Few would argue that Quality, Service, Value are the cornerstones of a happy, prosperous and competitive economy. It is not good enough to explain the recent painful economic downturn on global macroeconomic conditions and wait for the upturn. No amount of economic or political smoke and mirrors will save a company, much less an economy, from the inevitable consequences of charging too much for indifferent products and services, produced wastefully. A high cost economy with diminishing competitive advantages cannot afford a £130 -160 billion budget deficit, growing at a rate of £11 billion per month.

The CQI is committed to opening a transparent debate as to whether UK Plc wishes to reaffirm its commitment to quality or continue as a casino economy with a few beacon enterprises but a static domestic manufacturing sector and an increasingly outsourced service sector. Politicians acknowledge that cuts in public spending will be necessary to make inroads into this unsustainable deficit, mitigated by improvements in efficiency and productivity. But this begs the question as to why this didn’t happen earlier. The answer is that quality management, in its absolute sense, took a back seat when cash was king.

Public sector net debt has risen from 50 – 60% of UK GDP since 1999 and public spending now accounts for over 43% of the UK national budget, or £13,000 for every adult UK citizen. Unless radical inroads are made to the cost of providing services – or radical cuts - the UK’s credit rating will be downgraded. This will not only affect the government’s ability to borrow,  but will impact on every business left standing.  Only a concerted, nationwide drive towards reducing costs – not reducing the numbers of people in work, by the way – waste reduction but, above all, realistic, sustained continuous improvement, in the way we work, in private and public sectors, will reduce the deficit between what we make and what we consume and enable us to export our surplus, competitively, thus creating jobs. Failure to do so will cripple our economy. This much is self-evident.

The CQI argues that the alternative to slash-and-burn is a root and branch revisiting of the Quality ethos. This in itself begs the question as to how and why we lost sight of these principles. One fundamental reason is that there is a fundamental semantic disconnect between the consumer perception of Quality and its technical application. Consumers value quality. Companies demand it from suppliers, but a significant number of businesses associate the term with quality assurance, compliance and conformance, which they regard as costing time, money and complexity whilst creating little added value. Standards and targets are important – the opposite is no consistency and no goals - but the first is an audit function and the second is an aspiration. The earliest formal definition of Quality states that:

Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction. (A.V. Feigenbaum, 1956, Harvard Business Review).

The logic is simple and incontrovertible. Development, maintenance and improvement efforts are the basis of sustainability. Maintenance is relatively easy. Development should be a continous effort, but analysis of successive business cycles have shown that Quality is all-too-often a crisis driven initiative. Step changes in waste reduction, increased productivity, more satisfied customers and higher profits are often followed by a period of maintenance, characterised by audit and target-setting. But without holistic continuous improvement, entropy is inevitable and the root causes re-emerge. At this point the patient blames the medicine and fires the doctor and reaches for a new panacea.

Quality -or whatever you want to call it -  means making and doing things well and then working out how to do things better, at prices people can afford. There is no quick fix or magic potion – quite the reverse. We need to realign the ‘Q’ word and all its powerful nested values, tools and techniques, and rally our workforce around the slogan ‘making things better makes everything better.’ Customers need to be assured by the value and pleasure they derive from buying and using the best products and services that money can buy, not by adherence to international norms and standards. Workers need to be proud to deliver these goods, confident that in doing so, their careers and futures are assured. Anything less is simply not Quality. This much I know.

John J. Kelly

Mandy is worried about wonky cross dressing.

Yesterday, unlike ‘Lord’ Mandelson, I saw George Osborne deliver his case for the Tories as the party of ‘Progressive Politics” at centre-left Demos think tank HQ. The hounhymns were confounded. Phil Collins – no, not the former drummer of progressive rock group Genesis but the former speechwriter for failed prog rock singer, Tony (Ugly Rumours) Blair – introduced Osborne’s speech as the latest attempt at Tory ‘wordgrab.’ He concluded by thanking Boy George and telling him that he’d be pleased to relay his advice on policy to the Labour war room. Later, on national TV news, a rattled ‘Lord’ Mandelson, snidely referring to Osborne as his ‘old friend,’ accused him of ‘political cross dressing’ and called the whole schtick a ‘sick joke.’ Today, the ever-loyal Guardian published Mandelson’s ‘withering’ response as its lead story, but not the Osborne speech, together with a shrill, biased commentary from a Guardianista (middle) class warrior called Allegra Stratton. Outside wonkworld, nobody cares much about who ‘owns’ the right to be called ‘progressive,’ so why was Mandy so outraged? Surely political stereotype identity theft can’t bother an unelected peer, returning to run the country after a subsidised holiday as a guest of the Rothschilds  - don’t worry, citizens, the Business Secretary didn’t talk business, he and his fellow guests apparently sat around talking about the ‘celebrities they knew.’ Besides, we all know that his week-long stay on the Russian oligarch’s yacht last year had absolutely nothing to do with Deripaska’s purchase, then dumping, of LDV Vans. He’s bigger than that, as his contempt for democratic process clearly demonstrates.

Mandelson would never resort to cross dressing for political or any other purpose. After all, he's Gordon's willy.

No, Mandy was pissed off because Boy George has had the temerity to come back from the dead. As the architect, with Blair, of the highly effective vote winning strategy of stealing the middle class centre from the Tories with pinkwashed versions of Thatcherite ideology, he has every reason to fear its use as a weapon of mass destruction against his own beleaguered, corrupt and morally bankrupt regime. It was doubly galling that the latest body blow was delivered by the whippersnapper to whom he gave a lesson in realpolitik in the Deripaska ‘Yachtgate’ incident (Thus passim) almost exactly a year ago. Many observers, including myself, saw Osborne as the weakest link in the Cameron front line. Yesterday he gave a credible account of himself and pulled off a tricky piece of wonky jiggerypokery with aplomb. Besides, the Tories are the stupid party. This was all too . . . .freaky, man . . . .

Demos, home of much of the New Labour “Third Way” malarky, deserves much of the credit for the New Tory legerdemain. Under its latest director, liberal Blairite Richard Reeves, it  launched the Progressive Conservatism Project in January this year. Osborne’s ‘Third Way’ proposes a ‘progressive’ review of the role of government in the funding and delivery of education, healthcare and other costly social services. He argued that the choice facing the next UK government, faced with public sector spending of between 56-60% of GDP and rising, lies with cutting services and/or dramatically improving efficiencies. Labour claim they will not cut public spending, and neither will they reform their statist intervention in just about everything. The Tory solution involves identifying large savings by further privatisations, this time of the education sector, and proposing that alternative private sector or  ’third sector’ social entrepreneurs will thus be able to maintain or improve existing standards, which have fallen under Labour despite huge financial outlay, at lower cost.

A third way love-in before Tony became a neocon hag and Bill discovered girls and cigars.

Osborne cited Bill Clinton, Jean Crétien and Paul Martin (Canadian Liberals) and Göran Persson (Sweden) as examples of left-leaning centrists whose reforms transformed public finance deficits, whilst (allegedly) improving the state provision of public services. He correctly pointed to the fact that Labour has tried (with mixed success) to introduce a mixed economy in the provision of state education through its Academy schools (favoured by Tory shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, also present yesterday). The New Tory wonks thus turned the tables on (Old) New Labour: if they criticise the part-privatisation/academy opt out choice in education, they stymie some of their own policy. Likewise if they object to private finance initiatives. Moreover, Clinton, Martin and the saintly Swedes were and are poster boys of liberal centrist Blairites. Were it not for Mandy’s pantomime hissiness, conspiracy theorists might conclude that the New Tories were natural inheritors of the Blair project and that they were in this thing together.

While it is hardly progressive for the Tories to advocate prising away the dead hand of the state and to advocate more privatisation, by Tory standards, it is progressive to do so under the banner of an ideological duty of care to society and preservation of the welfare state (in contrast to Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’). Osborne is right about one thing: under Labour, state spending has recklessly ballooned out of control. We hear nothing about Gordon Brown’s celebrated ‘golden mean,’ whereby balanced expenditure would deliver prosperity allied to economic progress. But it would be truly progressive to question whether privatisation has indeed delivered real benefits to the population at large, as opposed to getting large items of capital expenditure off the treasury balance sheets. Thatcher and Reagan, whom Osborne cited as true progressives at the end of his speech, left legacies of huge budget deficits and social carnage in the form of institutionalised unemployment. Whoever inherits the record deficit left by Brown and his crossdressing puppetmaster will not only inherit a mountain of unemployment, but will also exacerbate the problem by taking a scythe to the bloated public sector. During Persson’s reforms Swedish unemployment soared to 16%, for example.

All of which leaves Demos wonks with plenty of work to do over the next few months. Make sure they aren’t passing your ideas over the fence, though, boy George.

John J Kelly

The folly of industrialisation began in the private sector. Advances in telephony led companies to centralise telephone work in call centres, taking advantage of lower labour costs; first building call centres in low-wage areas of the UK and latterly outsourcing them to lower-cost economies. The result, most often, was an unanticipated rise in the volume of calls. Instead of seeing this as a signal, managers responded by adding more resources and further specialising work (hence the growth in IVR – ‘press one for this and two for that’). Similarly, the allure of further ‘back-office’ economies – optimising use of resources by de-coupling the customer from the service itself – led them to create IT-dominated designs which sorted and routed work through processes dominated by service-levels and standard times. Again, the volume of work grew. Again the signal was ignored and similar tactics, further specialisation and outsourcing obviated any understanding of the real problem.

Service industrialisation represents the pursuit of lower costs through economies of scale. Yet higher costs ensue. The most evident cause is ‘failure demand’ – demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer, who then has to call again, creating extra work. In industrialised financial services organisations 40 to 60% of all work coming in may be failure demand. In police forces and local authorities it is usually higher.

Failure demand is an easy concept to understand – if we delivered services that worked, we would have less demand and thus more capacity – but to the wrong mind-set it becomes a ‘lever’ to reduce costs. Hence NI 14: ‘avoidable contact’, guidance for which obliges local authorities to measure and report it for publication in a national league table. This is management by fear, which encourages managers to engage their ingenuity in under-reporting; no one is engaged in solving the problem.

 Removing failure demand requires understanding and eliminating its causes. And these lie in industrialisation. Managing workers’ activity, standardising work, increasing specialisation and outsourcing on the basis of activity costs are the primary causes. Advice UK has documented the disastrous effects of these designs in the public sector, where the failure of DWP and HMRC to provide primary service throws high levels of knock-on failure demand into local authorities, RSLs, advice agencies, legal services and the courts. It is a lesson on the folly of managing costs.

It has been impossible to obtain evidence of the impact of back-office initiatives in local authorities, usually on grounds of commercial confidentiality. Yet we see regular controversy in the media, and informal sources provide evidence of heavy investment – £6m in one county – with no return. Claims for improvement usually cite lower transaction costs, which may be true, but are irrelevant, because the true costs of service are in end-to-end flow, not transactions.

Private-sector organisations that have learned this lesson design their services against customer demand. They ‘smarten up’ rather than ‘dumb down‘ putting workers in control of a system designed to serve customers and requiring managers to work on the system. This means getting rid of all arbitrary measures (targets and budget-based measures) and instead deriving measures from the purpose of the service from the customers’ point of view. The consequences are large improvements in productivity (400% is not unusual), massive improvements in service and transformation of employee morale.

Local authorities that have pioneered this approach in the public sector (for example Stroud) achieve improvements that make Gershon targets look derisory. Ironically, Stroud appeared in an Audit Commission report promoting greater use of back offices (Stroud has none): the Commission, like the authors of the Treasury report, won’t let evidence get in the way of their narrative and ideology.

The Conservative Party promises to sweep away the bureaucracy of public-sector control. It is an urgent necessity. The current push for further industrialisation should be halted and reviews of the current debacles should provide knowledge to prevent further failure. Stopping doing the wrong thing will save a fortune, but we also need policies that encourage people to do the right thing. That in turn will require that responsibility for performance is given to local leaders. Free from the need to comply they will have the opportunity to innovate.

John Seddon is author of: “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: the failure of the reform regime and a manifesto for a better way”, Triarchy Press, 2008. www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk

Stan and Ollie save the world

As Gordon and Alastair puff out their chests and iron their M+S Let’s Pretend We’re Businessmen suits (made in Indonesia) to host the G20 Global Summit on the global economy, a letter from Steven Katirai, whose Google search reveals him as a capital markets consultant based in the North East of England, has been doing the rounds on the internet. I publish it here with no guarantees as to its provenance, but with no party political line or biased intent, at least on the part of Thus. Whatever his motives, Mr Katirai professionally indicts, fillets and condemns the performance of the Brown government in a way which the Opposition have largely failed to do. Most of what he says is economic fact, much of which has already been covered in Thus and a small part is ad hominem, which I’ve left in, but don’t necessarily agree with (my attacks are more in the spirit of knockabout fun). Some of his observations scream to be in the public domain. I for one did not make the connection between Andrew Brown (whom I have met in his role as Public Affairs Director for EDF) and his BROTHER, Gordon. Neither did I realise that Tony Cooper, a top nuclear industry lobbyist, is the father of Yvette. Apart from revealing  how little I know – it shows how casually we have descended into elitism and cronyism in the war-torn years of Tony, Gordon, Mandy, Ballsy and the other Alastair. The letter was written on 15 February and is presented more or less as written.

An open letter demanding your resignation.

Prime Minister
Your position is untenable and I, as a citizen of Great Britain, demand your instant resignation. You are unelected, have no popular mandate and lack the moral authority to be Prime Minister. Your terms as Chancellor and Prime Minister have been a total disaster for this nation and your attempt to cling on to power at all costs show a complete contempt for this nation and displays your absolute vanity and thirst for political power. I list below some of the mistakes made by you during your time in public office. If as a director of a limited company you had made similar mistakes you would be subject to criminal prosecution and banned from being a company director. As a Government minister the standards exercised should be significantly higher than those exercised by a company director, you have failed to maintain those standards and are unfit for public office.
• Banking Supervision: You transferred responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority from the Bank of England so directly laying the seeds of the current banking crisis.
• Banking Crisis: The initial response to the Northern Rock crisis was so slow as to be glacial and ultimately led to the damage done to the whole banking sector. A strong Prime Minister would have provided depositors with a guarantee that their deposits were safe and the bank run would have stopped. Ultimately the same guarantee would have ensured that the HBOS and RBS debacle would not have been so severe.
• Criminal Negligence: The entire UK banking crisis has been caused by a lack of supervision under the regulatory regime set up by you, any man of honour would have resigned upon seeing the damage caused. You however have tried to blame everyone else and accept no responsibility. You are criminally negligent.
• Vanity: You have used the banking crisis to attempt to advance your personal standing and political career at the expense of the nation.
• Lack of judgment: You have made three serious errors of judgment in your appointment of advisers on the current financial crisis.
1. Your choice of banker to compile a report on ideas for improving public health was Sir Derek Wanless. a Northern Rock director when it imploded in 2007.
2. You appointed Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS CEO, to the board of the FSA who then had to resign after becoming embroiled in the row over failings of risk management at HBOS.
3. It now also appears that Glen Moreno will be forced out of his job, as chairman of UK Financial Investments Ltd, the company set up to oversee the government’s stake in the bailed-out banks, because of his links with a Liechtenstein trust accused of tax evasion. (NB Moreno did resign).
• You fantasise: by clinging to the idea that, thanks to your genius, British citizens are far better placed than competitors to handle this crisis. The following two facts demonstrate that this is a fantasy:-

1. The Office for National Statistics’ revelation that while the number of foreign workers getting jobs in the UK continues to grow (up by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year), domestic unemployment is rising sharply.

2. According to Business Monitor International, a research company specialising in country risk, “Britain is facing an unprecedented fall in its economic world ranking … from 12th place in 2007 to 21st in 2010″. “Despite enjoying 11 years of growth between 1997 and 2007, the UK ran a budget deficit of 1.7 per cent of GDP over this period, fuelling a fiscal time bomb. Faced with the financial burden of bailing out the banking sector and kick-starting the economy, the budget deficit will swell to an unsustainable 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2009.”

• Public spending: Your 2000 Spending Review presaged a major expansion of government spending, without any significant benefit to public services, directly leading to the UK being in the worst shape of any industrialised nation to weather the current financial crisis.
• You have colluded in hiding the full extent of public borrowing by using PFI initiatives to hide the borrowings off balance sheet. PFI is the most expensive and inefficient form of finance possible, and you have saddled the country with a debt that you cannot even quantify. Jeremy Pocklington, leader of the Treasury’s corporate and private finance team, could only give a rough estimate to Richard Bacon that the total liabilities, but not debt, from the vast majority of PFIs, but not all, from 2006-07 to 2032-33, but not beyond, is £157.9bn. That is not only astounding but unbelievable.
• Public sector Employment: The office for national Statistics shows Public sector employment was 5,846,000 (20.4 per cent of all in employment) in June 2005, 680,000 (13.2 per cent) higher than in June 1998, whereas from 1998 to 2005 private sector employment only rose by 1,241,000 (5.7 per cent). This growth is unsustainable and wrong.
• Growth: An OECD report shows UK economic growth averaged 2.7% between 1997 and 2006, lower than in any other English speaking country.
• Gold sales: Between 1999 and 2002 you sold 60% of the UK’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce, close to a 20-year low, a disastrous foray into international asset management.
• Your spectrum auctions gathered £22.5 billion for the government which caused a severe recession in the telecoms development industry, leading to the direct loss of 30,000 UK jobs. Two auctions were run in the USA, the first being cancelled and re-run (for less revenue) due to damage caused to the industry. The Americans realised their mistake and tried to rectify it. The British and German chancellors copied the North American first auction; which had failed. To copy a failed economic model is normally considered a serious error of judgement.
• Your East Coast Mainline franchise auction led directly to the demise of GNER, an excellent company, which was replaced by National Express who offer East Coast mainline users a significantly poorer service. Your duty was not only to maximise revenues, you also had a duty to the shareholders, employees and customers which you completely failed.
• Anti-poverty: The Centre for Policy Studies found that the poorest fifth of households, which accounted for 6.8% of all taxes in 1996-7, accounted for 6.9% of all taxes paid in 2004-5. Meanwhile, their share of state benefit payouts dropped from 28.1% to 27.1% over the same period.
• Tax: According to the OECD UK taxation has increased from a 39.3% share of gross domestic product in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. This increase has mainly been attributed to active government policy, and not simply to the growing economy.
• You pledged to not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax however in all but your final budget, you only increased the tax thresholds in line with inflation, rather than earnings, resulting in fiscal drag.
• You abolished the 10% tax band so that you could reduce the basic rate from 22% to 20%, to make it look like you were decreasing taxes. However in fact it led to increased tax for 5 million people, and, left those earning under £18,000 as the biggest losers.
• Pensions: Your changes in 1997 in the way corporation tax is collected, directly led to the taxation of dividends on stock investments held within pensions, thus lowering pension returns and contributing to the demise of most of the final salary pension funds in the UK. This act alone has single handedly damaged the pension of every person with a pension in the UK but also saddled UK corporations with a an ever growing pension liability, so much so that many companies futures are imperilled by these debts.
• Falsehoods: You used the Laura Spence Affair to beat up Oxford and Cambridge about their admissions procedures, Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said ‘nearly every fact you used was false.’
• Inappropriate links: Given the finding that the government did not carry a proper public consultation on the use of nuclear power in its 2006 Energy Review, your brother Andrew’s links to one of the main nuclear lobbyists, EDF Energy, could be construed as inappropriate.The father-in-law of your closest adviser Ed Balls, Tony Cooper (father of Labour minister Yvette Cooper) has close links with the nuclear industry. Cooper was described as an ‘articulate, persuasive and well-informed advocate of nuclear power over the last ten years’ by the Nuclear Industry Association on his appointment as Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum in June 2002.
• Iraq War: You supported British involvement in the Iraq War against the wishes of the UK population and helped to justify that involvement by publishing false intelligence. This war has directly increased the odds of terrorist attacks on British subjects and the financial cost has had a significantly detrimental effect on the British economy.
• Military Covenant: You have not adhered to the ‘military covenant’,leading to a significant decline in the moral of the armed forces due to poor housing, lack of equipment and adequate healthcare provisions. The lack of equipment has directly led to an increase in the loss of lives,
and serious injuries, compounded by a lack care following serious injury.
• The 15% VAT Rate: introduced to counter the effects of recession demonstrated a total naivety and breathtaking stupidity. Far from digging the nation out of a hole, it has saddled the country with a huge unsustainable debt.• No one should benefit from failure: You have on numerous occasions stated that no one should benefit from failure, however your tenure as chancellor was universally recognised as a failure, but you were rewarded with the Premiership and had the gall to accept.

• ‘There will be no more Boom & Bust’: In your hubris you made a statement that was patently untrue, and counter to any economic theory. You either knew that statement to be untrue and lied or if you believed it then you clearly demonstrated your foolishness and proved that you were unfit for office.

• ‘The UK is in a better position than any other developed country’: this again is completely untrue, we have more than double the debt per head of population than any other country in Europe.
• Public Services: You have destroyed Public Services by a raft of inappropriate targets, which have led to resources being wasted by the attempts to meet those targets.
• Surveillance society: You have presided over and led to the creation of a surveillance society in which any perceived wrongdoing is used as a pretext to pass oppressive laws. You and your predecessor have both single headedly succeeded in making the UK an unpleasant place to live in.
These are but a small sample of your failings any of which make you unfit for public office and for which you should immediately resign. You sir are a fraud and I am forwarding this letter to as many people as I can, via the internet in an effort to shame you into accepting your failures, Prime Minister.

Steven Katirai

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

no malingering in back-to-work Britain

In yet another demonstration of the sort of lateral thinking that has made Gordon Brown not only saviour of the banks but saviour of the world, Work and Pensions Minister James Purnell announced a government pledge to force long term sickness benefits claimants and some single mothers back to work. The Welfare Reform White Paper has also been welcomed by the Conservative Opposition, largely because it steals their thunder by arguing that unearned benefits undermine society and destroy the work ethic.

a spot of hard work never hurt anybody

The sand in the vaseline of this get-in-your-invalid-car-and-find-work initiative is that the UK has just registered the highest unemployment figures for 11 years. For example, Plaid Cymru (Wales) MP Hywel Davies observed that there were 320,000 unemployed people in his constituency but only 20,000 jobs advertised. Scottish MPs are also skeptical, as well they might be. Nobody (dares) to gainsay ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ in our Through the Looking Glass mother of Parliaments, but it would help if the UK had any Arbeit on offer to its able-bodied citizens, never mind the vulnerable, disadvantaged or unskilled. Genuine skivers will always find a way to avoid job opportunities and cheat benefits, but they are a tiny minority. 

But enough of this cup-half-empty rhetoric. Despite the fact that my White Paper to reskill unemployed lap dancers as school zebra crossing attendants and bankers as traffic calming bumps in the road met with studied silence from the government (Thus passim), our policy wonkers have been hard at work solving this latest conundrum. It’s so simple it hurts:

Latest UK Government health advisor

Send the sick and the lame on a ‘Crusade to Health’ to Lourdes. Allow those that are cured back into the country and put them to work immediately building a Brit Art installation out of their crutches, eye patches and walking sticks. Those that stubbornly refuse to be cured should be branded a threat to national security or similar by no-nonsense Northerner, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who can knock together a failsafe points-based entry system at least as good as the one which kept out the million or so illegal immigrants we apparently boast. And there’s more. Since RyanAir are the main carriers to Lourdes, there is a fair chance that they won’t be they won’t be able to run fast enough to catch the plane back in any case so they’ll have to live in a French concentration camp – Calais has a good one, I hear. 

Behold the miracle: the lame leap from their Beemers and into the pub each match day

In the event that nobody will lend the UK Government enough cash to buy the RyanAir tickets, even during one of their miraculous ‘million seats for £1.00′ bonanzas, there is another solution. I have noticed that whenever my local team, Arsenal, play at home, miraculous numbers of people with disabled badges leap from their cars and rush to the ground, more agile and fleet of foot, in many cases, than the footballers themselves. If the government wants revenge and tabloid headlines, my advice is to start by investigating those displaying disabled badges in 4×4 jeeps, Beemers and pimpmobiles on Match Day restricted parking zones. There is more than a fair chance that they are also benefit cheats, especially if they can afford the gouging season ticket prices charged by our foreign-owned Mercenary Utd. soccer clubs.

Or we could move towards creating real jobs which people, disabled or otherwise, will enjoy doing. If that fails, make a Novena to St. Jude, patron of Lost Causes.