30 years in Sudbury Hill
October 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
When my parents split up, I was seven and I lived with my mother (and sister and brother) in one rented location after another. So, as an adult, I’ve hated moving.
Today Vee and I celebrate living 30 years in the same house: a semi-detached place in a quiet crescent in Sudbury Hill in north-west London. Some of the neighbours are still the same but many have changed and all the children who were here when we arrived have – like our own son Richard – gone to university, got married, and started families.
Of course, we’ve done a great deal to the place over the years and Vee’s brother-in-law – a builder called Derek – has earned a great deal from us and become very well known to our neighbours.
I love the diversity of our area. In our road, our immediate neighbours include Irish, Spanish, Polish, Indian, Pakistani and Lebanese. Our postman is Nepalese, our doctor is Indian, our newsagent is Sri Lankan, our dry cleaner is Pakistani, my dentist is Iranian, my hairdresser is Greek Cypriot.
Vee would be happy to move to the coast now – but I really enjoy London.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
A review of the recent film “Transcendence”
October 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I alway enjoy a good science fiction movie, but sadly “Transcendence” – in spite of starring Johnny Depp – is one one of them. See my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Understanding the difference between the deficit and the debt: the smaller one is going down but the bigger one is still rising
October 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
At this week’s Conservative Party Conference, the Prime Minister David Cameron told delegates and voters that the country has been “paying down its debts”. Is that true? Is it heck. At best, it was misleading; at worst, it was an outright fib.
Let me explain briefly …
The deficit is the difference in any given financial year between what the Government raises in taxes and what it spends in public programmes. The present government has reduced the deficit by around a third but, at the beginning of its term of office, it promised to eliminate the deficit entirely by now, so it is still less than half way to its target.
Now the debt is something different entirely. This is what the country owes in total, essentially as a result of past deficits. In a letter this week from the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority to the Labour Party’s Shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury, he sets out that in June 2010 debt was £997.4 billion (equivalent to 64.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product) and in August 2014 it had risen to £1,432.3 billion (equivalent to 79.1% of GDP).
We need more truth-telling in politics.
You can find more on this issue here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
At last, a good news story: how a million Africans will receive much better medical care
October 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It’s a 159 tonne ship that once used to be operated by the Royal Navy. It’s been kitted out in Scotland as a medical centre by BAE Systems.
It has been transported 8,585 miles by sea and land from Glasgow to Lake Victoria. The journey took 246 days.
And, over the next 20 years, it will provide high class medical care to around a million Africans who currently have little or no access to basic medical services.
You can read more here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
What’s wrong with the British political system?
October 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“I know the vast majority of politicians are in it for the right reasons but the entire political culture is geared around Westminster elections and the positioning needed to win them.
The middle ground is where elections are won and so parties disproportionately focus on how to win votes and craft policies to appeal to the same few electors – leaving everyone else feeling irrelevant. It exposes politicians as being inauthentic; because what they feel is hidden behind what the middle ground tells them they want to hear.
To the disengaged this looks like a game. A game where negative campaigning wins. That dwells on image. That does so because political parties can’t risk setting out a vision that describes doing anything profoundly different, in case it loses the election”
This is a quote from a thoughtful blog positing by Lord (Jim) Knight, a colleague of mine at the Tinder Foundation.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
All companies need to listen to their customers
October 2nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
For the past two and a half years, I have been the independent Chair of the Customer Challenge Group of South East Water, one of the 18 suppliers of water and sewerage services in England and Wales. Each of the companies has had such a group. Since these companies are local monopolies, they are are regulated by Ofwat which every five years approves business plans of these companies and determines the prices that they can charge for the next five years.
Essentially the role of each CCG has been to satisfy itself that the company had conducted an effective programme of customer engagement and had properly reflected the findings of that engagement in a business plan that was likely to be supported by the company’s customers. It was for then Ofwat to mount the cost challenge to companies’ business plan proposals, assessing how much they need to invest, how much they would have to pay to raise the capital for such investment, and how much they should charge their customers.
It has been a fascinating, but complicated and time-consuming, process and all CCG members have had to work much harder than they imagined when they were appointed in mid 2012. But the end result will be better services and lower prices (in real terms) in 2015-2020 than has been the case in 2010-2015.
As a CCG, we have met about once every two months and, as a CCG Chair, i have spent approximately one day a week on this exercise. We have made three formal submissions to Ofwat: the first on the company’s proposed business plan (ours ran to 108 pages), the second on the regulator’s risk-based review of that business plan (ours was 16 pages) and the third on the regulator’s Draft Determination for the company (this was 15 pages). I sent off the third and last of out submissions this morning, so I am now able to draw breath. I don’t imagine that you’ll want to read these documents but, if you do, you’ll find them here.
For the purposes of this blog, the important point is not what the CCG said so much as that we were there to say it. Of course, there is no substitute for customer engagement and research by a supplier of goods or services, but such research needs to be carefully designed and the findings carefully interpreted. Also, especially in a regulated industry, there are complicated sector-wide arrangements that individual customers cannot be expected to know but a standing customer voice can and must understand. The effective embedding of the CCG inside the company has enabled and encouraged a dialogue on behalf of customers of a detail and frequency that would not have been possible in the past.
This is why, over the last decade or so, I have worked as a consumer advocate and served on bodies like Ofcom’s Communications Consumer Panel, the DCMS Customer Expert Group, Postwatch and Consumer Focus. It is why I have enjoyed being the Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water. It is why I serve on the External Advisory Board of the mobile operator EE. I am not quite ready to retire …
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
How secure is the White House?
October 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Not very if you read this story. Any US President – but especially the first black one and a man I admire so much – needs much better protection than this at the building that is his home and office.
It makes a couple of recent Hollywood action movies look a little less unlikely than first appeared. I refer to “Olympus Has Fallen” [my review here] and “White House Down”. [my review here].
I have been to the White House twice on public tours – but that was in the olden days when anyone could visit and terrorism was not the scourge it is today.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the new movie “Before I Go To Sleep”
September 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This is a solid enough film but not the best memory loss movie. See my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Fancy travelling somewhere different? Want a bit of excitement? Here are 13 suggestions.
September 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
As you’ll see from this section of my web site, Vee and I like to travel to different countries and, over the years have been to some fascinating places. Not just nations like Egypt, India and China, but quite exotic locations like Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria and Guatemala. and Vee especially has done some fun things like hang-gliding in Brazil, zip-wiring in Costa Rica, and bunjee-jumping in South Africa. Where should we go next?
In this article in today’s “Mirror’ newspaper, there are 13 suggestions for some very different – including very dangerous – holiday adventures. One of them is the Macau Tower in China which offers a bungee off the highest commercial jump in the world at 765 feet. But Vee has already done a bunjee jump of 708 feet [see here], so that’s really no big deal.
Actually, we’re thinking of Ethiopia. Any advice or suggestions?
Posted in Miscellaneous, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Why has the West been so globally dominant in the last 500 years? It’s latitudes not attitudes that explains it.
September 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I am currently reading “War: What Is It Good For”? by Ian Morris and this fascinating look at big history frequently refers to the ‘lucky latitudes’. This led me to look up earlier writing by Morris on this idea that it is geography and not biology that has largely shaped the history of civilisations.
In this article, Morris gives a lightning tour of world history. emphasising the advantages to humankind of farming in the latitudes between 20° and 35° north in the Old World and a similar band between 15° south and 20° north in the Americas.
“So what do we learn from all this history? Two main things, I think. First, since people are all much the same, it is our shared biology which explains humanity’s great upward leaps in wealth, productivity and power across the last 10,000 years; and, second, that it is geography which explains why one part of world – the nations we conventionally call ‘the West’ – now dominates the rest.
Geography determined that when the world warmed up at the end of the Ice Age a band of lucky latitudes stretching across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China developed agriculture earlier than other parts of the world and then went on to be the first to invent cities, states and empires. But as social development increased, it changed what geography meant and the centres of power and wealth shifted around within these lucky latitudes.
Until about ad 500 the Western end of Eurasia hung on to its early lead, but after the fall of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty the centre of gravity moved eastward to China, where it stayed for more than a millennium. Only around 1700 did it shift westward again, largely due to inventions – guns, compasses, ocean-going ships – which were originally pioneered in the East but which, thanks to geography, proved more useful in the West.
Westerners then created an Atlantic economy which raised profound new questions about how the world worked, pushing westerners into a Scientific Revolution, an Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, the West dominated the globe.”
Posted in History | Comments (0)