Getting Into Bed With Unilever

Hat tip on this item to the blog “Some Assembly Required”, a dry summary of life in the USA as it is reported in the media (www dot ckm3 dot blogspot dot com) and the link on Monday August 2nd “Location, Location, Location” to a page on “Advertising Age”.

When reading this item, please bear in mind that I believe Unilever has interests in contraceptive and very personal care products. You may allow your imagination to run wild and free in wondering about the implications

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Is Your Detergent Stalking You?

Brazil's Omo Uses GPS to Follow Consumers Home With Prizes

Posted by Laurel Wentz on 07.29.10 @ 12:23 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Unilever's Omo detergent is adding an unusual ingredient to its two-pound detergent box in Brazil: a GPS device that allows its promotions agency Bullet to track shoppers and follow them to their front doors.

Starting next week, consumers who buy one of the GPS-implanted detergent boxes will be surprised at home, given a pocket video camera as a prize and invited to bring their families to enjoy a day of Unilever-sponsored outdoor fun.

The promotion, called Try Something New With Omo, is in keeping with the brand's international "Dirt is Good" positioning that encourages parents to let their kids have a good time even if they get dirty.

Omo accounts for half of Brazil's detergent sales and is already found in 80% of homes there, so Unilever's goal is more to draw attention to a new stain-fighting version of Omo and get it talked about rather than looking for a big increase in sales.

That made the idea of doing a promotion where the prize finds the consumer, rather than the consumer having to look for the prize, and maybe not bothering, appealing.

Fernando Figueiredo, Bullet's president, said the GPS device is activated when a shopper removes the detergent carton from the supermarket shelf. Fifty Omo boxes implanted with GPS devices have been scattered around Brazil, and Mr. Figueiredo has teams in 35 Brazilian cities ready to leap into action when a box is activated.

The nearest team can reach the shopper's home "within hours or days," and if they're really close by, "they may get to your house as soon as you do," he said.
Once there, the teams have portable equipment that lets them go floor by floor in apartment buildings until they find the correct unit, he said.

Of course, Brazil has a high crime rate, and not everyone is going to open the door to strangers who claim to have been sent by her detergent brand to offer a free video camera. Bullet has thought of that.

If the team tracks a consumer to her home but she won't let them in, they can remotely activate a buzzer in the detergent box so that it starts beeping.

And if the team takes too long to arrive, and the consumer has already opened the box to see if she's a winner or just do laundry, she'll find, along with the GPS device and less detergent than expected, a note explaining the promotion and a phone number to call.

"Anything can happen," Mr. Figueiredo said. "We have to be innovative, but we don't know what reaction to expect from consumers."

In a big web component, the site experimentealgonovo.com.br (Portuguese for "try something new") goes live in August, and will include a map showing roughly where the winners live, pictures of each winner and footage of the Bullet-Omo teams hunting down the GPS-enabled detergent boxes, knocking on doors and surprising consumers.

"It costs more than a traditional promotion and is riskier because it's never been done before, but it's worth it," Mr. Figueiredo said. The technology aspect of the promotion costs less than $1 million, out of Omo's overall marketing budget of about $23 million.

"We believe in using new technology for promotional marketing," Mr. Figueiredo said.
Plus Bullet just likes figuring out how to ingeniously embed stuff in products. Two summers ago, sales of Unilever's Fruttare Popsicles soared when Bullet disguised 10,000 iPod Shuffles as popsicles and popped them in freezer cases.

The agency's creatives had noticed while reading their iPod instruction manuals that an iPod can operate at temperatures below freezing. They immediately began freezing their own devices as a test, then constructed a fake ice-cream bar case that mimicked the popsicle but fit an iPod, and a wildly successful summer ice cream promotion was born.

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This tells us a great deal about modern marketing and even more about Unilever. William Hesketh Lever, where are you when we need you?

Voting For Dummies

“Political Science” is a field of study that is short on science and long on politics. The relevant philosophies that intrude on the subject may veer unsteadily between the two. Often there is a lot of history involved, sometimes from historians, often not.

This again depends on the mind set, field of study and thinking processes of the writer. A number of politicians on the Left of British politics have written theses at one time or another under this broad heading. Although classified as “political science” they would be better shelved under Fiction or Comedy.

The question of voting systems has long been one of the parts that is left to the more “nerdish” students and academics involved. It is all very “techie” and complicated with obscure jargon, terms and labels and the rest. I have not seen a “Voting For Dummies” in the local bookshops but it will not be long before one is available, at a price.

In voting systems, as with computer software and techno’ kit often the worst thing you can do it to go for the alleged upgrade or improvement or bolt on thingy that is said to deal with an immediate problem. The trouble with quick fixes is that they are rarely quick and the fix does not last for long, because then you have more trouble than when you started.

The whole question of “to AV or not to AV” is yet another quick fix. The British Constitution has had a huge number of such since the late muddle Major years and following under blagger Blair and blunder Brown. In computer terms like those still on Windows 95 it is time to find another operating system.

The basic system no longer functions in terms of modern demands nor will it ever and the notion of a tinkered change to the voting system such as AV or similar device will not deal with the essential problems of how we are governed. Our major problem as in so many fields is that in Britain we are carrying far too much baggage from the past in the way we direct our thinking to the issues of the present and the future.

One in the UK is having been told by conventional wisdom of the past to rejoice over the benefits of our two party system. This was part of our great history. Once we had Whigs and Tories, then after 1832, Liberals and Conservatives emerged only for the Labour party to supplant the Liberals by 1945. It was never as simple as that and in any case the franchise had changed utterly as had the whole structure of Parliament and Government.

By the mid 20th Century we had developed a Civil Service that was relatively incorrupt and reliable and had established a network of local authorities that was more or less effective, although often in a ramshackle and unpredictable way. It was not perfect but it was not evil or exploitative or vicious or beholden to dogmatic extremes. Also it provided the foundations for Whitehall to do a job that attempted to relate to the real tasks in hand.

What do we have at present? A parliament that little reflects the electorate and along with government is no longer the culmination or peak of political or personal ambition. Nearly all of them use it as a stepping stone to further riches or celebrity. Would Ann Widdecombe have ever made “Strictly Come Dancing” and been able to appear with the legendary Felicity Kendal had she not been an M.P. and a minister? Would Blair have become a property magnate, friend of the plutocrats and jet set political and financial fixer had he not been Prime Minister?

It was in the 1960’s under the statistician Harold Wilson and Lt. Col Edward Heath of the Honourable Artillery Company, and Chief Whip, when it was finally fully realised that to target marginal constituencies was one key way to win an election, especially a closely contested one, as many were at this time. The old big world grandstanding was always there but the real money was thrown at where it really mattered politically and has been ever since.

It is our fixation that one way or another the voting systems should be based on the notion of constituencies that has been at the base of so many of the major fault lines in the UK government. Originally, the House of Commons had been drawn from the Knights of the Shire and the Burghers of the few Chartered Boroughs to advise the Lords and Monarch and to agree taxation.

After 1832 there was a series of revisions based on the 19th century view or urbanised and rural community that resulted later in the First Past The Post election based on single member constituencies in a Parliament controlled and dominated by the House of Commons. In commercial and industrial terms this has had the effect of concentrating attention and influence on economic activities of the immediate past and not the future or what is needed after radical change occurs.

This has had a disastrous impact on the two major parties. The Labour Party became dependent on and controlled by a limited number of industrial and political interests in its “heartlands” and a similar effect was in the Conservative Party. The switching in marginal constituencies ensured those members came and went. This limited those who led to those who were lucky enough to picked in a heartland base.

All those who supported a party in the heartland of another were ignored and this led to gross imbalances in representation and policy. At one time the Civil Service and local government networks provided a balance but in the last decades these have been both corrupted and almost destroyed in real effectiveness or as neutral entities in the business of governing and administering.

The situation now is that the smallest area for providing a base of election to the House of Commons should have not less than twenty Members of the House of Commons which might have a total membership of between 350 or 450 but no more. If there is to be a Second Chamber to replace the crony Lords then it should be half that number and elected from the same base area on the same form of franchise.

The voting system should be one close to those of other countries where those parties with major support will have a representation close to their total votes. For small parties a minimum might be necessary but not high enough to deter some minorities of one sort or another having at least one or two voices. Precisely which form of this kind of voting system would be best is one for the experts but one preferably that is not too complex or liable to distortions.

We might then begin to relate to reality but just how we fix a shattered Civil Service and an off the rails local government I do not know.

Inflation, Deflation, Reflation, Stagflation, Etc. Etc, Etc.

We parked the car on a small town station car park and it cost a fiver, the reduced off peak rate. As we waited for the train a tourist special trundled through made up of old Pullman coaches. My memory twitched and I recalled that in 1959 I had paid five guineas (£5.25) for a Pullman train from Paddington to Cardiff and back, lunch and dinner included, with a ticket for the game.

A couple of years back I had the notion to try one of the Heritage Pullman journeys for a good day out. The price made me change my mind, a couple of noughts would have to be added to the 1959 figure for the two of us. This is inflation.

In London again and the Chief Executive and Finance Director was noting the expenses. Just over fifty pounds was the conclusion for the expeditions overall revenue outgoings. It covered admission, the cheapest rail fares, the parking and an estimate for fuel. We carry all our own food, the normal one days marching rations, together with liquids and ancillary equipment. At a good £10 for a large cuppa and decent bun for the two of us we do not buy.

It was in April 1958 that I was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane for the London first night of “My Fair Lady”, standing at the back of the stalls. I had a three course meal in the canteen before and a couple of pints after and had decent change out of a ten bob note (fifty pence).

These days it is hailed as one of the great “hits” but before it began there was a lot of doubt. A musical based on Shaw’s “Pygmalion”? After the wonderful film? And American? I was there to see Stanley Holloway, worth the ticket price on his own, but I was certainly delighted by the show along with everyone else.

Also, in a way it was quaint, because it was set in a world before 1914 when prices and wages were very much lower than the expensive 1950’s. Then for many people £50 could be regarded as almost a small fortune and a years income.

Now it cost fifty quid for rather less in the Summer of 2010. Around forty years ago in 1971 a weekly wage at that rate was buying me a mortgage on a four bed roomed house with garage, garden and fitted kitchen and bathroom, admittedly in a cheap part of the country. This was at two and a half times salary.

Also, I ran a Ford Cortina, went to a few First Division football or good Rugby matches and enjoyed a few beers now and again. We did not worry about credit card bills because we did not have credit cards. The occasional great cultural occasion could be managed. Yes, I saw Freddie Starr perform at the Batley Variety Club.

One of the joys of satellite TV is that there are many channels where it is possible to find programmes that reveal other people can be nearly as disorganised and have almost as many failings as one’s self. Not many, but some and one of them, a repeat of a series I missed originally, is called “Heir Hunters” about inheritances unclaimed where the deceased died intestate and those firms who search for the relatives hoping for commissions if a claim succeeds.

Sometimes a figure is quoted from the past that makes me sit up and wonder at the price and relative value comparisons taken from the ONS series of statistics. One in particular caught my attention. Someone around 1930 left an estate worth £800 and Julia Sawalha, the presenter, told us firmly that this amounted to £22,000 in today’s money. Removing the rude words I remarked that this was unlikely.

At that time £800 a year was very high salary, few Headteachers for example, would be anywhere near it and in ordinary industry and commerce it suggested senior managers. It might also buy you in many parts of the country a decent semi-detached house in a desirable area. At a pinch you could employ a day cook and a housemaid if your other expenses were not too high.

This was an era when price structures were very different. Food and clothing prices were relatively higher than today in real terms as well as white goods and other products. A decent new radio could cost a working man a month’s wages. On the whole consumer goods were much more costly and people had fewer of them and expected them to last. We are still using grandma’s old pillow cases.

So if you base relative price indexes on these kinds of goods you might well come to the conclusion that £800 in 1930 was worth £22,000 now. But that figure would not buy you anything like the total contemporary lifestyle you could enjoy for £800 a year in 1930. As you go back into the past the discrepancies become more serious.

The documentaries on satellite TV quite often have reconstruction efforts and items detailing what exactly was involved in making this or building that. For anyone who had done any costings the conclusions are stark. If we look back at all those ancient ships, cathedrals, buildings and landscaping the real cost in today’s terms has to be hugely adrift of the ONS comparisons. Putting those costs in terms of the actual lifestyle etc. of the period means that the ONS figures based on a narrow basis of modern consumer spending are very wrong.

OK, you might say this is all ancient history, but it is not really important. But it is because the ONS and current statistics have been telling us that inflation recently has not been all that much. In the meantime property prices and debt charges and many living costs, not in the indexes, sky rocketed along with other things involving necessary payments. Because property is defined so much as “investment” we have forgotten that it is also a part of essential living cost and as much “consumption” as anything else.

This may not be inflation to the government as it has chosen to define it for the purposed of formulating politically acceptable spending plans and that it is generally convenient to hold the headline figures down. The media may have bought this fiction and too many economists are too concerned with mathematical models based on limited data but there has been runaway inflation in the real financial burden to most of us who have to pay in real money. So now we may have to face the backwash of all this.

If between 1965 and 2005, part from one or two glitches, we have been using cheap oil and this has meant cheap energy, food, distribution, transport and consumer goods because petrol-chemicals are an essential primary resource in all these sectors then it may not last. If the costs and prices of these rise in real terms then we may well have sharp inflation in the actual ONS figures with the effect of major reductions in real incomes, especially with savings income depressed by interest rates being held down by central bank intervention to fund property activity.

In the UK we have out sourced increasing proportions of our food production, making of consumer goods and most of our clothing industry. We have become dependent on overseas capital for credit and much of our management and administration is now abroad and/or offshore. Even our so-called high tech’ activities are increasingly bought in and foreign provided. Our private pension funds are reliant on overseas financial trading and our public sector schemes on government borrowing to cope with government spending. The property market and pricing is almost our sole driver of economic activity.

With the government throwing money at the property market and construction this means it intends this inflationary sector to go on rising in price in both money and real terms to keep all their personal fortunes intact. If they are not careful, the whole pricing structure may begin to collapse so that we get a massive deflation and related contraction in economic activity. In terms of the money, where we are and where we go, nobody will be certain and it will be a recipe for serious unrest. It has happened before historically and can happen again.

When you hear about inflation few of us understand the reality but it may be about to return and all those wonderful ONS statistics may not be of any use at all to the policy makers or to the rest of us and nor will any historical comparisons.

Lockerbie, al-Megrahi, Evidence, What Evidence?

The look of relief on the face of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi as he left the plane in Tripoli after his release from Scotland may have been that at last he might receive some proper medical treatment from competent doctors. This is not the place to debate all the difficult legal, moral and political issues surrounding his release, there is more than enough elsewhere.

What I am looking at is the information that is missing in the latest farrago. We are assured by the Scottish medical authorities that it was the medical evidence that was critical in their recommendation for compassionate release. The Scottish legal men and politicians claim that they proceeded strictly on the basis of this advice. What was going in London is all a great mystery, or something.

As it is medical evidence, mercifully for those who made the decisions in this age of Human Rights, it is shrouded in secrecy, or rather privacy. But what say, if for reasons of convenience, incompetence, stupidity or arrogance or all of these in the case of al-Megrahi his treatment and medical handling had been botched? What if medical evidence that should have been there wasn’t?

No wonder nobody concerned wants to go the USA to admit that medical analysis and treatment that would be routine even out in the sticks there simply wasn’t done or even considered in the case of al-Megrahi. If he had prostate cancer then he was certainly a sick man. As such any other compromising medical issue would have a serious impact on his overall health and might appreciably increase the risks and prospects for the length of time he might survive.

Could this happen in Britain? Indeed it could and does and all too easily. In Britain the practice if someone is having serious problems is to work out the options and then test for only one. If that doesn’t work, then tough, or declare some catch all syndrome and shove some medication across to shut the patient up. If something nasty happens under medical treatment the Primary Care Trust is very likely on legal grounds to refuse testing or examination and the doctors to sit on their hands.

There are a number of medical reasons why al-Megrahi may have been very ill for reasons beyond the basic problems of his prostate. Two are picked out solely as examples of what can happen and to illustrate the issues. It could be that other issues affected him, but the same considerations apply.

One is dietary and the other toxic chemical as contrast. Reaction to gluten is a condition suffered already by many and the numbers are increasing. The reasons for the rise in numbers are relatively simple. Modern wheat and other grain varieties today have more gluten content than those of the past. We are eating more grains and processed they appear one way or another in many packaged food that are a staple of modern eating. Ergo, more gluten, more eating, more reactions.

So a lot of people suffer serious problems and pain in the lower abdomen and go to the doctor. Are they offered tests for gluten? Fat chance, in the NHS this is treated as a last chance saloon option and only if you know about it and make noises. You are likely to spend years suffering on expensive IBS medications, with all the nasty internal damage being done, before anything else, including gluten, is considered.

The chemical one is Chlorhexidine. If you go to Google Scholar, or just ordinary Google and tap in that word with “Anaphylaxis” you will be amazed at the number of hits you get. It was in 1998 when the FDA of the USA first put up a warning about this chemical specifically relating to cases of prostate problems in men where chlorhexidine impregnated catheters were used in the course of treatment.

Since then a lot more has been researched. In the meantime it is likely that a lot of elderly men in treatment for urology issues have died from reactions but the deaths put down to respiratory or cardiac issues, especially in Britain. What is known now is that reactions to this are both nasty and dangerous. Also what we know is how difficult it is to get referral to an immunology specialist for proper testing and analysis.

If al-Megrahi has had this then he can only have got it from treatment in hospital using a chemical product that was already known to be dangerous. One interesting piece of research on chlorhexidine suggested that along with Cetrimide you might get cirrhosis of the liver. So couple of drinks, clean your teeth and do a mouthwash you could be doubling your chances.

As stated, there are a number of dietary, chemical and other problems that could have a debilitating and severe effect on an already sick patient. Often it takes a good deal of time, trouble and preparedness to do the analytical work to find out and confirm the critical issue. In the case of al-Megrahi in Scotland I doubt that any of this was attempted or considered.

Perhaps a couple of easy tests that proved inconclusive might have been tried, but all too likely the medical evidence was a spatchcock job done in the writing up of the report, emphasising the basic prostate condition and given a dressing of psychological colouring. After all, it wouldn’t take much for the medic’s to blind the politicians with science. As medical records etc. are covered by the laws etc. on privacy, then who would ever know?

So there it is, probably al-Megrahi’s prostate condition was not diagnosed until late, then the routine treatments did not go well. Given the political sensitivity of his case he was given more advanced treatment and medication and somewhere along the line contracted something that hit him badly.

This was neither diagnosed nor treated properly. Hence he was nearly dead when shipped off to Libya. When their medical services took over the case they soon sorted it out, improved his overall condition and extended his life expectation. No wonder all those involved are running around in a panic.

There is a personal twist to this. In 1988 we were living in the North of England and sometimes the sky above would be busy with large passenger aircraft and sometimes not. It was explained to me that it was the way the jetstream was flowing that would be the reason for the changes in the routing of Trans Atlantic flights.

On Wednesday 21 December 1988 the planes were flying the northerly route and it was likely that Pan Am Flight 103 was near to us about half an hour before the bomb exploded.

Robert Burns, Table Tennis And Teenagers

Long ago on Sunday 6 June 2010 when the world was a less complicated place there was an item on this blog about being by the statue of Robert Burns and with tourists. Yesterday, we were there again taking advantage of the weather and time to spare. The elephants had gone to whoever was the highest bidder. They were replaced by two table tennis tables staffed by skilled players on a scheme to encourage young people to take up the sport in the name of Olympic Legacy subsidies.

As no young people were coming forward I lurched out of my seat and knowing that Burns fixed gaze was on my back and wondering as a man who had a sharp eye for the follies and foibles of man what he might have made of table tennis picked up a bat; explaining to the appointed player that it was around thirty years since I last played and the old eyes were not quite as sharp.

It took a couple of minutes to get used to the metal table and the spongy bat and the other player was trying to be fair but then one went fast to the end of the table and I had to take it with a running back hand drop shot which he managed to return for me to work his corners then finish the point with a sliced fore hand which he missed. He remarked that I had played before and asked if I had played in a league.

I admitted it with the excuse that it was around sixty years ago when I was only a teenager. This was in an age before TV and the big recording and media companies had managed to get control of young people to organise, manipulate and segment their interests according to their production and marketing requirements.

The one TV channel; that of the BBC, was even worse than the present. No youngster with any self respect would be caught watching it. In Coronation Week of 1953 the sole sop to the masses was a Burl Ives (wikipedia) programme. I missed both having other engagements.

The baby boomer generation and others like to claim that it was in the 1960’s that it all changed and that somehow before then it was all innocence, ignorance and strict class differences and all the rest. But these are all people who never worked on a factory floor or in manual work or served in the Armed Forces.

It is difficult to explain how flexible we were about things and how little we worried about what to listen to or what entertainment to enjoy in the age before TV. It is also difficult to explain how we managed to enjoy being young without all the technical kit, advertising junk and attention grabbing visuals there are today.

We did what we did and what we liked doing with others of our age. The idea of going to a concert of music from the 1920’s with our parents to suit the promoters back catalogue and media men would have had us rolling about with laughter.

With most of the post war and 1950’s generations of teenagers leaving school at 15 to go into industrial or commercial work and almost all of them having had a lot of experience of street play and/or going about in groups of one sort or another. We may not have said much but we may have known a good deal more about the world.

In the 1940’s and earlier was a generation who had left school earlier and had gone through two world wars. There is a good deal of cinema and newsreel footage featuring largely suburban families and images of what people in authority either wanted it or imagined it to be.

Reality for the masses was very different. There was scant coverage of them and all the disrespect, cynicism and raucous aspects of their lives were heavily censored out. There are some fleeting but bowdlerised references in films but always from film makers and script writers looking down rather than around.

What had changed by the 1960’s was the idea of what life might be had. By then the antibiotic and sulfa drugs had begun to transform medicine and life expectancy. Again it is difficult to explain what it was like before modern drugs existed. This was something that connected us to past generations to the time of Burns and beyond. Life could be a very fragile thing.

It was at the beginning of the 1960’s that National Service ended and many men no longer had to work out their angst in a barracks or abroad. There is an unrealised effect of this in that with the end of Empire and major reduction in the Armed Forces large numbers of public schoolboys were coming into industrial and commercial management and the public services in the UK.

Suddenly we were being managed not by men who had worked their way up but by well connected chaps with alleged leadership capabilities. The trouble was that my lot did not like being led like this by men whose attitudes related more to simply giving orders to underlings than to being aware of what was what. It is little wonder that the class war began to rear an uglier head at this time.

Another problem was that the limited number of university places became more contested by candidates from public and private schools. With the ending of the London social season as the old agricultural aristocrat order and its provincial equivalents had finally collapsed, this meant more daughters looking for an education beyond and distinct from finishing schools. The Universities were duly expanded.

In London it was substantially these groups with a few special additions recruited from below that promoted the Swinging Sixties, always a more RADA and West End phenomenon than Rotherham or Worcester. Groups that had never had an ordinary urban or rural teenage existence began to tell us all how to be a teenager.

On 6 June I mentioned that by the Burns statue is a memorial to the WW1 Camel Corps that served in Palestine and Arabia between 1916 and 1918. In the picture above you can just see a part of his statue. This time I took a close look at the names. As well as those from the UK there were many from Australia and some from New Zealand.

Amongst all of them are a number of surnames that Burns would have recognised and many would have been teenagers or very little older.

Taking A Beating In School

In the media row over which schools were which and whose new building had been taken off the list for renewal there was one key element which was little mentioned in the media parades of proud parents, all those weeping children and anxious teachers.

It was that when Mr. Gove looked at the financial figures he had thrown a bigger wobbly than when the average family looks at the credit card bill after Christmas. By any standard the financial figures were horrific. What I cannot begin to understand is how any functional government machinery could come up with plans to build on the basis of deals like that.

The only explanation is that the culture of bonuses, favours, and financial kickbacks was such that these people were all literally pillaging and plundering the Education budget for decades to come. Mr. Gove was going to be damned if he did and damned if he did not question what exactly these plans consisted of, how they were to be paid for and on what basis.

Looking back over the nature of school education building in its various phases from the early 19th Century through the 20th until the last couple of decades what I do see is the sharp contrast between how it was managed in the past and what has been happening recently.

There were never the anything like the numbers of consultants, legal people and all the financial elements that have been brought in so recently. In a typical County or County Borough of the 20th Century, or its successors in the 1970’s through to the 1980’s at management level there would be a handful of people in the commissioning Department handling new building as part of a wider package of duties.

Then there would be a couple of architects either from within or contracted according to strict rules and a couple of people each from Legal and The Treasurers. That would be it. Before 1974 in some of the small Local Education Authorities the building programmes would be managed by literally a handful of people. Yet they managed to put up decent buildings for the period.

Moreover their salaries and expenses, part of the routine annual budget and determined by fixed national scales, would be paid out of revenue. Additionally, whilst building and fixtures would be a capital item with expenditure and municipal borrowing firmly controlled, kitting out and putting in all the consumables again would be out of revenue. None of this would be allowed against added debt and again within clear limits.

If so much management of building programmes could be done by so few and a lot of it quite well and with massively lower comparative on-costs, what on earth has been going on in the last decade? Why at management level should it take twenty times as many people on typically five or more times each the real salaries of those of the past and with added bonuses and incentives to build worse buildings?

And all of it on borrowed money at almost penal terms. There are other awkward questions. Looking at some of the buildings that are to be replaced, they are not that old. What has been going on in relation to the maintenance and repair budgets? If a lot of these buildings have been allowed to run down so much that urgent replacement is now necessary, who is responsible?

Another is the distribution of these projects and who benefits. Are by any chance a disproportionate number of them in former Labour held or marginal seats? In other words did the Labour government in its last months having run down schools repairs and maintenance suddenly come up with a wheeze to throw money at some localities and ask all its many best friends in financial services to help come up with the money off balance sheet?

For Mr. Gove there is one lesson and a hard one. It is that none of his Department, the Agencies with which it is connected and others can be remotely trusted either to give him reliable information or to do the job that needs to be done. Somehow he will have to check, check and double check everything they handle and bring to his attention. He, and his colleagues are going to put some heavy stick about.

Because almost wherever you go and whichever department of state in Whitehall you can think of, the same problems arise, the same situations will be found and what was once the Civil Service is now a motley crew of incompetents and shape shifters on the make personally and to hell with the notion of serving the ordinary public.

In the recent media excitement about school buildings the story has been about denying a number of people what they had been led to expect. A lot of us are going to get this soon in many ways and probably worse.

What we have to face is whether the new administration are up to it or whether they will just stumble along trying to make the best of a very bad job.

BBC Proms, Losing The Chord And The Picture

The 2010 Proms have begun. It took the BBC forty years after it took over this festival of music to begin broadcasting it in a regular and reliable fashion on the radio. It has taken even longer for the BBC to come to terms with this new fangled TV thing that has so upset their ordered universe.

At first the only TV item was the Last Night second part that was put on to feature Sir Malcolm Sargent, a celebrity conductor. One disastrous effect of this was to fasten a completely false image on a complicated and broad based music festival. It was something that the BBC resolutely refused to shake off until very recently despite the evidence under their eyes. Yet another case of BBC image being totally at variance with the facts

At present and in recent years with the BBC Proms team in tandem with R3 it has been possible to know what was happening and why on radio. Unluckily, when it comes to TV this falls into other hands. Too many of them with too many distinct organisational and internal political interests to be able to sort out what they are supposed to be doing and why.

The TV programming has become a hit and miss business that both ignores its audience and the real purpose of the festival. This year it is a Mahler anniversary and there is a big Mahler audience out there, not only in the UK but internationally. When you see the grotesque mess they have made of this it is astonishing.

For those that they do record or broadcast do not worry about when you might ever hear them again. Barely anything will ever appear on DVD or CD or other channels and any repeats will be scant. They will disappear into the bottomless pit of the BBC Archives lost to any of mankind and hidden from public sight and hearing forever more.

If you want to see how not to televise a major festival for the audience that is likely to watch it or others who might wish to try, then read below and wonder. Remember there are large numbers of highly qualified very expensive people organising and arranging this who have had more management training between them than had the entire population of Britain before 1980.

It is listed by the Prom number where TV is involved and DS is delayed start and NTG is no time given.

1 Live on BBC2 and HD
2 Live DS,
4 recorded for showing on BBC2 on the date of Prom 10 (Dr. Who) but NTG
6 recorded for showing on BBC4 at 4-7.30 on the date of Prom 9 which starts at 7.30.
8 Live on BBC 4
10 (Dr. Who) recording for showing on BBC3, “future broadcast”.
16 Live DS on BBC 4
18 Live on BBC 4
19 Live DS on BBC2
24 Mahler 3 recorded for showing on the date of Prom 26 on BBC4 directly clashing with the R3 broadcast of Mahler 4 and 5.
26 Mahler 4 and 5 recorded for showing on the date of Prom 29 NTG only with one on screen and one on the “red button” indicating that the full Prom will not be broadcast. Prom 29 (also below) is the National Youth Orchestra.
27 Live DS on BBC4
29 National Youth Orchestra, recorded for showing on the date of Prom 48 on BBC2, NTG which is the date for the Rotterdam Phil’ whose programme includes Mahler and which will attract an audience similar to that for Prom 29.
37 Live on BBC4
38 and 39 on what is Bach Day. Three Brandenburg Concerto’s at the Cadogan Hall will not be shown live or recorded. Another three later will be recorded at the Cadogan Hall for showing later in the day NTG. Prom 38 5-6.00 in the Albert Hall will not be recorded or shown live, but Prom 39 will be Live on BBC2.
42 recorded for showing on BBC 4 at 4-7.30 on the date of Prom 45 which begins on R3 at 7.30.
46 Live DS
49 (Rodgers & Hammerstein) recorded for showing on BBC2 NTG on the date of Prom 57 which has Beethoven’s 9 Choral Symphony.
54 Live DS on BBC4
55 Late Night following Prom 54 on the same date, recorded for showing on the date of Prom 56 on BBC4 at 7.30 when it clashes directly with the R3 broadcast of Shostakovich and Bruckner.
62. More Mahler plus Bruckner recorded for showing on BBC4 at 4-7.30 the date of Prom 65 which starts at 7.30 and features Simon Rattle with the Berlin Phil’ doing Beethoven and Mahler 1, which is not being shown live or recorded.
63 Live DS.
66.Live DS
67 The programme for the Last Night of 1910 running from 2.30 to 6.00 recorded for showing on BBC4 at 7.30 on the date of Prom 74 clashing directly with that and the R3 broadcast.
75. Live
76 The Last Night, first part for the intellectuals on BBC2, the second for the heaving masses on BBC1, with clipped in jollies from here and there. Other parallel Proms may be shown on BBC4 or regional, but who knows?

Enough, enough, I have begun to gibber and need cold compresses.