You are held in a queue until someone can be arsed . . . .

Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, exponentially increasing computing power, lowering costs and putting Star Trek devices within the reach of the Kalahari bushman. Though I personally think Intel founder Gordon Moore was reaching for a soundbite when he made his famous prediction 46 years ago, the general principle has held true. The average mobile phone, much less smartphone, holds more processing power than the average desktop computer of a decade ago. Much good it does us.

The Thus Law of Modern Communications states that the ability to get a timely, logical, sensible answer to a phone call decreases according to the number of technology-enabled ways people can employ to avoid responding. In the mid 1990s, US researchers coined the phrase ‘Slamdown’ to describe the reaction of 65% of callers directed to voicemail instead of a human being. Since that time, ‘developments’ in voice recognition software, menu-driven automated roulette and general customer-hating jiggery pokery have made a routine call to buy or enquire about everyday goods and services, especially from banks, financial services providers, government, utilities and, most ironic, communications providers, a time of dread, humiliation and frustration for the majority of citizens.

If we don’t hear: ‘all of our operators are busy responding to other customers,’ there is a good chance that we’ll be charged to listen to a list of options followed by a robot voice advising that the most convenient way to deal with the query is online. Finding a telephone contact number online, meanwhile, has become increasingly and deliberately difficult, as ‘customer facing’ companies herd clients into the ether, deploying the hideous doctrine of ‘planned avoidance.’ For the companies, the principal ‘advantages’ are headcount reduction and the ability to log calls to serve as evidence in the event of a legal dispute. In many cases, the customer not only bears the cost of the transaction but pays to do the company’s work – giving a meter reading, entering credit card data, buying insurance, making a travel booking etc. Customer service doyens such as the lovely RyanAir innovated by charging a premium for telephone bookings – and now actually charge a ‘service fee’ for online bookings. Companies profit from transaction cost savings: the customer loses.

WB Yeats' visionary pose, anticipating mobile phone ennui by a good 70 years: Things fall apart; the (CALL) centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Despite the fact that ‘We are helpless, helpless helpless, helpless’ should be the default call centre music on hold, instead of Vivaldi or Sounds of the Seventies, we replicate this crassness in our private lives.  Routine avoidance of personal conversation has become pernicious and commonplace – except, it seems, on public transport, where people babble on mobiles, whilst avoiding eye contact with fellow passengers. ‘Leave a message’ is the likely response to a dialled number, itself accelerating the trend towards ‘responding’ by text or email. I’m finding that increasingly people can’t be bothered to respond by email or text either. Perhaps I should change the header from: ‘Pick up the phone or I’ll chop your head off next time I see you you’ to something less strident.

In Victorian times, there were between ten and twelve mail deliveries a day, enabling multiple correspondences across the capital within 24 hours. Technology has enabled a near-instant response, but the Second Thus Law of Modern Communications states that getting a timely reply is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of finding anyone willing or able give one. We are well and truly wired into an Age of Rudeness, disabled by technology and heading inexorably towards digital oblivion. And no, the irony of writing this message on a computer hasn’t escaped me, nor has the sad fact that due to spamming ratbags, I’ve had to temporarily disable the comments feature on our website. You’ll have to Twitter. God help us.

John J Kelly

PS. Not that anyone should give a monkeys, but the twatter suing Twitter is flying down the wing in a red shirt at the age of 38. His opportunist should be red carded for giving him such bad advice and ruining his hitherto – deserved – reputation for level headedness in a world of airheads.

When on the site, click “Home” then “Ex-directory” this will remove you from the directory.

Except you can’t today. When I tried this morning, the 118800 website, which boasts that it has amassed over 15 million mobile addresses from ‘opt-in’ customers, tells me this:

“Apologies. Our website is currently unavailable as we carry out essential maintenance. However it will be available again tomorrow and you will be able to use any security code you have received to complete your ex-directory request. Please do not call 118000 for ex directory requests as you will be asked to visit our website tomorrow. . Thanks for your patience.”

As far as I’m aware, no one agreed to this when we signed our mobile phone contracts. The information has been largely aggregated from marketing companies and commercial organisations who have sold their information to 118000. Everyone who has given their mobile number to an airline, credit card company, magazine subscription service, online mail order catalogue or who has simply subscribed to a mobile phone operator is potentially at risk from unsolicited calls (which may cost money to answer or reply to). Prepare to be deluged with scammers, spammers – and buggers.

And while I’m on the subject, at the risk of sounding paranoid, Thus Intelligence has noted that my site has been compromised recently. Could the idiots who are monitoring me please go away and do it somewhere else or at least do it more competently? It’s slowing down my computer to the degree that I can scarcely get a day’s work done exposing the world Illuminati conspiracy, let alone check my lotto results.

All hail discordia, John J Kelly

Watch Jeff Jarvis talking to a room full of Guardian Journalists. You will see a curious thing (in part 2). Here is a guy standing in supposedly the UK’s, if not the world’s, leading left-of-centre newspaper, talking about ‘flexibilising journalism in the new link economy.’  In plain English, he is advocating that journalists – including Guardian hacks – will have to work with absolutely no safety net, no pension, no social security, nothing in this newest world order. They all sit and nod sagely. This may be because it all seems so inevitable, a future which flows naturally from the nature of the technology. Does it have to be that way?

Four out of five countries with the most personal computers per-capita are small, with strong social safety nets. The fifth is the US, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and the clear exception that proves the rule. Whilst America is built around what Isiah Berlin might call “negative liberty” that is freedom from constraint and interference (though not from health insurance companies it seems) most other civilised countries also put an emphasis on the sorts of positive freedoms that arise from the collective, or in other words the ways in which a supportive state makes it possible for its citizens to realise their potential. And this is not all about the bend-over-and-hold-your-cheeks politics of flexibility.

Turning to entrepreneurialism  - would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks)  will take care of you? This is precisely the kind of free-thinking and risk-taking that the internet is supposed to foster, but do we want innovation to derive from desperation, as in the India of Adiga’s White Tiger, or be nurtured by a confidence in the system? The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

So should we expect technology, on its own, to make the world a better place - a web-2-opia? It is clear that the foundations of freedom are not manufactured by businesses, but created by well-run, uncorrupt states. Neither the UK nor the US, whose anglo-saxon definitions of freedom are singularly defined in economic terms, are notable examples. So the future of the web, like the future of religion, the future of finance and the future of the environment, is increasingly unlikely to conform to the American dream.

A few posts back I wondered whether M15 and its master, the CIA, Twittered. Well, not for the time in the world of Thus, fact has rapidly overtaken fiction. The inept and authoritarian UK government is actually considering the mass surveillance and retention of all user communications on social-networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo. The UK government’s record on data protection is appalling, while its cack-handed hassling of its citizenry is a subject of grim humour in States considered repressive. Let us not forget, in passing, that the Security Services, led, as far as we know, by John Scarlett, served up the mess of misinformation about yellow cake uranium that nailed down the pretext to invade Iraq. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be laughable. The vast majority of this piece comes from ZD Net, so I’ll leave it to their excellent analysts to explain: 

Pay attention! Former Nottingham Deputy Headmaster, now Minister for State Security, Vernon Coaker, wants to outdo China in snooping the internet at vast cost to the economy and to civil liberties

“Home Office security minister Vernon Coaker said on Monday (16 March) that the EU Data Retention Directive, under which ISPs must store communications data for 12 months, does not go far enough. Communications such as those on social networking sites and instant messaging could also be monitored. ”Social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Bebo, are not covered by the directive,” said Coaker, speaking at a meeting of the House of Commons Fourth Delegated Legislation Committee. “That is one reason why the government are looking at what we should do about the Intercept Modernisation Programme, because there are certain aspects of communications which are not covered by the directive.” From 15 March, 2009 under the EU Data Retention Directive, all UK internet service providers (ISPs) are required to store customer traffic data for a year. The Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is a government proposal, introduced last year, for legislation to use mass monitoring of traffic data as an anti-terrorism tool. It has two strands: that the government use deep packet inspection to monitor the web communications of all UK citizens; and that all traffic data relating to those communications are stored in a centralised government database.

The UK government has previously said that communications interception was ‘vital’, and has hinted that social-networking sites may be put under surveillance. However, responding to a question from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, Coaker said that all traffic data on social-networking sites and through instant messaging may be harvested and stored. ”The honourable member for Carshalton and Wallington will also know the controversy that currently surrounds the Intercept Modernisation Programme,” said Coaker. “I look forward to his support when we present Intercept Modernisation Programme proposals, which may include requiring the retention of data on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and all other similar sites.” Deep packet inspection, the second strand of the IMP, involves intercepting and examining the contents of all data packets that flow over a network. In Monday’s meeting, Coaker said the government still intends to have a consultation on whether to inspect and then store all internet traffic data in a centralised government database. ”What is the point of having a consultation if, as the honourable gentleman implies, the government have already made up their mind to have a central database?” said Coaker. “We have not made up our mind. We have said we will consult on a variety of options.” Opposition to the government’s IMP proposal has been fierce. Cambridge University computer security expert Richard Clayton told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the government proposal to monitor social-networking traffic was “extremely intrusive”.

Preview of 2010 Labour Election campaign poster

“The question is whether it’s necessary or proportionate, and the short answer is no, it doesn’t look that way,” said Clayton. “If the government wants to make us safer, having a few more police on the electronic beat would be a good idea.” Clayton said that the problem for the government is that the Data Retention Directive only applies to data held by internet service providers, but that a large number of people don’t use ISPs’ systems to communicate, instead using online services including webmail and social-networking sites. Servers may be located in different jurisdictions, said Clayton, and data-retention times may be short. ”The government wants to collect all of this data on everybody, just in case,” said Clayton. “Suppose you use hotmail.pk, and you blow up the Houses of Parliament. The government would have to persuade the Pakistani authorities to turn over the logs, which may then turn out only to have been retained for three days.” Clayton believes that the cost of harvesting this information, which would involve all UK internet infrastructure providers and ISPs having ‘black boxes’ to monitor data, would be prohibitively expensive. Clayton said that taxpayers’ money would be better spent on the police, who could target investigations to those they suspect of criminal activity, rather than on performing blanket surveillance of everybody. ”To deploy deep packet inspection equipment isn’t cheap – the word ‘billion’ is appropriate,” said Clayton. “It took the Home Office the best part of a year to find £3m for the Police e-Crime Unit. That’s what is wrong with this picture.” Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee also opposes the use of deep packet inspection to inspect people’s data. Berners-Lee told ZDNet UK last week that the internet should not be “snooped” upon. ”If [third parties] are using the data for political ends or commercial interest, there we have to draw the line,” Berners-Lee said. “There’s a gap between running a successful internet service and looking inside data packets.” 

I’m probably already on a bunch of gormless Watch lists but you all might consider the risks of arsing about on Facebook and the like in the dark days of Mordor under the watchful eye (he’s only got one) of Gordon Brown and his paranoid androids. Don’t say anything subversive such as: “Golly, I wish we had another government – any government – instead of these silly billies” or they’ll render you to Morocco and apply the Gillettes to the old man.  John J Kelly

Pop artist Patrick Hughes used to hand people an exquisite calling card inscribed with the single phrase: ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I’ve been trying very hard to understand why anyone feels the need to bother strangers with random jibber-jabber, and how this has become a global phenomenon. Trying to fathom the Zeitgeist, I joined Twitter, but frankly couldn’t make beak nor tail of it. The first thing it asks is ‘ what are you doing right now?’ My immediate reaction was: ‘depends who’s asking.’ I probably should have stopped there, but in a spirit of uncharacteristic bonhomie replied that I was ‘thinking about revolution, and how to start one.’ Nobody seemed interested. I tried again, wondering if ‘the CIA, Mossad and M16 ‘Twittered.’ I now have seven followers. One is Barack Obama. Last time I looked, he was following 368,000 Twits. If he’s spending his time reading messages in the ether about someone’s plans to meet their friend Sandra for a lary hen night, thinly-veiled PR plants such as: ‘Buying tickets to see the great film, Watchmen,’ or ‘drinking Lucozade’ I think we have the answer as to the outcome of the current global crisis.

Oo-ee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp (repeat)

“Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream was the sinister and emetic anthem of Blair’s New Labour, fittingly a middle-of-the road song from a made-up pop group. Things most certainly didn’t get better for the huddled masses in Iraq, who got their arses tweeted out of existence by people they’d never harmed and didn’t even know. They didn’t get better for the workers – they never did, really. They didn’t improve for the middle classes, who saw their real disposable incomes fall by up to 30% in the US and UK. They did get better for Tony, Cherie, a bunch of warmongering liars, private equity spivs, arms dealers, some Jocks who ruined our financial system and people who sell surveillance systems. I’m not a natural optimist, and don’t join in with football chants or the national anthem. I didn’t cry when Elton John crooned ‘Candle in the Wind’ in a ridiculous wig at Di’s funeral. I’m not a natural Twit. My loss, I know. Another Scottish pop group, actually called ‘Middle of the Road,’ penned one of the most vapid hits of all time: ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,‘ whose non-sequitur lyrics can be viewed as a surrealist comment on the emptiness of existence (‘where’s your momma gone – far, far away’) or as absolute bollocks. Either interpretation will suffice, if you think about it, which I know is a deeply unfashionable pursuit. It spent 34 weeks in the international charts then disappeared like Boo.com.

Fair play to Twitter and all the Twits. My partner in crime, Daniel Taghioff, started Twittering a week ago at my behest and has amassed a following of thousands. His tweets are sensible, pithy and occasionally witty. But I’m with Patrick Hughes. I don’t know why you’re telling me this.

John J Kelly

'You trains had better learn to speak Japanese,' said Gordon

The UK Department of Transport (DOT) may have seen last week as another ‘good time to bury bad news’. Gordon Brown announced that the government had awarded the contract to upgrade our antiquated 125 Intercity trains to a consortium led by Hitachi of Japan. It is almost 7 years to the day since Stephen Byers was forced to resign for using 9/11 as the cover for an inconvenient DOT announcement. These days, almost any day would do. David Freud, ex-banker and ‘close advisor’ to Brown, quit to join the Conservatives, frustrated with the government’s palpable failure to address the failings in the employment market. HBOS, the toxic bank whose former CEO became another of Brown’s close advisors, then deputy chairman of the FSA, forced to resign last week, declared £10 billion losses. Now Lloyds TSB, a former steady Eddy of the banking sector, is likely to follow the other Gadarenes into forced nationalisation. Its shares have fallen by more than 80% in the past few months. The government encouraged Lloyds TSB to absorb HBOS.

BMW, owner of the iconic British Mini brand, today announced 880 job losses at its Cowley plant, where it hs been obliged to cut production to a five day week. In 2000, BMW was obliged to sell Rover for £1.00 to a consortium of nitwits who drove it into the ground and sold it in turn to Shanghai Automotive. Jaguar is now owned by Tata of India, whom the UK government, with seemingly endless largesse, is attempting to bail out. We’re not good at manufacturing on this evidence, but we’re not going to get any better if we reach for the first screwdriver solution instead of knuckling down to a day’s hard work.

So was it such a good week to kick Bombardier, a Canadian company, best-in-class in train rolling stock manufacture, who rescued the Docklands Light Railway project in the 1990s after the former suppliers, who included GEC, provided trains ‘unft for purpose’? Canary Wharf would have been home to canaries and not much else had Bombardier not fixed the transport link to the New City. They also made carriages for the Eurotunnel (after the first lot failed). By absorbing some of the afterbirth of the 2001 ABB meltdown – Percy Barnevik, the guru CEO who discovered the secret of perpetual growth and oversaw 30% annual compound growth in unfashionable metal bashing, having apparently overlooked that this involved double counting – Bombardier saved a lot of jobs in Derby and kept British rail engineering alive. (Incidentally, Barnevik was forced to pay back some of the breataking CHF 148 million bonus claimed from ABB upon ‘retiring’ when shares plunged from CHF 54 to CHF 15, but that’s another story).

So we reward Bombardier and encourage British heavy engineering by awarding the £5.7 billion train replacement contract to Agility Trains Ltd. a consortium led by Hitachi, Barclays Private Capital and John Laing, a UK construction company, in what looks like another Private Finance initiative (PFI). Over the last weekend, it was announced that the government would need to pump at least another £4 billion into PFIs(this year alone) to avoid school and healthcare investments going into administration. 

As the train drain news squelched out last week, the figure of 15,000 new jobs was mentioned, amazingly similar to the 15,000 new jobs that apparently will result from building a third Heathrow runway. The joy was surprisingly muted here in England, the country which invented commercial locomotives (OK, we should have moved on in the intervening 250 years, but that’s yet another story). I think I know why. The Japan Times reported the Hitachi job creation prospects somewhat differently:

‘Hitachi said separately that it is planning to build a train assembly plant in Britain for the project, the first of its kind overseas. It will require an initial workforce of up to 200 people, a number that could climb to 500 in the future. After Agility Trains officially signs the contract for the project, Hitachi will provide trains on a 20- to 30-year lease. Britain plans to replace its high-speed trains, which are 20 to 30 years old, on the Great Western and East Coast main lines. Hitachi said it will provide up to 1,400 trains between 2013 and 2018. The consortium is expected to work out the details of the deal and sign the contract by October. (Japan Times 14 Feb 2009).

There are several worrying questions raised by this factual announcement. Firstly, the trains will be leased – we’ll be paying (at least) £5.7 billion for yet another significant piece of vital infrastructure which we will not own. Secondly, 200 -500 jobs is not the same as 15,000 jobs. Thirdly, why should the UK taxpayer pay yet more money for rolling stock when the train operating companies are already subsidised to provide investment in rolling stock? Fourth, whilst not disputing Hitachi’s proven expertise – they built the high speed Channel Tunnel ‘A’ trains, the replacement 125 trains, whilst containing hybrid technology innovations such as the ability to switch between diesel and electric power – are not ‘bullet trains.’ We should be capable of building these vehicles here, and if we can’t we should be very afraid indeed. Rolls Royce (a Derby company) make engines and turbines which power much of the world’s commercial air fleet. Bombardier (located in Derby) build and maintain carriages and have a proven track record (no pun intended) in delivering on time and in adversity. Barclays and Laing are British companies. It’s not (Stevenson’s) rocket science.

While we accept that in a ‘free global market’, the lowest cost bidder with the most appropriate credentials should prevail, by outsourcing technology for vital infrastructure projects, funded by the taxpayer, not to mention the fares paid over the next 30 years by the passengers, we are driving another nail – or rivet – into Britain’s manufacturing capability.

Alastair Darling, UK Chancellor, should be deeply aware of all these considerations. Before becoming Chancellor, he pretended to be the UK Transport Secretary. The contract will not be signed until October 2009. The Tories should make it a priority to make sure it isn’t, until all these elements of reasonable doubt are explored. This is not a call to nationalism or protectionism. We sympathise with the poor folk of Japan, (if indeed the grunt work will take place there), but we can and should build our own trains, especially if we’re paying for them out of taxpayer funds. And the train operators should bear the risk.

John J Kelly.

A surefire sign that something's wrong

India and China sit on an awful lot of coal, and there is a heated debate going on amongst agonized environmentalists that Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors might be necessary to avoid it all going up in smoke. Carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon as it leaves the chimney and then storing it underground-  sounds like a good idea, but it is a long way from being commercially viable, and there is not a lot of time left. The Greenpeace energy plan for India avoids coal and nuclear, but leans on “biomass.” This means plants mainly, and it raises the same problems as bio-fuels, namely that it becomes more economic to power machines than feed poor people.

One thing that has become clear with the recent nuclear deal is that the chances of the US stopping India from further developing its military nuclear capability are next to zero. So in this version of events, the risk of nuclear proliferation is a sad side-effect of what has to be done to stop us from cooking ourselves more slowly.  However, in another version of the story, proliferation is the main event. It involves a dark place, deep underground, where a small yellow bird sits in a cage.

Before the invention of the Davy lamp, canaries were used by miners because they are sensitive to gas. When they died, the miners knew they had to get out. Today’s canaries are the poor, such as subsistence farmers. When they start to perish in accelerating numbers, we know that there is a calamity upon its way. This makes the recent slew of farmer suicides in India a bit worrying. Actually a country with 80 odd percent of its people at or below starvation incomes – the 27% poverty figure you see for India is based on snide statistics –  can only really be described as a Canary state. India uses 90% of its freshwater for irrigation, and looks set to get drier. Tweet, tweet.

Canaries are useless if you don’t pay attention when they start expiring. Indeed, if recent trade rounds are anything to go by, the rich world seems unconcerned about the fate of Indian farmers under climate change. But here’s the twist. The US has just given India what looks like a license to power up their nukes.  So India is now unlikely to go out with just a chirrup. It also has nuclear-enabled neighbours, China and Pakistan, who are not going to sit on their hands as India tools up. So we have probably got the best part of Asia cooking up a nuclear storm.

Forget Africa, with its huge land area and tiny population (ten times the area and 200 million less population than India alone.) The subsistence farmers in Africa are not hugely dependent on chemical inputs, and thus on Oil prices as in Asia, and they have a lot more space to move around in, with a huge North-South gradient to traverse in search of the weather they need. No, it is Asia with its incredible population densities supported by mechanised agriculture that will feel the pinch between Climate Change and Peak Oil. And that is where America has been is tending its nuclear flower bed.

So things are bound to change a bit: Rather than valuing the Canaries based on their “willingness to pay” for their lives (THUS passim), we have to start thinking about what happens to their nuclear-armed governments if they show a strong willingness to riot. Ironically, this means that George “W” is an accidental hero. Having upped the ante, the world now needs to work hard to ensure that India is not forced into a situation where food riots lead to catastrophic nuclear proliferation, enabled by the US. In the words of another great American, Forrest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”

Turning chilly for Jaguar - another bailout needed

Margaret Thatcher privatised Jaguar in 1984 to howls of protest from people who liked big rusty cars that broke down a lot. Ford bought the brand for $2.5 billion in 1990, to more howls from Bufton Tufton (67) stalwart of the Enoch Powell Golf Club, Jaguar’s only customer. Sales fell to around 15,000 units a year, 75 per cent of these to the USA, in the teeth of the 1992 recession. Rework – the percentage of cars requiring repair at the end of the assembly line – was running at 65%. Productivity and quality control was as bad as in the strange days when Jaguar was merged with British Leyland, a state-owned basket case whose models gave Lada a market opportunity in the UK. Ford invested heavily in reskinning the big Jaguar XJ series, replacing almost 2000 components with ones that worked and drove through innovations such as stopping the cars from leaking, locking the passengers inside against their will and not starting. Jaguar had borrowed heavily from the bank of goodwill during its dark years. Ford fixed the reliability problems but the marque was always running on empty – its core market was middle aged CEOs who played golf and sat in the back and racy middle-aged cads who bought its expensive XJS sports car. Jaguar needed mid- and entry level models to expand its demographic, as we marketing mavens tend to say.

Inspector Morse investigated murders in a MK2 Jag - he was often late arriving at the crime scene, but always did so in style.

Ford, exemplary owners, made good their promise to the Midlands carworkers who loved the brand they could never afford to own, invested heavily in retooling and added a midrange S Series car, a beautiful vehicle, reminiscent of the iconic Mark 2 Jaguars made famous by Inspector Morse, designed to compete with the BMW 5 series. They also, less successfully, designed an ‘affordable’ Jaguar, the X type, to compete with the BMW 3 series, and replaced the horrible but ferociously fast XJS sports car with the beautiful, (relatively) affordable XK series, designed to compete with Porsche. 

John Major knew the wily ways of the Indian. Oh yes. Bring him back forthwith.

The trouble was that they didn’t address the fuel economy issues or introduce diesel versions of these cars until too late, largely because the US still has an irrational aversion to diesel passenger cars and the Jaguar market didn’t care about gas guzzling. Thus the big Jags couldn’t compete with Mercedes (or Lexus), the middle sized Jags couldn’t match BMW (or Lexus) and the baby Jags couldn’t compete with anyone, because they were too dear, too thirsty and had an uneconomical and pesky 4 wheel drive powertrain borrowed from the Ford Sierra and other ‘platform-sharing’  features which seemed designed to cause trouble. Ford needed at least 200,000 sales for the marque to be viable and a much larger percentage of European buyers. They never really got consistently close. There was also a problem of perception. Although Ford hived its “premier brands” such as Jaguar, Lincoln, Volvo and even Aston Martin into supposedly autonomous units, brand afficionados found it incongruous that Jaguar was owned by the Great Satan of mass engineering and there was no real economy of scale or opportunity in cross-selling a Fiesta with an XKS. The marque made progress but never really capitalised on the $11 billion which Ford spent rejigging and making new models. The impressive new Jaguar XF emerged just as the global downturn was starting and Ford’s own core business was in terminal decline.

Tata, one of India’s top three agglomerates, if not its biggest, stepped in to buy Jaguar and Land Rover/Range Rover, owned for a time by BMW but sold in 2003 to Ford, for $2 billion, more than half the price that Ford paid for the two marques, not counting the estimated $11 billion which Ford invested: a bargain, in fact. The deal was formally announced in March 2008 and 16,000 jobs were said to be saved as a consequence.

Ratan Tata, owner of Tetley Tea, Corus steel and Jaguar, may soon go on UK Benefits, courtesy of Lord Hinduja of Mandelson

So riddle me this riddle, Lord Mandelson of Hinduja: why should the British taxpayer step in to subsidise or part-nationalise a company owned by one of the world’s richest men and biggest agglomerates to the reputed tune of £1 billion – equivalent to the price Tata paid, in fact? Yes, we know about the 16,000 jobs, but Tata (company motto ‘Leadership with Trust’) is a global player, employing 350,000 people, bigger than any British manufacturing concern. Chairman Ratan Tata is a global philanthropist  and the group is seen as a model of ethical manufacturing and corporate citizenship. 61% of its $62.5 billion revenues come from outside India. Tata should not need help from the British government. We would laugh if Honda, Nissan or Toyota, all undergoing severe problems and bigger UK employers than Jaguar, were to be proposed for state intervention. If Tata gets help then where does the government draw the line?

Moreover, they don’t appear to be that broke. Today, when even Honda is stepping down from toys for the boys stuff for reasons of cost, it was announced that Tata would sponsor Ferrari in Formula One Racing. (Tata have a joint venture with Fiat, which owns Ferrari, to make cars in India). The company has a long and largely well-deserved reputation for ethical practice and global citizenship (yes, I hate these terms too but I’m pretending to be a business analyst today) but threatening to move production of Land Rover and Jaguar away from Browns Lane and Solihull unless the increasingly bonkers Brown trousered brigade grant unfair subsidies will incur horrid karma in the next life – Mr Tata may come back as a broken-down Jaguar or a Solihull shopkeeper.

Jaguar fitters like these made the company what it is today

If the vehicles can be made cheaper and better in India – I’m sure the land Rovers could – then get on with it. (Land Rovers are already made in local markets). If moving the entire production away from Britain was what Tata had in mind all along, then ditto, but I doubt if cheap labour will necessarily make expensive, complex cars: BMW and Mercedes, the world’s most successful prestige auto brands,  for example, operate in the world’s highest cost labour market. Also, if Ford found it difficult to sell a premium luxury brand under its umbrella, then the maker of the world’s cheapest car might find it even harder. For what it’s worth, my advice would be to leave the high end manufacturing where it is; the cars are good enough now, the market isn’t. Since Tata already makes the world’s cheapest car, the ‘Nano,’ however, invest in the development of electric vehicles for Europe here (not bloody Ferraris) and keep a respectable distance from Lord Mandelson, who has an unfortunate history when it comes to Indian oligarchs.

PS. Thus has an audacious plan to manufacture a hybrid version of the Sinclair C5 and the DeLorean. We’ll call it the DeCVe. We need a lot of cash or we’ll sack ourselves and move to Eastern Europe or India.

John J Kelly

In response to the excellent comments posted following my piece about browsers and spyware, I need to point out that the problem goes much deeper than browser technology. Internet Service providers (ISPs) have the direct ability to pinpoint, log and aggregate every site you visit, irrespective of your choice of browser or what type of spyware detection software you might employ to clean up your local computer files. They are (roughly) equivalent to the network exchanges of the internet,  connecting your computer via servers to other computers or servers, each of whom has a unique identifier, whereas the search engines and browsers are (roughly) equivalent to telephone handsets. Every connection to and from a server is logged and can be traced. Phorm and others are advocating profiling using ISP data. This is not conspiracy theory. A leaked memo indicated that British Telecom, for example, tested out Phorm profiling in June 2008, in alleged violation of UK Privacy laws.

For the ISPs, operating in a cut throat market with wafer-thin margins, this could be seen as a lucrative lifeline, and therein lies the danger. So far, despite sporadic outbreaks of sanctimonious finger-wagging, mainly directed against Microsoft, the European Union has failed to legislate against what is increasingly becoming a threat to civil liberties and the free market. Cloud computing could take the problem beyond the tipping point.

Thus welcomes further information and comment on this important topic, strictly on the grounds that you don’t hassle me too stridently for not knowing what the hell I’m talking about. John J Kelly

by John J Kelly

The government’s bailout plan for threadbare foreign technology and data collection corporations is gathering pace, despite the fact that like Iraq, the Dome or the Special Relationship, the majority can’t see the point of the drastic plastic Identity Card project and doubts that any good will come of it. But the UK government is determined to finish what it started – the Balkanisation of civil liberties and UK Plc. (in Administration). Apologies if I’m sounding a tad Monday morning, but I’ve just noticed that the overwhelming majority of the (estimated) £19 billion of UK taxpayers’ money earmarked for this flawed project will be spent on contractors such as EDS (Ross Perot’s liberal US behemoth) , IBM (US company who needs no introduction), Siemens (Germany), Fujitsu (the only Japanese company daft enough to buy ICL), Thales (a French water company) and a carpetbag of ‘international’ consultants (I’m only guessing, but CapGemini (Fr) surely loom large). We all know that the costs will balloon (even more), the project will have deadly security flaws and these foreign companies will repatriate our cash while remaining embedded in our national security in a deadly embrace. In a bizarre turn – file under ‘you couldn’t make it up’ – Jacqui Smith’s Home Office is seeking special powers to search the homes of UK employees of these companies for the next 20 years without recourse to search warrants (in the event of theft or, more likely, sensitive policy leaks). Yet we are told that there is absolutely no danger in assembling this database.

We already know that the government’s (largely outsourced) security vetting procedures led to up to 5000 illegal immigrants working in government departments. We suspect that the Damian Green farrago (Thus passim) has a lot to do with pathetic attempts to stymie more embarrassing leaks of that nature. But we need more police and government control over our lives. Not on my street we don’t. We’ve already got a hatful.

London, May 2008. Nearly 600 police in riot gear goosestepped up MY road scaring off Muslims and showing off their helmets when Brown showed Sarkozy and Carla round the Emirates Stadium, before I'd even started publishing THUS. This is not a fake picture.

Today, Gordon Brown is meeting a coalition of willing idiots (Sarkozy and Barroso, but not the sensible Mrs Merkel, leader of Europe’s largest economy) to tell them how to rescue their economies by charging banks 12% interest and expecting them to lend below Libor to bust businesses. (Those German fools are charging less than 5% interest to their desperate banks – next thing they’ll be manufacturing stuff to SELL to people for MONEY instead of playing Monopoly). Presumably his advice to Sarkozy will be to buy more British utilities with semi-nationalised French state utilities and take over our infrastructure completely. Mr Barroso needs to send us more immigrants to exploit from newly-initiated member states.

The EIB is suddenly to blame

Brown has apparently just woken up to the fact that the European Investment Bank (EIB) was set up to advance development loans to European businesses, and has EU cash available to do exactly that. When the Euro was weak against Sterling, UK banks made it difficult for small and medium sized businesses to take advantage of EIB loans at preferential rates (preferring to lend at rates preferential to themselves, of course). Some estimate that up to £4 billion per year in qualifying loans for UK companies went unclaimed for several years. It is risible that the UK government is now trying to blame the EU at the same time as claiming leadership in the credit crisis, but entirely consistent with the policy of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted (then shooting the stableboy, especially if he’s European).

Meanwhile, we’ll maintain the pretence of British independence by doing whatever the US, a busted flush tells us to do. It’s Monday morning and I’m grumpy, but last week the European Court condemned Britain’s illegal DNA database (THUS passim). Gordon Brown could reduce the national debt by several billion by putting the hated identity card scheme on hold and he could stop pretending that spending vast amounts scrubbing the decks of the Titanic with (foreign) toothbrushes is likely to work. Talk to the Germans, Gordon. They have some experience of economic reconstruction. It tends to involve a degree of hard work, readjustment to economic realities and (in the case of the former GDR) dismantling the wasteful and corrupting apparatus of the police state.