go where the people are. That means following on Twitter or joining the various fan-pages on Facebook. (Randomly “friending” people on the latter who happen to live locally but who you don’t know just strikes me as wrong – especially if you’re an adult seeking public office!)

There are local councillors, candidates and activists that use social media effectively – just not enough of them…and not enough in my neck of the woods! Over recent weeks other wards in Cambridge seem to have been the Twitter battle grounds between the Lib Dems and Labour – with a couple of Tories (mainly Andy and Tim Haire) spicing things up. It was feisty but generally good-natured. It would be nice to see more of this in the future. Perhaps also the challenge is to try and use social media in a manner that complements ‘offline campaigning’ rather than having it as an alternative. Two things I want to see in the future (mentioned earlier here) are:

1) Local political parties publicising their regular meetings and opening more of them up to the public/inviting the public in

2) Local ‘Question Time’ events where people can talk/discuss/scrutinise politics rather than leaving it to the area committee format – which has its limitations for this sort of debate.

Commiserations to those who lost their seats – particularly Neil McGovern and Amanda Taylor who I’ve met on previous occasions. Congratulations to those that won their seats – particularly George and Richard Johnson who brought some energy to Twitter in the run up to the vote.

The turnout was disappointing, but I think part of that can be blamed on the weather over the past few weeks. If it were warm and sunny, I’d like to think more campaigners would have been out and about, and more people would have become aware of the elections. That’s not to say turnout isn’t a huge issue – it is. But when so many of our substantial decisions are made in London by people so far removed from the rest of us, is it any wonder why many people tend not to bother with local elections?

The music industry – from a consumer perspective

Summary

How the music industry has changed – in my eyes.

I can’t help but thing the music industry was setting itself up for the most almighty collapse throughout the 1990s. I remember in the very late 1980s (when I was still at primary school) the emergence of the compact disc. My first sight of one was when I was round a friends house – Tim. His now sadly-departed older brother had what I remember was a mini-disco in his bedroom, and was the first person I knew of to get a compact disc player. He’d bought the then new Michael Jackson album “Bad” – and his version had the bonus track “Leave Me Alone” which did not appear on the cassettes or the LP – the latter of which my younger brother got hold of after a particular piece of housework.

I still had this idea that compact discs were like LPs, just squished into a smaller space. I knew nothing about lasers, the sharper sound quality or anything digital. The only thing I observed was the higher prices. Why would I want to buy a CD that seemed to be up to 50% more expensive than a tape or an LP? Remember that in early 1990s prices, you were expected to pay £15 for a new CD album. Work inflation backwards from £15 today and you get a feel for just how painfully expensive music was.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I weaned myself of cassettes – I took a year out and worked full-time in a bank. Just my luck it was in one of the weakest years for music. It didn’t stop me from spending my first couple of salaries on lots of it though. It’s also just my luck that I didn’t think of going to charity shops. I was still in this vain period of my life where charity shops were not the place to be seen in. It was only when I went to university that this changed.

In part it was due to the culture of ‘rethink, reuse, recycle’, a backlash against multinational corporations and cash pressures at university that made me switch from traditional record shops to charity shops. I sort of went back to tapes for a couple of years – if anything because they were as little as 25% of the price of CDs in both charity and second hand music shops. I still have box-loads of them stored up somewhere. Brighton in particular in those days had what felt like a vibrant second hand music shop scene. As recently as 2002 my music collection was predominantly cassette based.

Between 2003-06 I moved away from (and have never since been back to) popular music. “The charts” used to be a central plank of my music collection in the mid-1990s (to the extent some called me “chart boy” because I never really took to grunge). Much of the music I listened to was around what I could dance to on a ballroom or salsa dance floor. There was little ‘down time’ in those days. From 2004 in particular, I was working full time (normally 10-6) followed by 7-10 at some dance class somewhere. The weekends were for sleeping.

Then came the advent of the MP3player. My first was an awkward piece of work – I refused initially to succumb to the industry leaders Apple. I just wasn’t prepared to pay 10x the price of my little gizmo until it got to the stage that converting purchases from the latter’s online store into a file format readable by my MP3 player was more hassle than it was worth.

It was only when I moved to London that all things Apple became a sound investment – lots of time on public transport. By that time I had diversified my tastes – as had the rest of the buying public that the music charts ceased to be of any note with perhaps the exception of Christmas number 1.

We’ve come a very long way in a short space of time.

…is what I am trying to say. Two decades ago, it was all LPs and cassettes. The manufacturing of the physical items was a significant industrial process indeed. The idea of a “Fast Forward” button almost seems quaint. (Who remembers the magazine of that name?) Today I can store my entire music collection on a memory card about the size of a postage stamp, and play it on a sound system not much bigger. The days of carrying sackfuls of cassettes and CDs on long journeys are a thing of the past for me.

You could say that innovation in the field of music was in part driven by the high prices. Who remembers paying extortionate amounts of money for the computer games of old? £40 was the going rate in 1993 for a 16 bit Mega Drive game. It made fortunes for the companies but bankrupted the rest of us.

There was then the exposure of record company tactics that sought to use the singles market as a means for promoting albums. In days gone by, records would slowly climb the charts and slowly fall back down again. By the mid-1990s there would be a flurry of publicity and airplay in the run up to release, followed by release in which a single would expect to make the top five, before disappearing without trace. What it turned out the record companies were doing was offering retailers lots of ‘free’ stock in the first week – or just enough to get it to peak in the charts. e.g. for every one single a store purchased in advance, the record company would give one for free – allowing the store to halve their sales price. This was one of the reasons attributed to Blur selling more singles than Oasis in the Battle of the Bands in 1995.

The above was exposed to the general public by Roger Cook, who hired former Tory Minister Edwina Currie’s daughter Debbie in an industry expose. I remember picking up on the publicity at the time – prior to Cook’s show thinking “This can only end badly” – not realising it was part of Cook’s set up. Yet by that time, the record-buying public seemed to have cottoned onto the deal. If you wanted a single that badly, the first week of the release was the week to get it. For the record companies, the best way to promote a single was to get it into the charts – given the publicity that inevitably went with high-selling singles.

Yet that still left the problem of people buying albums full of songs that they did not necessarily want. This was the genius of buying music online. Apple made it clear in the early days (if I recall correctly) that record companies needed to make songs purchasable individually rather than as entire albums. Combined with the pressures of people downloading music illegally and not paying for them, intuitively it made commercial sense to come to some sort of an agreement so as to at least get some of the otherwise lost revenue back. The figures from the BPI are stark on this change. Sales of CDs by 2008 were only a tenth of the level of 2002. It’s interesting to note the digital sales more than making up for the difference.

I do wonder what impact price has had. With digital sales you are not buying a physical product – so none of the post-production manufacturing costs are involved. With digital and social media, sharing of information – i.e. the ability to access and listen to music before buying becomes much easier. Remember the days when you could only listen to a handful of albums on some skanky store headphones? You don’t need to do that now. You can listen before you buy. My older brother has gone further with Spotify – streaming everything online. I’m not going that far yet, simply because of the dependence of an internet signal.

Live music

Until last summer, there was also the boom in live music festivals. The only one I’ve ever been to is the Cambridge Folk Festival – in 1996, 2004 and 2007. It’s close by. Essentially I’ve never had a like-minded group of friends to go to any of the big music festivals. During the last decade, my equivalent was spent on going to grand balls in continental Europe – Vienna twice and Zurich once. Does that count?

I guess I’m also not really a big camping/festival sort of person. If I was, I’d have been much more driven about finding others and going to them. The truth is that I’ve not really been passionate about any individual bands or musicians to the extent where I’d want to spend several days in the rain just to listen to them play. If they turn up somewhere close where I can pop along for the day – as was the case with the Folk Festival, then yes. (Ray Davies of The Kinks, The Levellers and Oysterband for the years above).

There’s also the cost too. There’s a lot of money to be made from stadium tours. The biggest (and best) gig I’ve ever been to was Oasis and The Verve in 1997 at Earls Court. Shows have since become more spectacular – and more expensive. “Security” – by which I mean the protection of advertisers’ and sponsors’ property rights has become more draconian. We’ll see far more of this at the Olympics I fear.

The VIPs

Anyone remember “Live8″? Exactly.

For those that don’t remember, in London there was some controversy around the VIP pit which put the front end of the normal ticket holders incredibly far away from the main stage. I guess there comes a point in corporate music where you have to have special arrangement for the super-rich and the well-connected. Again, something I fear we’ll see more of at the Olympics with the VIP lanes. Only this time it’ll be right in people’s faces.

The rent-a-popstar-for-private-parties has also got some of them into trouble – especially when those hiring are part of not-very-nice regimes. They say music and politics – and sport and politics don’t mix. Who remembers “Cool Britannia” with the Noel and Tony show? It all got a bit comical at Leveson with the release of those emails.

“Does that mean you and Jeremy will not be coming to Take That?”

Brilliant! No longer is it a night at the opera as of the politicians of late 19th Century UK I sometimes read about, but a VIP box for a stadium pop band. That’s not to say such shows are rubbish. Seeing say Sir Paul McCartney or U2 live are probably things I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to if given the opportunity. I just wouldn’t spend several hundred pounds for the pleasure. (Not that I have it anyway, but you get my point).

Music to dress up and dance to?

One of the things that I’ve been missing for quite some time is precisely this. Ballroom will always be one of those lifetime skills which once you’ve been doing it for so long you’ll never forget the basics. A bit like cycling or playing football. Yet in my mind there’s something a little bit too 2005 for me. (I recall someone saying Salsa was a bit 2001 on some internet boards some time ago). The music industry tried to jump on the ‘Strictly’ bandwagon with a handful of jive tracks, but finding really interesting, danceable to and that hasn’t been overplayed is a labour of love. I still go searching even though I’ve not been dancing this year.

In a sense, that search for music to dance to reflects the anarchic beauty of what we have today. Social media makes it much easier to share, much easier to find new niches and much harder for corporations to dominate in the way they have done in the past. For me anyway. It was through social media that I randomly discovered all things electro-swing kicking off in Vienna.

There’s also the invention of Shazam, which if you hear a piece of recorded and published music and want to know who it’s buy & how to get it, you point your smartphone at the speaker, press the app button and wait for it to listen, search and reply. Every so often I’ll be in a cafe somewhere, pointing my phone at a speaker trying to find a particularly nice piece.

On electro-swing, I’d love to go to an electro-swing night somewhere sometime. But they seem to be few and far between. Feel free to point me in the direction of one if you know of any.

On mental exhaustion

Summary

Some thoughts on my recovery, and what next for the future.

No recovery is pain free. As Mind point out in How to rebuild your life after breakdown, some of my relationships with people have come under strain. A few of them have broken completely. When you have a broken mind, it can become very difficult for people to cope with that – and quite understandably they choose to break things off. I can only apologise to those who have been hurt and give thanks to those who are supporting me whether close to home or online from whichever distance. (For those of you not aware of any of this, please see my mental health posts from 18 March onwards).

The doctor agreed that I was suffering from mental exhaustion, and also had some interesting comments about the thoughts I put down in On patient choice and Quacks. With the first, he said the days where the doctor said “Take/do A, B and C and you’ll get better” are long gone. In decades gone by it was the force of personality and community standing of physicians that had as much an impact on the patient as the treatments they were receiving. Treatments themselves are now much better than in the past, but also the culture of working with rather than on the patient is becoming the norm. Hence (as others have said) I’m the one who has to make the choices here – even though at times I feel completely overwhelmed by it all.

On those treatments, with the second point he said that both sound a bit like quackery but there was nothing to stop me trying. By their very nature they sound intriguing but then such treatments apparently often do. Just by having something physically (albeit benignly) done can sometimes have a powerful impact. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been going to The Park Studios for massage treatments by trainees recently. (£15 for a hot stones massage? Yes please! (Such treatments are normally over four times that price)).

Not being able to work full-time – not yet anyway

The other issue is time taken to recover – and being caught between a rock and a hard place. I was at the At Ease With Each Other conference earlier this week – something that would have been par for the course during my Whitehall days. Yet at the end of what should have been a normal day I felt utterly drained – spending the next day in bed. Yet at the same time, I found spending the day engaging on stuff that I have some background in (one of my former policy areas is community engagement) took my mind off a lot of the negative stuff going on in my mind. How to find the right balance of doing stuff but not to the extent where it leaves me dead the next day. Hmm…

In part I wanted to bounce back quickly from all of this. But my mind wasn’t ready and my body was clearly suffering as a result of my exhaustion. A job involving a daily commute to London again is probably not in my best interests at the moment – even though in the distant future I’ll be back there again, hopefully in better shape than last time! For now though, my plan is to keep things simple, stable and local.

A couple of people have said that the day-to-day bustle of life in Whitehall (combined with six years on anti-anxiety medication) suppressed a breakdown that seemed otherwise inevitable. Perhaps there was also the ‘broken dreams’ aspect of what had been a career plan since 2000 at play. Until the start of 2011 the prospect of what to do after life in the civil service had never crossed my mind. I was going to be in it until retirement – or at least that was the plan. But the road to hell is paved with the best laid plans and good intentions.

On work

I went to a couple of temping agencies today – just to pop my CV in to see if anything will come up for a few days a week to keep me busy. I’ve also got a number of voluntary things in the pipeline that either involve me learning stuff, me speaking at events or me teaching people things. But the nature of much of this is one-off, not regular. In terms of recovery, let alone income it is the latter I feel I need: Spending regular quality time with a friendly group of people working together on something. Just out of interest, if you or anyone has an opening workwise for a social-media-savvy former civil servant to spend a few working days each week with you, please let me know.

What of teacambs?

Well, one of the things that I want to do with this is to branch it out beyond the County Council – and even local government. We meet every month on the last Thursday of each month. May’s event will be on open data featuring the lovely Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and will provisionally be in Waterstones. (From the last one, “man dressed as dog comes second in dog competition” had me in stitches as we learnt about hyperlocal sites). So as part of getting out and about, I’m on a little mission to persuade some senior managers to let their staff out of their boxes and come along. And if any of them say “Well it’s not in their objectives” Puffles will tell you all about them and how they are being a barrier to innovation!

On creativity

I guess one of the other things I’ve come to realise is that I’m far more creative than I have allowed myself to be – especially since my teenage years. The academic route pushed me away from it, as did the relative lack of ‘options’ with my GCSEs. I was one of those kids that could have gone on and done any subject that was available and done reasonably well – hence being part of a group on the receiving end of a fair amount of pressure from teachers to do ‘their’ subject at GCSE and A-level.

I put a couple of posters up around town looking for musical types to spend about an hour a week with me just to get me back playing my viola again. Some of you will be familiar with my musical journey – in a nutshell I’m looking to avoid cold emotionless rooms. Too much baggage. Give me a warm sunny room with someone who has a friendly enthusiastic patient disposition and chances are I’ll come out of my musical shell. Do you know of anyone reasonably local to Cambridge who fits this bill?

On learning

I’ve said to myself that I have a few years of breathing space to get better – i.e. no huge urge to get back into full time high pressure stuff. I sort of have my heart set out on the Institute for Government despite having been knocked back by them twice! (I was knocked back for promotion five times by the civil service before getting onto the Fast Stream, so I am nothing if not persistent – I’ll be back IfG!!!)

Actually, what I am pondering from September is an applied science BTEC for a couple of years – one full day per week to get my mind back in all things scientific. Because the last time I studied science properly – i.e. with labs and things, Pluto was still a planet. Just think of what scientific advances have been made since the mid 1990s when I was last at school! There’s also the incentive of playing with some computer programmes that go beyond the traditional Office software that is appealing too. When I hang around with people who are far more knowledgeable about these things, while I can get the concepts I can’t yet get the detail. These are some of the things that I want to be able to play with, rather than feeling like a bit of an ignoramus.

I don’t want to feel like those politicians who talk about how important things like science and computer programming are without having some sort of an understanding of what these things are about and why they are important. Hence pestering Lucy Chambers and Laura Newman about the Open Knowledge Foundation. They are doing some really brilliant stuff there, and I want to learn more on both what they do and how they do it.

The weather’s not helping though, is it?

I’m not good with cloudy rain. Dulls the mood. It’s also not good for Puffles’ wings. Have you tried flying with wet wings?!?! Exactly!

Not many of us like going out and about when it’s wet and ‘orrible, and we’ve got until at least mid-May before things dry up again apparently. Not that the water companies seem to be able to collect any of this in their reservoirs or underground anywhere. For those of you who are wondering why it’s so wet, have a look at this from the BBC. (I did a module on atmospheric systems in A-level geography which I found fascinating so could talk till the cows come home about weather things – but I won’t coz it’ll bore most of you. I’ll finish this one here).

Did Jeremy Hunt ask civil servants to act unlawfully?

Summary

As Jeremy Hunt fights for his political career, this post looks at the role of his civil servants.

The Culture Secretary is in more than a little bit of hot water – the testimony and written evidence causing something of a storm on the day the UK officially entered double-dip recession territory.

Arguably Hunt has bought himself a little bit of time with the resignation of his special adviser Adam Smith. But that’s unlikely to be the end of it. David Leigh covered four key points in an opinion post for the Guardian which speaks for itself. This post looks at the conduct of civil servants – in particular his private office, and that of the private office of Department for Culture, Media and Sports’ special advisers.

Hunt made a statement in Parliament yesterday. Tom Watson MP asked whether this was a ‘one rogue adviser’, and a number of MPs asked the question as to who advised/suggested to the DCMS permanent secretary Jonathan Stephens that a special adviser could be the point of contact for News International rather than a civil servant. No response seems to have been forthcoming on the floor of the House, but I expect MPs will want to follow this up when the permanent secretary next appears before the Culture Committee – as he has to on a regular basis.

David Allen Green has made allegations of the Secretary of State’s conduct – and that of his private office. I won’t repeat them on this post but you can see them here and here. Given the allegations made about the conduct of Secretary of State’s private office, there are questions to be answered on what civil servants were asked to do – whether by the Secretary of State or his now ex-special adviser. I refer to 5.1 of the Ministerial Code and to paragraph 18 of the Civil Service Code, and to paragraph 17 of the Special Advisers’ Code of Conduct. Ministers (and their special advisers) should not be asking their civil servants to do anything unlawful or illegal.

It’s rock and hard place stuff – in particular for junior officials. It can be a very lonely place when asked to do something that you have strong reservations about when very influential people seem to be moving full pelt. I’d like to think that someone put something on record with the email exchanges to say “I’m not comfortable with this”. This then puts the senior management – in particular the senior civil servants in the department under the spotlight. Were they aware of the activities of Mr Smith? Was anything raised? Were junior officials aware of the channels available to them to raise concerns if they had any?

What about the policy officials advising ministers on this case? Were any concerns raised about the alleged activities of the Secretary of State, his special adviser or the private offices? Were they even aware?

These are issues of propriety and public administration – not party politics. In this post I am asking questions, not making allegations. These are issues that the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee may wish to follow as a line of questioning. One for Tom Watson and Louise Mensch?

“Election candidates suck up to cuddly toy”

I simply had to post a link to this one!

Shallot Cambridge (a local take on The Onion in the USA – responsible for gems such as Congress passes Freedom From Information Act and Congressman Hurt To Discover Lobbyist Not Really His Friend) launched recently with a remit of lampooning local politics and politicians.

Today’s blogpost from the little onion features Cambridge’s most high profile dragon fairy – lampooning the politicians that engage with Puffles. Here’s Puffles with my local MP Julian Huppert, and here’s Puffles with my current local councillor George Owers of Labour – who is standing for election again at the local elections next week. (The list of candidates in my neck of the woods is here, but none of the other candidates has called round, delivered any leaflets or contacted me on social media, so I don’t really know much about them.)

Puffles must have done something right – Shallot even has its own Puffles-inspired house rules! Keep up the fun work everyone.