The Daily Novel

Imperial College is in the news for the second time this week, because of the brutal murder of two French exchange students who were studying there, but living in the more affordable area of New Cross. Imperial College sits next to the Albert Hall in one of London’s highest rent areas. The students, including the post-graduate researchers, have to find their digs elsewhere.

This is not the fault of Imperial College.

But their decision to stop Majid Ahmed from studying there to gain his medical degree is totally their responsibility. Ahmed won a place on merit, but later on he wrote and told them that he had a criminal conviction. He had served his time and repented. He wanted to make amends by devoting his life to healing the sick.

Imperial interviewed him and decided that, although he would be quite acceptable to study any other subject, he was not suitable for a medical degree, because of the ethical standards which doctors must abide by in caring for the vulnerable.

In blunt terms Imperial College rejected the penitent sinner. They don’t seem to be aware of the several doctors, who have been un-penitent sinners. Shipman is one name that comes to mind.

Imperial College is one of the most elitist of British educational institutions. They were part of the old London University, so they had the luxury of teaching only science subjects. They did not have to confront the paradoxes and uncertainties of the arts and the social sciences. Because their students could take other courses at London University, which knew about such things.

Imperial College prospered. And it spawned some of the finest scientists and engineers this country has produced.

But today, it is a very inadequate university in its own right. It does not have the range of Arts subjects, which have give science students the opportunity to increase their knowledge of other parts of human achievement.

The new rector, Sir Roy Anderson, has come to Imperial after being the chief scientific adviser for the British Ministry of Defence. Before that he was a distinguished medical man and an expert on infectious diseases. But from 2004 he was working for the Tony Blair government which went into the war with Iraq, etc, etc.

I hope that he will reconsider the Imperial decision to reject Majid Ahmed. Elitist institutions like Imperial can give enormous help to people like Ahmed, who, on
his own account, got in with a gang of near criminals. He now wants to help other people.

That surely, Sir Roy, is what education should be about. Helping those who do not have priviledged parents, to make a decent fist of their lives.

If anyone has seen the mind of Professor Adrian Monck, head of City University’s journaliism department, could they return it as soon as possible, in a jifffy bag packed with lots of bubble wrap. His brain may not be very big but it is the only one he has got. And every minute he is without it, he is a possible danger to himself, and and a certain threat to alll journalism students, and would-be journalism students, at City University.The news broke in the newsroom of The Guardian in London, when many witnessed the breakdown he suffered in a debate with the renowned philosopher, A.C. Grayling.But readers do not have to wait to see the evidence.The crafty Guardian hacks have buried it in the education section of their web site, under the misleading headline, of ‘Is the Renaissance scholar dead?’ Monck’s speech was not about scholarship, Renaissance or later. The thinking was mindless Monck polemnic laced with one reference to the gospel of Netscape founder, Marc Andreessen.

Monck says he does not want to shut down English departments and forensic science departments en masse. He merely wants this:

For a take on what Monck, who himself studied history at Oxbridge, might have said before he lost his mind, follow this link, to a blog from the Vice-Chancellor’s office at Macquairie University in Australia, That blog does say something about what the Renaissance was about and its relevance to today’s world and apparently it was written by Vice-Chancellor himself, a bloke called Steven Schwartz. Schwartz is a former vice-chancellor of Brunel University, whose great strength is in teaching engineering. But imaginatively. Schwartz argues that;

While I was away from Dorset I was taken to task by an ex-student of City University’s Department of Journalism for my critique of this year’s Xcity magazine. The comment disputes the implication of my article that the students were too lazy to do the work necessary to track down where the hundreds of ex-City international students are now. His/her argument was that there were so many gaps in the international lists that it was impossible to track them down.

On re-reading my own post I can see that it might seem I was implying this. That was not my intention.

It has been a real concern for several years now that the gaps in the international records were a blight on the all-important listings. The international records contrast with the records for most of the home students, where the detailed job records of students as far back as 1977 are nearly 100 per cent complete.

What I should have made clear in my post was that omitting ALL the international student records is not a satisfactory solution to this problem. It means that the many international records which were up to date, thanks to the efforts of both staff and students over many years, are not now included and will not be updated. That is a wasting the efforts of past students, and it is not in the interests of the Department which wants to keep in touch with all its ex-students.

A satisfactory solution can only be found by management action. The present situation, which happened more or less accidentally over the years (and it was partly my fault) is that the bulk of the work on maintaining the student records is done by the periodical students. In other words, by thirty-odd students out of a total student body of several hundreds.

In my view the best solution is to re-instate the international records next year. And for the staff to ensure that students from all courses next year are caused to take part in tracking down where ex-students from their own course are now. Those efforts should be concentrated on up-dating the records of those ex-students for whom we already have pretty full records.

That would take care of my most trenchant criticism in my post, which was that this year’s Xcity records, got the student records of two of the most prominent home ex-students; William Lewis,  an ex-periodical student, who was made editor of The Daily Telegraph last year, and James Harding, who was made editor of The Times this January.

Maintaining these records is now a huge task. It needs the help of all the students. And it needs the help of all the staff at the proofing stage, when the directors of all the courses should be required to check the listing for all their ex-students. I can save them a bit of time by telling them that Dermot Murnaghan has moved from the BBC to Sky News, in case they have not noticed.

 Breakfast on the prom, where my tranquillity was invaded by a large group with hard hats on. That part of the season which brings large groups of school children and university students. Mostly as part of geography or geology classes, for the beach is rich in fossils providing the evidence to support the theories of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins. But sometimes English and art classes; there is no better place on the British coast to inspire the young imagination to paint or write a poem.

This morning’s group appeared to range in ages from about 14 to 22, some too young for university, others too old for school. In fact they were a school party, but from Munster on the border of Germany and the Netherlands. The Germans take their education seriously. Staying at school til 22 and completing an undergraduate degree at 30 is not uncommon.

Their subject was civil engineering. So I wish them well. My grandchildren will have need of them, to stop the cliffs around here falling into the sea and to combat the results of global warming.

 Xcity is the annual magazine produced by the magazine students in City University’s Department of Journalism, which circulates to all alumnae and enables them to keep in touch with each other. The Spring 2008 edition deserves one bouquet and one brickbat.

The bouquet goes to Brian Semple, who not only got to interview City University’s new boss but led him to say something controversial. The new vice-Chancellor, Malcolm Gillies, actually has some experience of journalism as a music critic and higher education commentator in his native land for The Australian.

He told Semple:

‘The whole newspaper industry lags behind the advancment of technology appallingly. When I was a music critic I still had to phone my copy in. I could not send it as an email, and that was only 13 years ago.

But a journalism school has to lead the industry. We can’t follow it, we’re training for the next generation.’

 Good for the students. Gillies might not be so pleased since along with the head of the journalism department, Adrian Monck, he is hoping to raise 10 million pounds for new facilities for journalism at City from the British journalism industry, who might not agree that they lag behind the ‘advancment of technology’. Particularly since The Guardian leads the world with its web pages, now reaching a readership of 19 million compared with the 400,000 circulation of the print version. And in the past year The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times and the Daily Mail, have massively improved their web coverage, by recruiting more staff, some of them from City University. They are competing very effectively with the New York Times and the Washington Post, who have much bigger staffs.

Like Barack Obama, Gillies has to learn that speaking off the cuff when journalists are listening does not always convey the message which was intended.

The brickbat is for missing the best news for this year’s edition, which should have been highligted with interviews with the men concerned. In January two ex-City students became national editors, James Harding, class of 1995, at The Times, and John Mullin, class of 1985, at The Independent on Sunday. They follow in the footsteps of Will Lewis, class of 1991, who became editor of The Daily Telegraph last year.

The Xcity listings section, which reports what ex-City University journos are doing now, has James Harding as the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times,  and John Mullin, as executive editor of The Independent. Which was true last year!

The listings are are an awful sweat to produce, now that there are several thousand ex-students. But that makes it a good learning exercise for students to track down the ‘lost’ students. It is boring work with lots of un-returned phone calls. Just like real journalism. And ex-City students turn to the listings pages first, just as Time Out readers, go right the listings as soon as they buy the paper.

 But the staff and the management need to share the blame with the students in terms of Xcity priorities. The listings section, which now runs to 38 pages, no longer lists the details of the international students, the department’s money spinner, which has been taking eighty students a year for some years now. Including them would require an expensive extra twenty pages. But, in my view, they are worth it. They are, after all the geese who lay the golden eggs, and when they go back home they tell their colleagues and friends how much they gained from their year in London.

Xcity, the annual magazine produced by the magazine students at City University, London, takes on Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, in the latest issue that has just come off the presses. Paxman asserted that the nation, and the students, were wasting their money by studying journalism at a university. According to an interview he gave it takes only three weeks to train a journalist. Whereas the poor students at City University and elsewhere, have to sign up for three years for the undergraduate option or twelve months for the intensive post-graduate courses.

Paxman is renowned for challenging the conventional wisdom, and doing so with the ferocity of a Rottweiler and the tenacity of terrier. In this case he is espousing the conventional wisdom. Had he come to last night’s annual party for the Laurence Stern Fellowship, he would have found that the three national editors present, (from The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times) would have agreed with most of what he had to say on the subject.And I think it probable that the executive editor of the Washington Post, Len Downie, the presenter of the Today Programme, Jim Naughtie, and the anchor man of BBC News24, Gavin Esler, who were also at the party, would have found themselves agreeing with Paxman.

I can assert this with a degree of certainty because I have known for several years all the people I have mentioned so far, with the exception of the present editor of The Times, James Harding.

Harding was also exceptional in that he was the only editor mentioned who actually went on a journalism course before he embarked on a career in journalism. As it happens, he was at my own University, but because by the time he came we were the biggest in the UK we never met. I was running either the International course or the magazine course. Harding was on the newspaper course, but I know what he was taught.

So I am 90 per cent sure, that when challenged by Paxman, in my fantasy meeting which did not take place, he would have said that the course he did at City helped him get his first job, but it did not give him the skills/qualities which enabled him to leapfrog the competition and jump into the editor’s chair at The Times.

What all these editors would have agreed about, was not that it takes three weeks to train a journalist, but the thinking behind the sound bite that Paxman delivered to the City University student who interviewed him. The best way of learning journalism is by doing it. What you can learn off site, whether it is in a university or on a training programme run by the BBC or by a newspaper group, is far less important than what you have to learn by attempting to do it, thinking on your feet in a busy newsroom and getting what help you can from experienced colleagues, in the limited time available for you to write the story to get in tomorrow’s paper.

This was always true. But it is even more true today, when journalists, and students on placement with news organisations, have to meet the demands of twenty-four hour a day broadcast programmes and newspaper websites, which have adopted the same deadlines. As recently as two years ago, there was a fierce debate as to whether newspapers should save their scoops for the paid for printed newspaper. Those who wanted to hold stories have lost out to the realities of the web age in which we live. There are a few exceptions, where for instance, a newspaper has been conducting a long investigation on the Watergate scale, and has accumulated information which no rival can possibly equal in a few hours.

But even in those cases, the need to publish quickly often over-rides other considerations. While the newspaper is consulting its lawyers, other newspaper rivals will not attempt to publish. But web sites, like the Drudge Report, will publish the essence of the story in the making.

This poses a problem for universities preparing students for entry into journalism. The journalistic need is to design courses which will encourage the Rottweiler and terrier like qualities exemplified by Paxman. But at the same time, there is the even more important imperative, to discourage wouldbe journalists from trying to model themselves on the Jeremy Paxman brand, and to hold any Rottweiler tendencies they have firmly in check for a few years. After all Paxman only established his brand after many years studying serious subjects in higher education and after many years of learning on the job. It is not easy for universities to satisfy these kinds of needs. The dominant concern is with what is taught rather than how it is taught. The curriculum rules. And when I was in City University yesterday the talk was all about the changes in the curriculum being made and being proposed to make sure that students were prepared for the web age.

Barack Obama is the darling of the college kids, and increasingly he is making the still handsome Hillary Clinton look like an over-worked school teacher, who is desparately trying to get the children to listen to what she says. As he sweeps from victory to victory, he is demonstrating that a man in his forties can as well get votes from people old enough to be his father, but America’s oldies are fighting back.

Ralph Nader, aged 73 has just announced that he is entering the fray for the third time. He does not have enough money to pay for the advertising and press coverage necessary to give him a chance of winning. And, regrettedly, it is highly likely that most of America’s youf do not even know who he is. But many academics, as well as some journalists, have argued that his canditure in 2000, was a critical factor in getting George W. Bush elected. Nader’s reputation rests on his life-long campaign to make big business accountable to the electorae. Amongst his many other achievments as the champion of the consumer he pushed Detroit into making safety a selling point for cars, along with the more seductive features of speed and appearance. It was a platform bound to frighten away all decent Republicans. But it warmed the hearts of many Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrats, apart from the trade unionists, who thought that Nader in power might well mean that many of their member would lose their jobs.

This time he is making it even more explicit He is the candidate of the people, not the party machines, not the other candidates who are being in his view, much too lovey dovey with big business. This time around he will not be an effective spoiler, either for Obama or Clinton, if she emerges as the Democratic champion.

Why? For a short answer, the best quotes are those everyone knows, which happen to come from a Republican President, Abraham Lincoln. You can’t fool all the people all the time. Powerful though his office is, the American President in 2009, cannot tell big business what to do. What I call, in shorthand, American consumer capitalism, is currently embraced by the Chinese, the Indians, and many of the Europeans. The giant international companies have many paymasters they have to satisfy. And they have become pretty expert in persuading their customers that their products and their world view is right.

Readers, you will all have read in the mainstream media, that Nader is running. But the point of this story is not, in accordance with the journalist training that those working in the mainstream media get, in the first paragraph.

It is the last paragpaph. Which will have to be a long one. And, as we all know, the mass readership only reads the first paragraph and the working classes don’t understand long words.

In the trawl for comments on Nader’s presidential bid, a CBS reporter asked Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of New York, what he thought about it, at a routine press conference Bloomberg was giving about his business affairs. Bloomberg declared that every American had the right to stand for President. The message was go for it, Ralph. Additionally, as the CBS reporter dutifully reported, Bloomberg again denied that he was thinking of running himself for President. The CBS reporter worked hard and checked with the Bloomber supporters’ campaign. What they said is that Bloomberg will make his decision about whether he will run next week, after the results of the Texas and Ohio primaries.

Since I have written under the British libel laws, I would be the last person to accuse Bloomberg of lying. But I will say that his supporters know his mind better than he does! And I do think that Bloomberg could be a very serious contender. Not because I have not read my American history, and do not know of the long list of failed independent candidates. But because I believe that history never repeats itself.

But that is not a reason for not studying history.

Which reminds me, that the thing I am most proud in terms of my own personal biography is one of the things I did after I passed the British retirement age of 65, which was to start a new undergraduate degree is Journalism and Contemporary History at City University. All credit to City University for allowing, even encouraging me to start this degree. But my feelings about City University, like my feelings about most of the organisations I write about, are ambivalent.

Because a few years later City University fired me. (Message to the libel lawyers. This is journalistic licence. They did not actually fire me, they refused to renew my post-retirement contract, on the grounds, that, let’s face it, Bob, you are over seventy!)

But that’s just my own personal biog. So let’s return to the election for the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. The likely Democratic candidate is Obama, whom many still liken to JFK, for his appeal to youthful idealism. But they forget that the equally youthful George W. Bush, had made a pig’s ear of the job, so much so that anyone who stands for the Republicans is hobbled before he (or she, but so far there are not any she’s) has finished the first leg.

At the time I write, Obama is the clear front runner for the Democrats. On the Republican side there is no sign of a candidate who has any hope of stopping the bandwagon for McCain. His wife smiled at the press conference at which he was confronted with the New York Times suggestion that he had been fucking around with a blonde lobbyist. Quite different from Hillary Clinton, who looked distinctly uncomfortable when Bill was first being asked about Monica.

From my own viewing point, the sexual behaviour of the boss, is not the most important determinant. And, neither is it for the American electorate. Judged by the way people are voting, much of the American electorate does not vote according to prejudices about sexual preference, gender and race. This campaign has demonstrated that huge number of them are quite prepared for a woman or a black. (Whether they are ready for an openly gay President is still not indicated!)

And I don’t think they will blackball McCain because of the allegations that he has been an adulterer. Way back in the olden days, Palmeston acually won a British election when his opponents revealed his extra-marital affairs. Times change. But not too much. The journalists who followed Kennedy, knew all about his rather spectacular daily adulteries. They also knew that they doing in their own lives. Although they did not write about it.

But McCain has another problem, which has not been properly addressed by the mainstream media. He is 71.  And will still be ruling America at 75 if he wins. He is older even than Reagan, 69 when elected, and Eisenhower, 61. Eisenhower was still only 68 when I arrived to live in America in 1959, but he seemed much older. As does McCain.

Bloomberg in only five years younger, but he is more in tune with younger people. If he runs agaist Obama he might have a chance. McCain would lose a fight with Obama, but he would save the face of the Republican Party, because history would judge they had chosen a decent and honourable man (even if it is later proved that he cheated on his wife, because let’s face it, he is not alone on that score.)

In the dream I had bought a much older and lighter Yamaha motor cycle to replace my trusty but heavy Yamaha Majesty 250 cc scooter. I had made the purchase quickly and when I got it home I found that it’s performance was inadequate. I made some enquiries and discovered that it was indeed a brilliant bike, much loved by a devoted band of enthusiasts. But the company’s product. To work well this Yamaha required a modification which involved fitting an extra six exhaust pipes. Making this a motor bike looking like no other on the roads. Many people found that the seven ribbed fan on the side of the bike was ugly. But to the enthusiasts, who included one of my colleagues in City University’s music department, it was not only beautiful but an example of engineering excellence. The company did not make this modication. You had to buy the kit from the band of enthusiasts for 935 pounds.

I don’t think it is likely that Yamaha, or any other company, ever made such a bike, so instead of checking it out on the web, I thought a bit about how my sleeping mind had come to write this nonsense drama.

At yesterday’s meeting I had to meet a fresh face from union headquarters, and in the social chit chat before we got down to business I told him that it had taken me 48 minutes to reach City University by public transport, whereas it would have taken me 13 minutes on my scooter, which is now garaged in Dorset. He told me that he had walked from HQ in twenty minutes, but that he too preferred the speed and convenience of two-wheeled transport. He had a 900 cc Yamaha, which he did not use yesterday, because he has recently moved to deepest Surrey and comes up to London on the train.

I told him that my first bike was a 125 cc BSA Bantam, which had by far the biggest sale of in Britain in the 1950s, before the Japanese arrived, spearheaded by Honda, and drove BSA of the face of the earth. We might have gone on to discuss whether British manufacturing declined because of conservative and slothful managers or because of bully boy and conservative trade unionists. But instead we got down to business, which involved trying to protect our members from the effects of the new fashionable managerialism which is sweeping the British university sector.

Back to the dream. Now it serves as a reminder that I too suffer from the dread disease of conformity. My first bike was in fact a 1928 Raleigh 250 cc which I bought for 15 pounds from my saved up pocket money. It was a huge weight to push when the engine gave up, which it did occasionally. So I sold it for 20 pounds and bought, for 25 pounds,a 125 cc James, a lively and smashing bike. It had a modified exhaust  which stuck out at an odd angle and made rather a lot of noise, which alarmed my family. So I did the ’sensible’ thing; traded it in and bought for seventy pounds on hire purchase a BSA Bantam.

In truth, I never liked it that much. It made heavy weather of the hills, and girl on the back was liable to jump off and run up the hill, it was so excrutiatingly slow. And it stopped frequently. I became something of an expert at tickling the carburettor to get it going again. But that is no fun on a rainy night on the Birmingham New Road.

Why on earth did I not have the courage of my convictions and keep the James? And why am I presently a slave to Microsoft, even though its huge programs slow my computer down to a snail’s pace?

And why do I continue to use my mobile phone to communicate with BT and npower when they make no effort at all to sort out their mistakes and apologise for them?

It is now a week since I wrote my last blog. I have been dealing with giant companies who do not seem very sensitive to my needs. The big advantage of the free market is that it offers consumers a choice. But what I am impressed by is the sameness of big companies. Both www.bt.com and www.npower.co.uk tell me that ‘Your call is important to us.’ And then they keep me hanging on for hours, listening to automated messages. When I send emails of complaint they send me automated responses telling me my complaint is being dealt with. BT tells me it is their policy to deal with complaints in two working days. But it is well over two weeks since I wrote my first email of complaint to BT.

And they still have not connected my telephone line in London, ordered on 12 July for delivery on 1st August.

Worse than that they have not given me any explanation as to why they have not connected the line in my London flat, which is a BT line.

Yesterday afternoon I thought that I was at least getting somewhere with npower.co.uk. After doggedly hanging on from my mobile I got through to a human being. And kept them talking about why they were making a second threat to cut off my gas supplies. They still insisted, as they had done six weeks ago, that they could not trace the payments I had made to them, because they had so many bank accounts. They said I would have to talk to my bank and give them the details.

Happily I only had to listen to three responses from Smile, before I got a human being, who gave me a few numbers. I rang npower back and miraculously got through to another human being. Who told me at last that they could now verify my payments, but that before they withdrew their threat I would need to run downstairs and find the number of my gas meter. By that time I was at my daughter’s house and ringing from there. But I promised to do it as soon as I got home. Which I did and was kept hanging on for 35 minutes of automated responses before their closing time of 6 PM. (Yes, I did try their oft repeated offer to ring me back. But it does not work with mobile numbers!)

But what was finally admitted by npower yesterday is that they are trying to charge me for two flats at my new address in London. So yet another company is involved, www.parkheath.com, the estate agents who are responsible for managing the flat I am renting. So I still do not know whether the supply npower is threatening to turn off is for my flat, or another flat in the building. I alerted Parkheath to this problem way back in May.

Neither of these companies is guiltless. And I intend to pursue my complaints to each of them, until these matters are sorted out.

But tonight I realise that there is an even graver problem. Many, perhaps most, big companies, are slavishly following the curruntly accepted norms of how companies should deal with their customers.

Lots of soft soap, like ‘Your call is important to us.’ but a total failure to put things right.

What is even worse is that these values and practices are spreading to the university sector. Today I had to go in for a meeting at City University. It related to a consultation exercise. (The message to staff is your views are important to us. In fact university staff are punch drunk with consultation exercises. And this particular document reversed all the essential features of a similar exercise three years ago, which many staff opposed, but the management implemented.)

So www.city.ac.uk should take note of this. And particularly the new vice-chancellor, Professor Malcolm Gillies. He will have to take note of the views of the large companies who provide some funding. But he will also need to consider whether a decent university should slavishly follow these current corporate fashions.

Got back from City University at 5 PM yesterday, feeling extremely irritated. My meeting had taken much longer than I had expected and on the way home it had started drizzling with rain. As I was taking off my crash helmet the doorbell went. There was a young man on the doorstep wearing a white t-shirt. He wanted to ask me a few questions on behalf of Transport for London. It would only take a few minutes.

I was reluctant but since I was already too late to make the telephone calls I had planned to arrange services in our new house in Dorset I agreed. I like to think I am public spirited and if university lecturers refuse to help people doing surveys then how they expect their students to do their research, which in my area depends on a willingness of the general public to answer questions.

So I invited him in. He could not come in because that would be invading my privacy. I realised he was thoughtlessly regurgitating his training programme, which clearly did not include the obvious fact that if anyone invites you into their home you could not be invading their privacy. Then he said he did not mind if I got a chair and sat down. Clearly his training programme did not tell him that if you ask a 73-year-old man if he needs to sit down, the implicit message is that he is a doddery old man incapable of standing on his own doorstep for a few minutes.

To explain all this to him would have taken up more time. So I snorted that what I wanted was a cigarette. I went in and fetched my cigarettes, trying to contain my rising irritation and get in the right frame of mind to answer his questions. The questions began with things like did I own a car, a motor bike or a cycle, did I use the buses and the tube. I pointed to my scooter by his side. He then asked if I realised that I could buy an electric scooter. I said yes but I was not going to buy one until there was a model which would do more than twenty-five miles an hour and had a range much greater than forty miles between charges.

Gradually I realised that what he was doing was not a proper survey at all. The next set of questions started with would I like a map of the London buses. I explained I already had one. Oh, but his maps were much better, and he produced a set of them. One for the tube, one for central London buses, one for north-west London buses, one for the North London railway line, even one for the London underground. By this time I was having difficulty containing my rising anger so I told him that I had lived around here for thirty-nine years and could get about quite happily without using any maps at all.

I realised that this was in fact a public relations campaign for Transport for London. And it reminded me of an incident in the morning. My wife had rung the teacher’s pension fund to inform them of our new address which took about two minutes. She was then asked to answer a series of questions about what she thought about the service provided in response to this very simple request, which took at least ten minutes. My wife answered patiently and courteously. But when she put down the phone she snorted with anger. What a waste of time? What fatuous questions?

I was also reminded of my dealings with British Telecomms over the last few days. Left hanging on the telephone, for a total time of well over two hours, with the automated message ringing in my ears, ‘Your call is important to us.’ All I want from BT is my telephone number in Dorset so I can send out my change of address cards. They promised to send it to me in the post but it still has not arrived. I shall have another go today, but I am limiting myself to half an hour of waiting. Otherwise I shall not have time to do all the other things I have to do before we move in just over a week’s time.

The issues underlying this series of anecdotes are deeply serious. Thousands of such ’surveys’ are being done every day. If they are collated they are of no value because they are deeply non-scientific. If they are not then the whole thing is a sham. Either way the number of man-hours wasted in such activities must run into thousands and the amount of money wasted must run into millions. They are an aspect of what I call the new managerialism which is almost universally accepted. Someone at BT (and most other large companies in the land) has worked out that the amount of time employees spend on the telephone costs the company a lot of money. So the number of staff answering telephone calls has been reduced dramatically and the customer who is left gnashing his teeth.

Theoretically this problem should be solved by the free market. The business should go to the company, which perceives the customer’s real needs, and which is prepared to train people to answer queries properly and employ enough of them to cope with demand. In fact, it is difficult to find any company which is prepared to challenge the current conventional wisdom. My current telephone company, Virgin, is not quite as bad as BT in waiting time, but it is pretty bad. And, unlike BT, which at least leaves me in silence during the waiting period, Virgin plays the most awful music which shatters my ear drums.

It should be possible to prove the folly of the over-use of the automated telephone voice by a proper scientific survey, but would be almost impossible to design such a survey. Because of the complexity of the issues involved. The increasing complexity of the lives we live is one of the things that makes decision-making in both the public sector and the private sector so difficult for today’s managers.

I can illustrate this by reporting yet another thing that irritated me yesterday. My meeting was at the Cass Business School, which is near Moorgate tube station. So I decided to park my motor scooter in Finsbury Circus, where I knew there were spaces for around two hundred motor cycles. Obviously the best place to head for, because by the law of averages, someone was likely to move if I kept my cool and rode around the circus. After three circuits I decided that the law of averages was not working to my advantage, but I spotted just one space, where I could squeeze in by moving a 1950s Vespa a few inches to one side.

The plain fact is that the number of motor cycle spaces in central London is way below the number of people who want to use them because of the many advantages of the motor bike in today’s conditions. But the boss of London, Mayor Ken Livingstone, does not like motor bikes, although he is very keen on bicycles. He is able to justify this attitude by data which show that in terms of carbon emissions some motor bikes are worse than cars. Quite true. But it is equally true that motor bikes are almost as good for reducing congestion as bicycles and that the amount of energy consumed in manufacturing the average car is far higher than the average motor cycle.

When faced with issues of complexity decision making needs to be based on a qualitative analysis rather than a quantitive survey. The number of variables is so huge, that however you approach it requires a qualititive decision; otherwise, how do you decide to weight the various factors involved.

By co-incidence my meeting yesterday was chaired by a professor of organisational behaviour, the best discipline for articulating the disadvantages with the prevailing fashion for justifying decisions by reference to quantitive surveys. By yet another co-incidence his Ph D supervisor, was Professor John Morris of the Manchester Business School, a doughty advocate of the qualitative, whom I also knew well.

Morris spent a lot of his time in the last twenty years of his career pushing the advantages of action research, which was fashionable in the 1980s but is now too often dismissed as old hat. The starting point is not pulling the manager out of the work place to spend a month at a business school following a prescribed curriculum. Instead the university professor goes to the work place to experience the reality of manager’s job and to get the manager to articulate the way he sees his job and the problems it involves. Then the two of them sit down to work out a programme, which will involve the manager taking some courses at the business school while at the same time working on his problems back on the shop floor.

This approach requires a lot of man hours of work by the professor and the Ph D students who help the manager in the workplace. Which is one reason it has become unfashionable, because like employing human beings to answer the telephone, it costs a lot of money and it also uses up a lot of professorial time.

In the new managerialism, which is dominating the lives of today’s university teachers, it is not easy to find time for such activities. Because university teachers have to fill in their own questionnaires, justifying the amount of time they spend on different aspects of their work and specifying what their aims and objectives are. They have to get their research papers published in the journals. They have to encourage their Ph D students to do original work, rather than rehash the stuff written in the 1980s.

But surely it is still possible to challenge the conventional wisdom? What I would like to see is a Ph D thesis which investigated how similar the new managerialism is to the management theories which were fashionable in the 1960s, which included ‘management by objectives’.

And, come to think of it, perhaps the finance specialists could get someone to go through the books of Transport for London and find out how many of the millions of taxpayers’ money they spent went into wasteful activities like employing armies of young men in t-shirts to knock on doors in Kentish Town.