Prediction time - a revolution at work

I'm a management consultant in banking and financial services when I'm not being grumpy on Twitter, posting photos of the fine county of Cheshire on Facebook, or uploading exercise to Strava. My work brings me into frequent contact with Board members of a couple of the largest UK banks, including at the moment. And I think we might be seeing the stirrings of a revolution in how large, private sector organisations operate, directly as a result of CV19. I'll explain my reasoning, partly so I can look back in two years or whenever and either admit I got it hopelessly wrong, or be smug about my crystal ball...

So, coronavirus, CV19; when lockdown came the banks pretty much emptied all their head office-type buildings and functions. Employees were instantly told to work from home, and the vast, vast majority have not been back to their desks since. (Indeed, I've been told second-hand that when one of the banks that I don't work with asked if anybody wished to return to their desks at Canary Work when lockdown was eased slightly, not one of the 3,000 employees volunteered. And I know for certain that not even Board members have been into one bank's Gresham Street head office). Branch opening times have been reduced to four hours a day in many cases, and call centres have operated with skeleton staffing, again with many people being set up to work from home, where previously that simply wasn't an option for them.

In the first couple of weeks there were a few wobbles. Some people had to be given remote access to their organisation's systems, which isn't always straightforward given the security wrappers that are put round bank technologies these days. I know for certain that there was, and continues to be, major worries about the overall credit quality of the lending book, particularly for small and medium businesses. And the executives that run those businesses are particularly nervous, as they've been forced into providing Business Bounceback Loans, which although are government-backed, still fall under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority, who hold the senior managers of banks personally liable these days (through something called the Senior Managers Regime, introduced after 2008) for any wrongdoing - which includes lending to people or firms who are unlikely to be able to repay, which may well be the case for the Bounceback Loans. Plus, those same executives have been working even longer hours, and under even more pressure - probably unsustainably so - than BC (Before Covid).

Despite all the above, two major things have happened. First, despite the wobbles and the panics in the early days, the businesses have pretty much carried on functioning. Yes, there's been some criticism that some banks have been slow to pay out some loans, but by-and-large branches have still opened, internet banking has stayed available, phones have still been answered, and cashpoints have been full of notes. The banks have also had to absorb massively increased levels of phone traffic too, and individuals and small businesses have understandably flooded them with requests for payment holidays or other advice. Some days have been five, six times busier than the equivalent day last year, at a time when, as I've said, much activity has been transferred to 23 year olds working from their one-bed flats. It's been a truly remarkable achievement, and one that will get little attention or acclaim.

But for me, as a consultant, that's not the most significant or most interesting of the two big things that have happened. That is the fact that huge swathes of those people in the head office-type jobs have not been very busy, and that their lack of activity hasn't inhibited the running of the firm. This has been a hobby horse of mine for a while now - the fact that once an organisation reaches a certain size - I would estimate in the 5,000-10,000 employee range in the private sector - significant numbers of "non-jobs" are created. It's hard to define exactly what a "non-job" is, other that one that creates no discernible value, defined in terms of either generating revenue, managing or saving cost, or keeping the organisation safe from a legal or regulatory point of view. But after a while you tend to be able to spot a non-job holder quite easily.

These non-jobs have been created for a variety of reasons over the years. The three most popular in banking have been a) the 'spans of control' approach, which has set ratios for the number of people each manager has to have as direct reports, leading to jobs being created just to meet the ratio and thereby help secure their grade; b) a huge over-reaction to the events of 2008 leading to very fat 'Risk' departments (where few people actually understand genuine risk, but they sure have a fine list of forms that need to be filled in before anything can actually be done; and c) the fact that the organisations have been so big that the people at the top simply have no conception what thousands of their employees actually do, day in, day out. (I proved this to my satisfaction four years ago when I spent a month physically drawing out every department in every division of a large clearing back on twenty square metres of the CEO's dining room wall, and adding selected metrics for each one [number of people, average salary etc]. "The Wall", as it became known, stayed there for several months, during which time every executive and some non-exec directors visited it, and to a person expressed that it gave them insight into the company they'd just never previously had. Other than for their part of the business, they simply didn't know who did what, where, and what it cost beyond a headline figure).

Anyway, CV19 is beginning to shine a light on these non-jobs. They've been under-employed: the committees they support with their myriad Powerpoints haven't met as decisions have been escalated up the organisation much more quickly; the meetings that fill their diaries haven't been needed as a result - and the world hasn't stopped turning, something the people at the top have noticed.

Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to posit that it's only in the long term that the effects of the lack of activity of middle managers are likely to be felt. You could argue quite plausibly that the BC networks of information gathering and transmission that feed critical and strategic decisions are supporting what's going on now, and as they wither so the quality of future management decisions will deteriorate. I don't buy that - information is frequently sifted, refined and presented in such do-my-career-no-damage ways as to become practically meaningless. And if it's not diluted like that, it's bound up in 84 page presentations that simultaneously serve to both justify the existence of the author, and scramble the mind of the recipient, likely a senior decision taker.

I don't think I'm describing anything that the execs haven't known for themselves in their hearts. But these people have been their insurance policy, their don't-go-to-jail card, and I suspect that they'd probably prefer to keep them in place if they could. But after CV19 the world is going to be a very different place, one where they will be under immense pressure to cut costs, and the traditional approach of everyone finding 10% just isn't going to be enough. They're going to have to be radical, and they now know the uncomfortable truth that they employ lots of people that they don't really need.

So my prediction is that we're going to see huge swathes of redundancies in banking, but not from the sources of headcount reductions over the last decade like branches and call centres, but from the functions that have been growth areas in recent times - risk, chief operating office, transformation and related functions. (We'll also see branches stay at their current levels of service, and call centre numbers shrunk further, as everything goes online, but that's for another day).

And why would banking be any different from other industries dominated by large firms? It may have a greater risk management component than elsewhere, but my strong suspicion is that many sizeable operations will have been shocked at just how few people it takes to keep the show on the road. Not everyone with a non-job will be fired; I'm sure some will be transferred to more productive roles, but plenty will be shown the door. So while journalists and business writers are speculating on the long term possibilities of working from the home, the impact that will have on organisational culture, and the usage and rental yields of commercial property and so on, I sense that the real story might be an entirely different one - the fact that the virus has illustrated very starkly that there's a vast number of people being employed on very comfortable salaries (I'm talking in the £40k - £80k range, and more in London), who just don't need to be. Stand by for lots of middle class unemployment. 

New name, new style

Welcome to my updated blog title and style. It was time to move on, update things a bit. "Monmarduman" was never that catchy, and nine years on from its coining, it's a bit meaningless. In any case, the word was all to do with a variety and cycling and running challenges, and my subject matter's moved on and diversified a bit since then.

My themes are chosen at random, and are pretty much based on whatever seems worthy of comment, or personal stories of interest, at the point in time I write them. Something that I think I'm going to drop in now and again, however, is insight into the industry in which I do my consulting - banking and financial services. That sounds like it'll be about as interesting as watching the proverbial paint dry, but I've seen (and still see) some pretty hair-raising things, which I'll attempt to recount within the boundaries of not excluding myself from ever working again...

In the meantime, I'm going to reproduce a passage written by Lionel Shriver in the 18 April edition of The Spectator, for it captures exactly what I had in mind in renaming this blog:

"I am a type. I don't like groups. I maintain few memberships. I question and resist authority, especially enforcement of rules for the rules' sake. I'm leery of orthodoxy. I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms.  Everybody's met such obstreperous specimens - and some readers out there are just like me....We don't joyously belt out national anthems, and recently, to popular disgust, many of us curmudgeons don't lean out our windows every Thursday at 8 p.m. to clap for the NHS".

To my own disappointment, I'm not as publicly rebellious as Lionel. I do mine more quietly. But I don't clap the NHS. Nor do I wear a poppy in November, celebrate VE Day or burst to get Christmas decorations up. I don't like music festivals, religious gatherings or any other acts of mass worship. They unsettle me. Formal occasions bring out the 12 year old in me - when my youngest graduated at Oxford most of the degree awards ceremony was in Latin, which I couldn't help but provide an idiotic translation for my party. The same is true at weddings and funerals - the former depress me and the latter make me want to crack jokes.  I hate any kind of orchestrated jollity.  Parties leave me cold.

I'm sure some of this is down to the simple fact of being an introvert (though work and life has forced me, like so many other introverts, to develop an extrovert front).  But some of the rest of it could be down to one or more of: personality failings; a strong sense that I need no help when it comes to determining what's moral (or not); and an undoubtedly arrogant belief in my analytical abilities.

I probably wouldn't choose the words in the last couple of paragraphs if I were entering my details on an online dating website. Fortunately, those days are over, so instead I can use my darker side to being interesting on here (hopefully), and beginning to discuss things - particularly in and from my professional world, as I say - that previously I haven't. Let's see how it goes.

Coronavirus Diary

Normally, I write to be read by others, and while of course I'm delighted you're reading this, today's words are more intended for me to look back on in the future. Because what we're living through is so extraordinary, so unprecedented, that I want some record of how strange it felt. I also want to have a punt at guessing some of the things happening now that we'll look back at as acts of madness.

Normally at this time of year, at least for the last few years, both me and the missus would be in France. We normally go out to our house there at the end of March/start of April, and spend a pretty intensive month mowing, digging, planting, pruning, power washing, painting, airing and cleaning to get the place looking good after a winter unattended.

It's not all work of course. Life out there settles into a pretty agreeable routine of dog walking (one early morning long, two short ones each day), exercise, garden and house chores, at least one beach or coast path walk each week, a meal out, homemade pizzas and fizz on Friday nights, homemade curry on Saturday nights, and the missus off to a vide grenier ("empty loft", or a car boot) or two on Sunday mornings. If that sounds banal, it is. Conversation can get no more exciting than whether the lights on the wind turbines we can see from our windows have turned from red (night time) to white (daytime) yet, or whether Raymond (84 year old farmer-widower-neighbour) has trundled off to market yet. But it's all immensely relaxing for the most part, and it has its rewards. Here's an example (the view from the back door):

There's none of that this year of course. Goodness knows what the place looks like, but one this that's certain is that it won't look like the pic above. And neither will the veg plot be as pristine as this, nor the grass as short:

But hey ho, it's hardly the biggest problem in the world. We started from scratch in 2015, and we'll do so again. I just hope we can get back there in the second half of June so that we can at least harvest some of the blackcurrant crop.

At the moment, however, we're both at home in Macclesfield. We're among the lucky ones - we're both working, we're healthy, we have outdoor space and great walking both from the front door and within a very short drive for properly spectacular hills and countryside.  Day-to-day life, particularly the working at home bit, gets a bit repetitive and claustrophobic intermittently, but on the other hand getting up early and getting dressed properly helps maintain an important sense of routine and order.

For us, there are some good things to come out of this lockdown. Zoom and Microsoft Teams have been a boon to us, as for so many others. I find audio-only conference calls at work really unsatisfactory, but adding video transforms the experience.  I'm hoping that the realisation that we can be effective from home endures as life gets back to normal, and the 3-4 days a week I spend in London when I'm working can become 1-2. Less London (and its transport systems), less time in air-conditioned offices, and more nights in my own bed would make continuing to work generally much more tolerable.

Another good thing is that because seeing family is currently impossible, we seem to be making more effort to use technology that properly keeps us in touch - FaceTime in particular is great for that. We're also lucky in that we exist in some great communities, virtual and otherwise. Every Friday from 5 till 6.30 it's the missus' Head of IT doing a DJ set from his Manchester flat, every Saturday from 3 till 4 one of our neighbours hauls his Marshall speakers into the back garden for an hour of 'Uplifting Classics' which everyone round and about seems to enjoy, and there's been online quizzes, yoga and Zoom 'virtual background' competitions.

That's all lovely, but we're very lucky. If we had school age kids to try to entertain and educate, or if we had no outside space, or if our income had dried up, life would, I suspect, feel even harder and more unforgiving at the moment than it does usually.

But there are plenty of aspects of this lockdown that feel bad for everybody, and we'll maybe come back to look at as madnesses of the period, including....

The Police - they seem to be on a mission to break the policing-by-consent model. They've allowed the perception to grow that they a) find it easier to fine and boss-around generally law-abiding people than go after the difficult, awkward cases, which their approach to policing lockdown has reiforced; b) have a role to play in "making society fairer". They probably do, but it lies in ensuring that victims and perpetrators of crime are treated equally, regardless of cause, class or income, rather than pathetic virtue-signalling about how much they care about 'social justice'. Their weekly homage to the NHS is particularly excreable.

Talking of which...the slogan "Protect the NHS". I understand the reasons for this, I do, we don't want the health service overwhelmed, we need to manage the peak, blah blah, but the back-to-front nature of a key government message, if you take a step back, is astounding. The NHS should be there to protect us, and the fact that it wasn't ready to do so must surely represent a massive failure of planning and management. Even worse, the "protect the NHS" message has been taken to heart so literally by the masses that not only are the diagnoses of cancer down from c.30,000 a month to closer to 5,000, but A&E admissions for heart attacks and strokes are much reduced. I have a strong suspicion that when the stats are compiled we'll find that for every CV19 death we saved through hospitals not being overwhelmed, there were two others from late/no diagnoses and lack of timely treatment. But hey, the TV cameras won't be there to record those, so it'll be a much smaller political issue, and the government and its advisors will have been seen to have done ok.

And on that note, the uniformity of the instructions to the public has again seemed nonsensical to me. It's as though people are incapable of understanding more than one childishly simple piece of advice. Maybe they are, but I don't think so. This is what I'd have said:

- regardless of what the stats are around infection rates, country comparisons, it's clear that the vast majority of young people will escape unscathed if they get CV19, and the vast majority of the elderly and those with serious health conditions are at great risk from it.
- so, if you're under 50 with no health conditions, go about life as normal, but when you're in public, wear a mask and keep your distance from others (as well as plenty of hand washing an no face touching)
- if you're 50 to 70 and generally fit you might want to be a bit more careful. Carry on as per the under 50s, but don't mix with anyone outside of your immediate family.
- if you're over 70 and/or have a serious health condition, be bloody careful. Stay at home, don't mix with anyone. And we'll mobilise to bring you everything you need. (It seems lunatic to me, for example, that over-70s have been going to supermarkets because they haven't been able to get delivery slots, while under-50s have been allowed to continue to receive their groceries at home; that's fine if all the oldies are taken of, but direct capacity there in the first instance.

I'd have shut all the places where people come into contact as a matter as course - pubs, restaurants etc. - but to have garden centres, council tips and loads of other businesses closed as a matter of course regardless of their staffing or customer profile seems wantonly destructive to me.

But then it's all about political perceptions and the fact that most people are incredibly bad at understanding and assessing true risk. Not only do they not get the right way to quantify and compare risks is to compare their impacts with the probability of each event occurring, but even more subtly (and this is illustrated by the cancer diagnosis point above), it's possible that by focusing on a single risk and minimising it as much as possible, you actually increase the overall risk load by other risks becoming more likely.  Aside from probability theory in statistics, formal education doesn't really get close to touching this stuff, and it should. Not only would it increase the chances of having a more sophisticated electorate, less susceptible to media scare stories but it would also have an impact on how people manage their finances and take significant life decisions. I won't be holding my breath though.

Well that was a bit of a journey, from my back garden in France to what should the on the national curriculum. I'll stop there, with the hope that I'll be able to look back and read this in 2025 with the world sort-of back to normal.

Lose Yourself

After a bit of a drought, I'm raining blog posts at the moment. There's not much else to do, frankly. I can only sit in the sun and walk the dog for so long. But one of the things I am doing is getting some exercise early each morning; it's what I do even in normal times, and it feels even more important in these abnormal times.

When the weather's good, most runs or rides can be classified with the unimaginative adjectives 'nice' or 'good'. Occasionally they might achieve a notch up on the superlative scale - 'energising' or 'excellent' perhaps. Even less often they're elevated further - and a single adjective is inadequate for those, though if forced to choose one with a gun to my head, I might go for 'fantastic', or even - pass the sickbag - 'life-affirming'.

Today was one of those times. I was out for 74 minutes, and probably only 6 of those minutes made it into that top category (though the rest were definitely 'excellent'). But those 6 minutes - goodness me - what a difference they make to everything. I want to try to describe the feeling. In my case - and if you needed a sick bag for the last paragraph you may need a sick bucket for this one - it's a combination of a sense that at that moment there is literally nothing else you would rather be doing and nowhere else you'd rather be, a surge of elation, and a feeling that you're totally at the top of your game.

I get that feeling in two circumstances. Or one, depending on your point of view. They are descending big mountains very quickly on a bicycle, and descending hills or mountains on foot (running) on difficult terrain. And with the latter, I'm normally listening to music. (No chance of that on the bike; there are too many things trying to kill you [other road users, cattle, sheep, gravel, blow outs, your own misjudgment] to justify cutting off a vital sense).

Take this morning for example. The 6 minutes of delight came after I'd climbed up to the telecomms tower on Croker Hill / Sutton Common. From there you can look west across the whole of Cheshire and into North Wales, and east across the hills of the Peak District. It's fabulous, even if the spot itself has got a slight Cold War feel to it:

From there, I started the descent home. I had 'Nothing Else Matters' by Metallica on Spotify, I'd just seen a herd of 40 deer leaping hedges, the sun was rising over Shutlingsloe (the Matterhorn of East Cheshire don't you know), and I was dancing over the deep ruts of the dried out pasture with a lightness of foot that had appeared miraculously from somewhere. For those 6 minutes, I was in another zone; deep concentration so that I didn't turn an ankle, but still with an intense appreciation of my surroundings. It was fabulous and zen-like.

As I say, swooping descents off Pyrenean - for the most part - mountains are the other occasions when that same feeling creeps up on me. The only other times I can recall it are from when I used to row - when a rowing eight finally manages to achieve perfect timing, with blades all entering and exiting the water simultaneously and the boat perfectly balanced, that's pretty amazing too.

What I'm left with a few hours after this morning's run is the wish, or hope, that everyone could feel something similar to what I've been describing, even if only occasionally (it doesn't happen more than 2 or 3 times a year in my case). It feels transformative; de-aging, restorative, strengthening. Although my examples are all athletically-related, that's just my preference. I imagine the same feeling could be achieved through singing in a choir, playing in a band, dancing, or building or making something. I think it probably has to be active rather than passive - listening to a piece of music that you love may be transporting, but it hasn't got that element of personal input that feels so vital.

I think that's the point of this piece; if you haven't got something in your life that hasn't got the potential to create what I've tried to relate, try to find it. You'll forget your worries, you'll realise the inconsequentiality of much of what surrounds us, and you'll enhance your insight into what really matters. Go for it - that's my deep and meaningful Easter message.

Post-Covid Free Market Changes

I'm an unashamed believer in free markets, free trade and the power of capitalism to lift people the world over out of capitalism.  I think the case for all those things is beyond doubt empirically. 

But that doesn't mean that I think there's not a role for the state generally, and when appropriate, to regulate markets.  And when we get through Covid-19 and its hideous economic impacts, I think there's going to be a case for some fairly radical government interventions as part of the settlement with the UK population. A reset. Some measures to make things feel a bit fairer.

I've got three in mind. Here's a quick trot through them....

1. Curb executive pay by placing a limit on the multiple of what they can earn compared to the average full time pay in their organisation. I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or risk takers; I'm talking about the executives of public limited companies and larger private companies. These aren't people who've had brilliant ideas, or risked everything to create lots of new wealth.  They're much likely to have climbed greasy corporate poles through a combination of genuine ability and the skill to play the corporate game.  I'm happy for them to earn lots of money, but not the vast sums they currently do. There's plenty of literature on the subject of how the multiple of the pay of CEOs has risen from (roughly) 20 times the median pay of an employee in the 1950s, to well over (roughly) 200 times today.  I'm not sure what I'd set it at, but I'm sure that given the right data I could come up with a figure. 
   
   Aside from creating a slightly more equitable feel in the job market, this would also create an incentive to raise the average pay of employees.  We might find that the key workers currently risking their health for £10 an hour move towards earning £15 an hour. Not life-changing, but certainly more comfortable, especially when coupled with:
   
2. Moving towards a Land Value Tax as the primary source of tax receipts.  Making the move to this would be difficult and complicated, but then our existing system of taxation is difficult and complicated.  (If you don't know what Land Value Tax is the best thing to do rather than me try to explain it is go to this link: http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/). But post-Covid, there are going to be historically-enormous levels of debt that will need to start to be repaid. Increasing existing taxes on income on profits are going to discourage economic activity just at the point when it's going to be needed more than ever before, so let's move to a system which at worst will keep those taxes level, and in time would I believe have the potential to reduce them, while keeping the revenues we'll need to not slash public expenditure.  Aside from the economic benefits, I think a Land Value Tax, if done properly, would again help to create some genuine sense of "we're all in this together".
   
3. Shunning Chinese-made products.  Say what you like about Donald Trump (and most people do), but he's seen China as the major global threat for many years now, and I agree with him. A combination of their brutal domestic politics and policies, hideous human rights violations, and shameless stealing of intellectual property just make them a nation we shouldn't be doing business with (and that was before their cultural practices unleashed Covid on us). So we shouldn't.  I'm personally going to do my damndest to avoid anything manufactured in China, and I'd be supportive of, if not an outright ban on Chinese imports, high tariffs at the very least. And if that makes us worse off economically, so be it. The government can start by reversing its Huawei/5G decision. 

There's much more the government will need to do in its post-Covid (essentially a post-war) settlement with the UK population, and I'll cover that next time.

Covid-19: preventing deaths is not the top priority

I'm being good, I really am.  No unnecessary journeys or contact with others.  Choosing to exercise either very early or in the shed.  Washing my hands.  No panic buying.  Being one of the 700,000+ Good Samaritan volunteers.

And yet, and yet....something troubles me about all of this, and it's not just the police forces who seem to be delighting in their new powers (Derbyshire, Humberside - yes, I mean you, though I'm sure there are plenty of others), nor the people calling the police to report their neighbour going for a second daily jog, worrying though those things are.

It's more than that.  It's understanding that though we're being presented with the current measures and restrictions as a reaction to a public health crisis, that's only the first, and least important part of the story.  Those restrictions are essentially a political response to Covid-19, designed to maintain public order and the fabric of society.  I'm not saying that's wrong, merely that it shows that all deaths are not equal.  I'm also not saying it's a UK issue, nor even one of liberal democracies. It applies the world over, in all kinds of regimes.

Here's how I see it.  The latest modelling - which may or may not be accurate - is suggesting the UK may have 5,700 deaths as a result of the virus, two-thirds of whom are people likely to be in the last year of their life.  That feels a bit low to me based on current trends, so let's double it, and say there will be 12,000 deaths, a third of which will be people who otherwise wouldn't have died any time soon.  That's 4,000 new, avoidable deaths.  Let's say we didn't have the current restrictions in place, and as a result that rate was 10 times higher, at 40,000 deaths.

Shocking, right?  Hard to imagine.  Coffins everywhere. But as a number it's dwarfed by the number of officially recorded avoidable deaths in a typical year, as defined and recorded by the Office of National Statistics. The year for which the most recent numbers exist show that by the ONS's own definition, 31,000 women and 56,000 men died from what it calls "avoidable mortality" (treatable and infectious diseases, accidents, suicides, drug use etc.).  So in a 'normal' year, we have double the number of avoidable deaths that we'd suffer even in an extreme version of the Covid modelling.

For Covid, in addition to the restrictions on personal freedom, we're essentially crashing our economy for the foreseeable future, and creating debt that I think will take at least a century to pay off.  (Did you know we only paid the last of our WW2 debts off in 2006? [to the US]). For all other avoidable deaths, however, it's business-as-usual. 

What's the difference?  To use a horrible modern term, it's the 'optics'.  Most avoidable deaths are relatively unseen; we might hear about a death on the roads, or someone taking their own life, or someone else whose cancer was discovered too late, and think that while each one is a tragedy, it's no cause to fundamentally change what we do as a society. They're drip-fed doses of the reality of modern life.  But there's no moral difference between our reaction to Covid and what could be our reaction to the regular avoidable deaths.  Roads could be engineered and rules applied to massively reduce deaths on them.  The funding for mental health services could be expanded massively for the at-risk.  Everybody could go through very regular screening that would discover most cancers at an early, treatable stage.  But those things don't happen, by-and-large. Governments of all hues maintain a relatively balanced view of the political and economic drivers of policy.  Deaths still happen, but fewer than with no government intervention, and more than if every resource were focused on stopping them. But they happen evenly, in chronological and geographical terms, making them unremarkable other than to the poor souls affected and their families and friends.

Covid is unlikely to be like that however - there would be a massive spike in avoidable deaths, and we'd see pictures like the ones emerging from Italy and Spain, of rows and rows of coffins, of hospitals that couldn't cope with the numbers, and people dying from want of treatment.  And that would trigger in all likelihood political and societal upheaval; unrest, riots, other crime. So governments are taking action to manage that.  I'm not saying they're wrong or irrational to do it.

But what I am saying is that we need to recognise our own inconsistencies, our own lack of understanding of what goes on in the world normally, and how essentially fear of our reaction to extra deaths is driving government policy across the globe.  That policy may, as I say, be a rational reaction to address the risk of society fracturing, but let's recognise that it's our irrationality, our lack of awareness, and our inability to truly assess risk, that are driving the formulation and implementation of the policy right now.  So let's not ask whether governments are doing enough to address the threat from the virus, but whether we, in fact, are doing enough to spread the knowledge and rational thinking we're going to need in the future - because if something like Covid recurs in the next 20 years, we will be truly screwed from an economic point of view, and be sufficiently serious that it might generate the kind of societal breakdown the authorities are working so hard to avoid at the moment.

PC pc

I wanted to be a policeman when I was a little boy.  It seemed glamorous and worthy at the same time. Even as a student and then in the first years of work I looked into the possibility of joining up, but on each occasion my short-sightedness counted against me.  While I'm not particularly authoritarian, the existence of a large unarmed force, keeping the peace by popular consent rather than through power and coercion, has seemed something the UK should be legitimately proud of. I'm instinctively on the police's side.

In recent years that instinct has been challenged by a succession of events. I recognise that the list that follows probably represents a tiny fraction of overall policing activity, and that the vast majority of rank-and-file coppers are as embarrassed about it as their high-ups are pleased with it, but these have been the things that have come to represent the modern British police:

- being late to act (if at all) on grooming gangs
- taking the word of a fantasist (who later turned out to be a paedophile) at face value when he was incriminating innocent people
- allowing Extinction Rebellion to engage in acts of vandalism and civil disobediance
- a senior officer locking himself in his car and exiting the scene while one of his officers was dying from a stab wound (the Westminster attack)
- policing "hate speech" on the internet (where there clearly was no incitement to hatred or violence)
- actively participating in, rather than merely policing, Pride events.

In other words, in my eyes, they've had some bad PR. And the thing that links all the above (excepting perhaps the disgraceful Westminster episode) - the adoption and holding of a particular 'liberal' (though in reality it's nothing of the sort) set of political views.

Despite all the above, when I found out at Christmas that there was no age limit these days on who could apply to join the Special Constabulary (the part-time, unpaid police; but still 'proper' police, unlike PCSOs), I thought I'd give it a go.

That application culminated in a face-to-face interview last Friday at Cheshire Police's HQ.  The interview was conducted by 2 people; one female who was about 25 and was described as an "HR assistant", and 1 male in his early 30s who gave me his name but not his role.  The conduct of the interview was slightly odd in my view - each of the interviewers literally read from a script both at the start and end of the process, and the interview itself consisted of me being asked 5 pre-formulated questions.  Aside from the question of whether interviews as a technique actually are a valid prediction of how someone will perform in a role, and the rather odd atmosphere that prevailed because of the scripting, I'll share the 5 questions I was asked (the wording may be slightly different as I'm writing this from memory, but I'm not too far away):

Q1. Describe a difficult situation that you have faced, and how you went about addressing it.
Q2. Your sergeant wants you to find out the problems that your community faces. How would you go out about doing this?
Q3. Describe a problem where you had several options open to you - how did you assess each one and decide what to do?
Q4. You witness a senior colleague making an inappropriate response to a female colleague at work, which leaves her visibly upset. What do you do in that situation?
Q5. Thinking about a difficult challenge in your life - what did you do to be able to cope?

That was it. Bear in mind this was an application to be a policeman, my view would be that questions 1 and 3 are legitimate - they, if followed up properly, would give an insight into my thought processes, and Q5 may potentially say something about my resilience. But questions 2 and 4? Take Q4 - it may be of some relevance to, for example, my attitude to authority and whether I'm likely to turn a blind eye too readily, but this is one of the key things you want to ask me, really?

And that's the important thing - what these questions don't cover. Where are the questions that truly test my judgement in a policing situation?  That properly assess my motivation for wanting to join the force?  That ask how I'd make time to do this role alongside my current job?  That seek insight into my judgement and common sense? Or my negotiation and pacifying abilities?  En masse, they're a pathetic, politically-driven, standardised set of questions that in my view elicit virtually nothing about how a decent plod would do his or her job.

I suspected trouble was brewing after the end of my answer to question 2 - the one about "problems in the community".  I waffled on for a bit about community representatives and blah blah, and at the end of my answer I was - they were momentarily off-script, goodness me - prompted to name some specific people I should be engaging with. I hadn't a clue how to supplement what I'd already said, and pretty much said so.

It wasn't, therefore, a massive surprise to be turned down. Frankly, I was neither surprised nor disappointed. If those are the questions against which they decide whether to let me in the club, I don't want to be a member of their club, to disfigure a classic Groucho Marx-ism.  I can absolutely see the thread that links my interview questions to the appalling senior management police misjudgements over the last few years.  It's borne of a political view of the world (not necessarily party political) that has abandoned any sensible assessment of the amount of disutility particular crimes cause, and treats them accordingly, and instead attaches a political value to them - hence being offensive to transsexuals on the internet warrants more police time than investigating a burglary.  It's ironic that the principle of preventing crime by walking the beat now seems to apply more to offensive things in the virtual world rather than horrible ones in the real world.

Maybe it's best they turned me down. Maybe I'm too old, too old-fashioned, too socially-conservative, too intolerant. Perhaps their interview questions were, in that context, right on-the-money, and did the job they were supposed to.  In which case, good for them. But it makes me fearful for the future.  The people who manage to answer these questions properly are the people keeping us safe. I'm sure a sensible few will manage to game the system and get through, but it's worrying that the others will be unthinking, right-on, amoral idiots.