I enjoyed this animated RSA Short film, illustrating Simon Sinek’s point about how, in business, the big fix is rarely as effective as creating a culture where a lot of small, everyday positive things are allowed to happen.
The 5 hour rule: keep learning the Benjamin Franklin way
http://www.inc.com/empact/why-constant-learners-all-embrace-the-5-hour-rule.html
I enjoyed this article from Michael Simmons in Inc. Like seemingly all Americans who write about anything, he has a Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) fixation – but why not, it probably beats my fixation with Paul Scholes (1974- ), articulate and thoughtful though the Bury-born former midfield ace is.
Franklin was of course famously productive, unlike me. Marvellously the tenth son of a soap maker, he invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses and managed to juggle, according to Wikipedia, being an “author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.” Though I bet he never took his kids to karate, did the washing up, or sat in rush hour traffic. I can’t claim any of those job titles – and have no insight into soap making either – but I have one thing in common with him. Like me, he was a Fellow of the RSA, where they now, down on John Adam Street off the Strand, have a Benjamin Franklin Room. I’m not so much Enlightenment as three-lighters-for-a-pound, but perhaps I can learn something from this dude.
So Franklin’s trick, says Simmons, was to devote an hour a day, every day of the working week, specifically to learning. He got up early to do it. Now, I already get up early to get my son’s breakfast, as he has a long trip to school (due to education cuts, ironically), so fat chance of reading and writing, unless we get into sleep deprivation territory. But I think I can squeeze in an hour a day on learning.
So how should I be doing it? Simmons says:
1. Plan out the learning. We shouldn’t just have goals for what we want to accomplish. We should also have goals for what we want to learn.
2. Deliberately practise. We can apply the proven principles of deliberate practice so we keep improving e.g. practising specific skills we want to improve. [Simmons should practise his spelling, he spelled it ‘practice’ when using as a verb. Schoolboy error]
3. Ruminate. This helps us get more perspective on our lessons learned and assimilate new ideas. It can also help us develop slow hunches in order to have creative breakthroughs.
4. Set aside time just for learning. This includes activities like reading, having conversations, participating in a mastermind, taking classes, observing others, etc.
5. Solve problems as they arise. Having slack creates the space to address small problems before they turn into big problems.
6. Do small experiments with big potential payoffs. Whether or not an experiment works, it’s an opportunity to learn and test your ideas.
Yes, this is slightly vague and waffly stuff. But the bigger point is, you get more done by working smarter, not necessarily burning the lightbulb at both ends [that was Thomas Edison, you numpty -Ed]. You only see those shortcuts and those big insights when you give yourself space to do so.
I must say freelance / independent qual life has its drawbacks, but has been (for me anyway) better at giving physical and mental space to think than agency life was. The catch is, you miss the interaction with others that you also need. So, a freelance / independent, going on training courses pretty regularly is a must. Freeing up the time and budget for that is easier said than done, but always worth it. In the meantime, I have some lighters to shift …
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Johnny behavioural science mnemonics: EAST and MINDSPACE
It’s too late to improve Keanu Reaves’ acting, but there’s still hope for using behavioural economics to improve other outcomes. Here are a couple of ‘what to remember about behavioural economics’ mnemonics I thought I’d share, from my recent reading of David Halpern’s Inside the Nudge Unit.
According to Halpern, the man behind the British government’s Behavioural Insights Team, E.A.S.T. is “a mental heuristic of mental heuristics” – a shortcut to remember how to cater for the mental shortcuts people commonly live their lives by. Organisations wanting to introduce cues or prompts to influence people’s behaviour, whether in government or in business, can be more effective if they remember:
- Easy – make the behaviour easy for people to do
- Attractive – make the behaviour attractive, something people would want to do
- Social – tie the behaviour sought of an individual into something others are also doing
- Timely – prompt people towards the behaviour at the most opportune time.
Sounds simple but that’s an awful lot of research and testing boiled down nicely.
The other one I wanted to share is M.I.N.D.S.P.A.C.E. It’s been around since 2010 and seem to remember even using it myself in one project a few years back (where the team I was part of played around with some behavioural interventions, with the help of an academic behavioural economist). This one, says Halpern, was “to help busy policymakers think about what might influence people’s behaviour in a given context.” The framework is a series of very broad insights / truths established by social psychology. They may seem like statements of the obvious, but it is useful to have them as a checklist to make sure you have covered the main bases when thinking through the possible effects of any piece of public communication or public activity:
- Messenger – we are very influenced by who is communicating the information
- Incentives – we respond to incentives using mental shortcuts, like ‘loss aversion’
- Norms – we are strongly influenced by what we think others are doing
- Defaults – we tend to revert to established behaviour options
- Salience – our attention is drawn to what is new and seems relevant to us
- Priming – we are influenced by sub-conscious cues
- Affect – our emotional associations can powerfully affect our actions
- Commitments – we try to be consistent with our public promises and we seek to reciprocate what others do for us
- Ego – we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves.
M.I.N.D.S.P.A.C.E. is more fully explained in the Institute of Government report here: Mindspace Report. Hope that’s useful.
Halpern’s Inside The Nudge Unit is a fascinating read, by the way, full of practical examples of nudges in action – what worked and what didn’t and why. It’s a success story, really – how the Behavioural Insights Team won over decision-makers and influencers in government to making policy have more impact by taking account of how real people actually behave. It has been a quiet revolution. This has taken off massively over the past 5-6 years, but it is still in its infancy. Halpern can currently (October / November 2016) be heard on the BBC Radio iPlayer, for people in the UK, as part of Bronwen Maddox’s Radio 4 series The Pursuit of Power, talking about “the power of nudge”: The Power of Nudge.
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Petrels: Flailing Tomb
Thanks to Paul Margree for taking me to such an enjoyable evening of sound at Cafe Oto in Dalston last Thursday – Petrels, with Ensemble Economique as support. The kind of thing I would never find on my own 🙂 Here’s Paul’s Petrels album review from last year for Louder Than War.
“An inspired marriage of ecstatic drone, krautrock and synthpop.”
Read the review at Louder Than War.
+++
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Eating the cabin boy: clues to Brexit from the mists of the Noughties
The period around a decade ago, at any given time, is often lost in a Bermuda Triangle of cultural amnesia. We remember very recent events; and we enjoy revisiting events further back, the tracks through which have been trodden down by enough historians to count as ‘history’. But go back only one decade and we can be a bit uncomfortable. It’s not long enough ago for a revival of interest to be fashionable, or for historians to take ownership of it; but too long ago to actually remember events in much detail. It’s a foggy, disconcerting place; few venture there.
Enter John Harris, ex of the NME now of The Grauniad, in a “long read” in September 2016 on the current struggles of the political left (John Harris: Does The Left Have a Future?). Harris went back a decade and re-visited political speeches that were much reported at the time, but have now fallen down the back of the sofa of memory. And in doing so he has caught a rear-view mirror glimpse into the seeds of Brexit germinating.
He went back to a then widely reported, now-forgotten Blair speech (come to think of it, do we remember any of them much?). It was the one he gave to the Labour conference in 2005, after his third and final General Election victory. Blair was warning of the ramping up of the harsh pressures of a globalising world economy and flagging up the challenge for Britain. Harris writes:
His next passage was positively evangelistic. “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”
I watched that speech on a huge screen in the conference exhibition area. And I recall thinking: “Most people are not like that.” The words rattled around my head: “Swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” And I wondered that if these were the qualities now demanded of millions of Britons, what would happen if they failed the test?
We’ve all been saying for decades the world is getting more competitive. For a long time it sounded like a gentle and distant admonition and, to many of us, the UK seemed to be coping well enough. Yes, we were working ever harder, and time and money were getting increasingly squeezed, but was the UK not well up the league tables on GDP? Yet … our apparent successes overall were masking the fact that, looking inside, it was actually the economic success of a fairly small number of people. For the rest there was stagnation in living standards and quality of life – at best.
Books like Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level put the data together to prove what had been happening for decades. And it’s far from only theoretical or statistical, as I have experienced in recent years when interviewing people in-home around the UK on the detail of their household budgeting. It’s visible too in high streets and the shopping centres around the country. The big urban centres are thriving and exciting. But large parts of the country are in visible atrophy, struggling for a role in modern Britain beyond hosting low pay, low security, low satisfaction employment. There’s a carotid artery leading straight from that, it seems to me, via the 2007-8 Crash, into the heart of Brexit.
The 2007-8 Crash was a seminal moment, when we saw that the hallowed financial market emperors had no clothes. Worse, they didn’t seem to care. Not surprisingly, the clothed masses started questioning how much the financial experts deserved to be trusted – and not just them, other ‘elites’ too – to look after the interests of all. The Crash, along with the inability of the Coalition government subsequently to produce a socially-spread recovery, plugs fairly directly into 23rd June, 2016.
Since 2010 in particular, people have felt left on their own to sink or swim.
We were on the EU ship, but June 2016 has shown too many of us were worried it was going in the wrong direction. So we have activated the life boat – whose seaworthiness has only been cursorily checked – and launched off on our own. We’ve just been bobbing up and down, really, in the months since we splashed down into the icy waters. We have a captain, but she’s not keen to tell us what direction she’s taking us in, in case we mutiny if we don’t get there. Rescue craft, in the shape of big generous trade deals with the US, China or Japan, are on their way, she assures us. But in truth these rescue craft haven’t even been designed yet, let alone, built, let alone set sail in our direction. We’re going to have to survive on our own in the ocean swell for a long time. We are at the mercy of the weather, supplies are not limitless and I personally don’t even like fish that much.
As Neil The Hippy said in The Young Ones episode, Flood, when it appeared they might be the only survivors of a vast deluge:
Hey, wouldn’t it be terrible if we ended up having to eat each other? Like those sailors did in that film, um…”We Ended Up Having To Eat Each Other”.
Let’s hope we can paddle like people possessed, and that Poseidon smiles on us. That big EU ship is still in sight, we could head for there – I hear they have a food mountain. But it has all but disappeared over the horizon. I expect by the time we’ve been cooped up for two years, we’ll greet any sight of land at all with delirious gratitude. We may have eaten each other by then. But who will eat whom?
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Riding the elephant towards empathy: an RSA Animate
In this RSA Animate short film, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA (whose blog is here: https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/matthew-taylor-blog) gives a really interesting overview of the currents of change in big thinkers’ ideas about society. The RSA itself is an organisation that follows, curates and influences these developments. He points forward to what we can expect in the coming years – what are the big differences in how we might be doing things as businesses and as a society? A great summary of where we’re at and a little advert for the RSA, of which I’ve been a fellow the last few years.
He talks about the importance of not just education but “empathic capacity”, the ability to think about and pursue the wider public interest in a self-aware way. In Taylor’s eyes, we were developing ourselves nicely enough in Britain on that score, until the last decade or so, but we seem to have hit the buffers somewhat. The global financial crisis, followed by austerity and growing discomfort around immigration have been antithetical to our empathic capacity. Since Taylor produced this in 2015 it’s only got worse, with first the rancorous self-destruction of the Labour Party and then the bitter division of the country though the Brexit vote. It feels like, for now, our empathic capacity is exhausted; we need some back, badly.
I also enjoyed the echoes of John Gray’s Straw Dogs in Taylor’s criticism of our tendency to pursue “progress” as if it’s the same as pursuing well-being. The logic-driven “progress” of science & tech, markets and bureaucracy can as easily work against overall public wellbeing as for it.
For example, former Chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan’s shrugging off of the crash as the product of unavoidable “human nature” was inadequate. We clearly need to move beyond mere acceptance of current processes into thinking about what kind of society we want then changing our processes to make that a more likely outcome.
The same goal-blindness – perhaps a conservative-ideology-driven one, rooted in a love of the organic and an aversion to planning – applies also to those politicians jumping to respond to perceived concerns about immigration. This is one kind of social engineering that social conservatives will advocate, but apparently with no picture (attractive or otherwise) of what they are trying to engineer towards. One suspects that the goal is left undescribed because to articulate it clearly would be to reveal both its ugliness and its impossibility. We need a whole lot more realism and honesty there.
As Taylor puts it, logic gets you from A-Z but you need ethical reasoning to work out where Z should actually be. We need a lot more focus on the Z and an honest debate about what it looks like. I suspect there is a rather large amount of consensus among politicians, when pinned down on this as individuals, on a rather large proportion of the elements of that Z. But we do need some idea of what kind of progress we want and how to recognise good progress when we see it. Otherwise we consign ourselves to being hamsters on the shiny, cool, dazzlingly impressive and cleverly built wheel of some other kind of progress – an illusory one.
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What kind of Brexit? Don’t just ask the 52 per cent – we’re all leaving
Brexit means Brexit. When I studied law, that’s what we called a “circular definition”. The question of what it does mean – that is, how Brexit is to be carried out and what future relationship with the EU we are aiming for – has been deferred. Until now that is. The political mood seems to have changed since the party conference season. After a strange “Phoney War” hiatus, the debate is really kicking in now on (1) what we are aiming for, and (2) how we go about it – by executive action only or involving parliament, and if the latter, what influence will our elected representatives have.
There has been a lot of talk about “what the people meant” when they voted for Leave by 52 per cent to 48 per cent in the referendum. I’m not a pollster, but as someone working in public opinion research (albeit a qual specialist and mainly in non-political topics), I take a particular interest. Here’s my take on what kind of guidance the people have given the government on what Brexit should be like.
A word on polls first as I’ll be citing a couple. Surveys used alone are blunt instruments. They ask fixed questions, don’t get to see people’s body language or mood when they answer, can’t pick up easily on nuances of meaning and aren’t always great at digging beneath the surface for people’s real motivations. This isn’t to do them down, just to point out that you often need complementary qual (like wot I do) to build a full explanation of what people are really thinking and feeling. An election is an extremely reduced version of a survey – one question is asked and a whole raft of interpretation is then rammed into that cross-in-a-box.
In a general election, there is some interpretive help: there are manifestos to go on. That is, there is a convention that the party that gets elected into government with a majority of MPs is deemed to have a democratic mandate for the programme it published before the election. A referendum, on the other hand, is an even more extremely reduced version of an election. It decides one question, the one on the referendum paper:
With a referendum, there is no manifesto, there is no programme or even political party that people voted for. There is just the question.
Technically, the EU Referendum was advisory, but in reality parliament is obliged to enact its recommendation to leave the EU. That much is clear and agreed by almost all. But what else does it mean – what is the “will of the British people” beyond that, for example on what Brexit ought to entail?
The short answer is that it is, contrary to some claims, very unclear what the will of the British people on this is. And the referendum cannot itself clarify that. All it told us for sure was that the British people voted 52/48 for ‘Leave’.
People appeared to be worried about immigration levels – but were they voting for an end to open borders? Maybe. The truth is we don’t know. 52 per cent voted to leave the EU, but might some of them actually want to stay in the single market and keep free movement more or less as before? 48 per cent voted to stay in the EU, but might some of them actually like more immigration controls? This matters, because it only takes a few per cent fluctuation for there to be a decent majority for keeping something akin to the free movement we currently have. A coalition of the 48 per cent plus the soft Brexiters is not hard to imagine and would, it would seem, command a majority.
“Hard Brexiters” are arguing that the 52 per cent for Leave equals 52 per cent for hard Brexit (i.e. some arrangement involving leaving the single market). Former Remainers and soft Brexiters point out that leading figures in the Leave campaign like Boris Johnson explicitly said Brexit did not necessarily mean leaving the single market. The Leave campaign did not, of course, campaign on one single shared message on the form Brexit should take: they were a broad coalition of people with different positions. It was not necessary for the purposes of the referendum to have an agreed position on what form Brexit would take, because – and we come back to it – the referendum was on one question only: should the UK remain a member of the EU or leave it? That was all they needed to agree on as a campaign; and it was all the public was voting on.
As with any snapshot of voter opinion, voters have lots more going on in their heads than just a simple cross in a box can express. So was this, as some are saying, a vote “against immigration” and if so, against how?
It is true that there is big concern in the UK about immigration. Britain is not alone in that, it is a global phenomenon, as the Ipsos MORI release from August shows (Ipsos MORI global survey, immigration, Aug 2016):
Although in Britain views tend to be more negative than positive, we are actually mid-table on most measures, and there are some more positive views on immigration than in previous years. Thirty-five percent of Britons think that immigration has been good for the country (up from 28% a year ago, and 19% in 2011), while 49% think there are too many immigrants in the UK, down from 60% a year ago and 71% in 2011. These positive changes are despite a significant increase in immigration and the recent EU Referendum, where reducing immigration was a key factor behind the vote for “Brexit”.
Still, 49 per cent is a big, politically significant number of people to think there are too many immigrants in the UK, even if it’s a snapshot of a trend of opinion apparently on the way down. Does this impel the government to go for hard Brexit? Perhaps not: there are contrary indicators of how the public feels on this too. British people have also been increasingly seeing immigration in positive terms in recent years:
British people have become more positive about the impact of immigration over recent years. Forty-five per cent say immigration has been good for the economy, up from 38% a year ago and from 27% in 2011, and 38% say immigration has made it harder for native Britons to get a job, down from 48% a year ago and 62% in 2011. However, Britain is one of the countries most worried about the pressure placed on public services by immigration, with 59% concerned – although this too is down from 68% a year ago and from 76% in 2011, when Britain was the most worried of all the countries surveyed.
The worry for those in the UK who are worried seems to be the pressure being put on public services. Arguably, that is an issue that could at least in part be addressed by better funding of public services, rather than necessarily cutting immigration numbers. Labour’s argument, if its solipsistic leadership team actually managed to put one forward cogently, would be that it was the under-availability of public services after David Cameron’s over-enthusiasm for austerity which caused large sections of the public to form a negative view of immigrant numbers. But still, we have that 49 per cent figure to take into account, the number who think there are now too many immigrants in the UK.
So what kind of Brexit does this mean people want? The referendum itself was silent on that, so we must look again for other evidence. Luckily, some pollsters have actually bothered asking them.
In August, YouGov carried out this poll: YouGov poll: what sort of Brexit do we want? Do read the whole thing, it is fascinating and you can impress your friends no end by quoting the stats next time Julia Hartley-Brewer gives one of her many pearl necklaces another outing on national tv. As Anthony Wells of YouGov explains:
There is little support for a so-called “hard Brexit” – even among Leave voters. Only 10% of people think Britain should leave the EU completely and not seek any sort of formal trading relationship and only 22% think we should drop out of the EU as rapidly as possible.
The preferred scenario for Brexit so far appears to be the “Canada” one. This is where Britain would have “a limited free trade deal with the EU – there are no tariffs on goods, but service sectors like financial services would not be able export freely to the EU. Britain would make no financial contribution to the EU and EU citizens would have no right to live or work here.”
But the point is, none of them commands, or is likely to command, the support of a majority of the population. It certainly seems there are some options voters see as “not respecting the referendum”. That is politically significant; but technically, all the options here “respect the referendum”, because they all deliver Brexit. Political leadership may be needed to remind voters that all the referendum decided was leaving the EU. YouGov’s question on “respecting the referendum” is really interesting – it’s important people feel the referendum has been respected – but there is also an onus on political leaders to remind the public accurately what the referendum did and didn’t decide. We are not used to referenda and it seems some may be getting carried away in how far they are stretching their extrapolations from this one.
What’s more, as Wells says, it is early days.Voters don’t know an awful lot yet about the pros and cons of the Brexit options. If I were to do discussion groups on this, I would expect to have to provide stimulus and definitions before we could pin the discussion down, voters are not in a position yet to be able to just discuss Norway vs Canada vs Switzerland vs WTO terms unaided. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet and when asked about this in a survey, many respondents I assume may well have felt quite shakey on their answers. Certainly I would struggle. With the Canada option, for example, when voters realise the hit to the economy involved in not being able to passport financial services, they may take a different view. Views may also change as we get poorer as a nation over the coming months and voters start to notice it as the cost of living rises. So, these are soft, initial figures.
But they do seem to kill off for good the notion that the Brexit vote was a mandate for hard Brexit of the kind advocated by, say, John Redwood. Far from it, it would seem. Redwood seemed particularly tetchy on Newsnight last night – nerves are starting to show, particularly with the pound now tumbling. It seems the Three Brexiteers may have some serious persuading to do if they want the British people to support their apparent direction of travel. Brexit may be in the bag, but hard Brexit isn’t.
Theresa May is more grounded and practical than any of them; if they are inclined to be cavalier towards public opinion, she as Prime Minster can’t be. Riding high in the polls and the overwhelming choice of Conservative MPs for unity candidate PM, May is at the moment politically unassailable. How Brexit plays out really comes down to her. She can go either way, hard or soft. She’s giving mixed signals at the moment as to where her arrow will be aimed. But if she does go for hard Brexit, she’ll be doing it against the wishes of most of the electorate. She’ll have a keen eye on that.
There is an argument for a referendum on the final deal in two years’ time. But if we don’t have that, it seems the public does need a say through parliament on what form Brexit takes. It will be the biggest decision in half a century and we’ll live with its consequences for at least a generation. Important though the vote to leave the EU was, it cannot surely be the last reference to public or parliamentary opinion in the process. It seems to me, it was only the start.
The 52 per cent are being listened to: we are leaving the EU. But in how we do that, all 100 per cent of Britons come back into play. Going forward, the Brexiters must remember that the British people consists of 48 per cent of people who want the same relationship with the EU as we currently have, plus, shall we estimate here, at least a good 5-10 per cent of the 52 per cent Brexit-voters who want some kind of single market membership (I’m plucking that figure from the air but it’s an educated guess). That would make a clear majority for a single market, or quasi- single market, arrangement.
Indeed, the YouGov survey backs that up, with 60 per cent prepared for the UK to follow EU regulations relating to the single market (and only 17 per cent finding that unacceptable); and 52 per cent in favour of allowing EU citizens the right to live and work in the UK:
These figures are a couple of months old at the time of writing, but we weren’t ready for the debate in August. It feels like we are now. It will be interesting to watch these numbers morph and shift in the run-up to the triggering of Article 50 in Spring 2017, as ideas crystallise (or remain vague … I’m not counting on anything!). Interesting times. And much is still up for grabs.
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Brexit brands: catching up with the left behind
Campaign: Brands Favoured by Remainers and Leavers
Back at my desk / wheel / digi-recorder, I wanted to register this article I missed in August before we all move on and forget the summer ever happened (some of us would prefer to; but every day I wake up and it turns out it still did). It’s the first of a few blog posts about the dreaded issue we can’t get away from now for the foreseeable future, Brexit.
I first read about this study of brands favoured by Leave vs Remain voters in the new ‘pop up’ print newspaper venture The New European (which went from wild idea to print run in less than two weeks earlier in the summer – a pretty remarkable event in itself). Needless to say in my neck of the woods, central Oxford, we have The New European on display outside the local Co-Op. That’s because it’s one of those ardently ‘Remain’ bubbles that are dotted around the country, in not quite big enough numbers. Oxford also voted ‘Yes’ in the Alternative Vote Referendum, 2011 – remember that one? No, I didn’t think so.
There is much to be said about the referendum but for now, I offer just some brief ruminations on the fascinating list of brands generating by some nice big data stats crunching by RKCR/Y&R and YouGov.
The brands most favoured by Remain voters apparently are:
BBC.co.uk
BBC iPlayer
Instagram
London Underground
Spotify
Airbnb
LinkedIn
Virgin Trains
Twitter
EasyJet
The Brexiteers however have quite a different list:
HP Sauce
Bisto
ITV News
The Health Lottery
Birds Eye
Iceland
Sky News
Cathedral City
PG Tips
Richmond sausages
Emily James of RKCR/Y&R summed up the Leave brands list as “traditional, straightforward, simple, down-to-earth, good value and friendly.” I’m fond of several of these myself but overall I think that’s quite a diplomatic description. We have to be diplomatic in this game, as we’ll probably end up doing branding research for one of them eventually. I’ve already worked on a couple of that list. But it doesn’t reflect the outward-looking, buccaneering version of Britain that the Leave campaign claimed Brexit was all about.
James describes the Remain brands, on the other hand, as “progressive, up-to-date, visionary, innovative, socially responsible, intelligent.” And wasn’t this really the divide in British society that Brexit has revealed? It is, by the way, most definitely ‘revealed’, not caused: in my view the vote wasn’t that much about the EU at all. It’s the coming home to roost of decades of social sundering.
The divide is between, on the one hand, the self-confident part of Britain that is not just at ease with modernity and change but actually driving it; and on the other hand, those parts of Britain that either got left behind or who never wanted to be part of that project in the first place.
It’s easy, especially if you’re a Remainer like me, to paint the two in Manichean terms – that Remain is progressive, liberal, open and optimistic and that Leavers are the opposite of those things. And there are some Leavers who are indeed dangerously stuck in the past, intolerant and inward-looking. But it would be short-sighted to write off all of the 52 per cent of the British population quite like that.
There is a positive to come out of this for us in a ‘progressive’ bubble: we can no longer ignore, patronise or marginalise such vast swathes of our fellow country people and expect this to have no negative consequences. Britain has been a deeply divided country for some time between people who benefit from the status quo and people who don’t. Those of us who are reaping the benefits should perhaps have listened more carefully to those who haven’t and we should have done something about it earlier. Perhaps now – too late? – we can start to understand there are other Britains beyond the ones we personally inhabit – and they can look very different. They are interesting and they all count.
There is a third list of brands, ones that have somehow managed to connect across this perilously divided nation. These brands are split equally between Remainers and Leavers:
Money Saving Expert
NSPCC
TK Maxx
M&S
Martin Lewis, Mr Money Saving Expert himself, regularly features near the top of list of the most trusted people in Britain, usually right behind the almost deified David Attenborough. Lewis has a phenomenal and rare combination of qualities: the ability to fully understand complexity, render it simple and explain it clearly and engagingly. Sounds simple but no one can do it quite like him. He’s great on the tv, he’s amazing on the radio and he can write. The magic ingredient though is this: he gets that his area of expertise isn’t innately engrossing for most people. Life is about, well, life – not money, for most of us. He doesn’t look down on us for that, or think we’re lazy or stupid for it. He accepts us. And thus a relationship is built. Add to that that he seems to know his stuff backwards and we readily trust him and hang on his words. Qual researchers presenting our insights can learn a lot from Lewis.
M&S is another success story. A bit too upmarket though for Brexiters? That would be to underestimate two things: (1) how many affluent middle class people are Brexiters; and (2) M&S’s symbolism as an aspirational food shopping brand to people who can’t afford to shop there much. The way we do our food shopping now, increasingly in fits and starts, many of us have repertoires of stores that include both an M&S and an Aldi, or a Waitrose and an ASDA. It’s easier now for a premium retail brand to be relevant across SEGs; and the same goes for a value-driven retail brand. Look at the rise of the likes of Home Bargains and B&M. I interviewed shoppers in those stores earlier in the year. It was fascinating to see their recent evolution and how much shoppers are now embracing them. They are now becoming very mainstream places to shop and they have changed to reflect that.
So perhaps to surf on the crest of the post-Brexit divide, as we researchers have to, we don’t have to go to Iceland (and endure the orange glare off the faces of Peter Andre, Jason Donovan and Kerry Katona). The reassuringly expensive lure of Marks and Spencer’s is still something Remainers and Leavers can agree on.
See also: BBC News online: BBC – Brexit brands, divided Britain
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Harry Frankfurt on “Bullshit” – with thx to Martin Weigel’s blog
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted… Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it […]
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Gender Pay Gap: Still Holding Britain Back
If you’re a woman coming into the workforce in Britain, the best advice seems to be to join the police and make it to chief constable, go into IT, or drive a train. There you have a chance of being paid more than a man. Otherwise though, it seems you can expect to earn less because you have a uterus. Click on this Information Is Beautiful visualisation: Information Is Beautiful: The UK Gender Pay Gap
Really, Britain, in the 21st Century? Come on guys …
These things don’t correct themselves through some mysterious natural force, as some perhaps wish to imagine. Nor can it be acceptable surely for this to continue for yet another generation? I’m a bit astounded – and a bit not – that we’re still in this predicament in 2016. I used to be a lot more laissez-faire and on the fence about all this stuff in my 20s. I kind of believed things were OK, moving in the right direction. Now I’m in my 40s, with a working wife and a daughter, I can’t really take such a Pollyanna-ish view of it any more. It’s not changed the way I thought it would and I’ve had to revise my views as a result and accept laissez-faire on this one is inadequate.
Of course a gender pay gap does not necessarily mean women are not on average getting “equal pay for equal work” – as the gender pay gap involves a number of disparities in working patterns between men and women – but it does seem pretty likely to be true. Weirdly, there is no official information on that, according to the Equal Pay Portal (http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/where-to-start-2/), which is a good place to start finding out more about all this. I’ll quote their summary of the situation on the gender pay gap in full:
- Women are entitled to equal pay with male colleagues doing equal work; workers from all of the groups protected against discrimination are also entitled to equal pay;
- There is no official information on the extent to which women are getting equal pay for equal work;
- Equal pay is about equality in contractual terms; the gender pay gap is about differences in average earnings;
- Headline figures on the gender pay gap are published annually by the Office for National Statistics; in 2015 the median full-time gender pay gap was 9.4 per cent;
- The gender pay gap is not only a burden on individual women, it has a negative impact on the UK economy;
- Closing the gender pay gap requires action to tackle all of the four main causes: occupational segregation; pay discrimination; the unequal sharing of family responsibilities and the undervaluing of women’s work. In particular, the part-time and full-time gaps call for different approaches – there is no one size fits all solution.
See also the Fawcett Society, who also press the need for a big improvement on all this: Fawcett Society – gender pay gap and the ONS statistics: ONS gender pay gap statistics. A recent report by Glassdoor Economic Research showed Britain well down the league tables for the equal treatment of women in the workforce across a range of measures: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/18/uk-has-one-of-worst-records-for-gender-equality-at-work-report. For an alternative view, the Daily Telegraph is convinced there is no problem – we should all carry on as we are and see the disparities in positive terms: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12153967/The-gender-pay-gap-might-be-unfair-but-its-not-the-fault-of-sexist-employers.html It’s a view, is all I will say to that …
The gender pay gap is partly about the kinds of work done predominantly by women being undervalued financially. It’s also about women being held back from promotions through unconscious biases. The problems some bosses seem to have with understanding fairness issues around childbirth and early years parenting has particularly impacted upon the career trajectory of women in their 30s, in way it hasn’t with men. It’s not just some “Millie Tant” lefty feminist issue – it is, many economists and investors now think, holding back the economy considerably.
It’s not a UK-only problem, as this work by The Brookings Institution shows in the US: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2016/04/12-gender-pay-gap-equality-and-beyond-sawhill. And tackling it is complex stuff. But not, one feels, beyond the wit of man, or woman, to start addressing. The will has to be there.
By the way, there is an excellent series of academic articles on the future of pay more widely pulled together by The Resolution Foundation, in its Securing A Pay Rise document, downloadable here: http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Securing-a-pay-rise-the-path-back-to-shared-wage-growth-web-version.pdf. Among other things, it shows that the apparently positive news of the narrowing of the gender pay gap in recent years may not be as positive as it seems – it’s been the result of the real pay of both men and women falling, men’s pay just falling even more than women’s. Not the kind of progress you’d hope for.
Low and unfair pay generally is a massive issue for the UK, as for many advanced economies currently. But that’s probably for another post, possibly by another blogger. Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government happens to be at the top of my road, and the blog of Professor of Economic Policy there Simon Wren-Lewis, Mainly Macro, is as good a place to start as any: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-general-theory-of-austerity.html
Strangers on the Shore 