Behind Blue Eyes

Over the last month or so I have become somewhat an expert on the retail industry, as a customer. I have spent so much money on such a wide range of “stuff” recently that I feel as though the whole economy might have been working on my sole behalf. Some thoughts.

Buying stuff online should be the best thing ever. And yet it isn’t due, inevitably, to the distance between the retailer and the customer. I found the bath I wanted was only available on about three websites (I have a non-standard-length bathroom), two of which made it extremely hard to order the bath. So I ordered a whole stack of the stuff I needed from the third site for convenience. It was a disaster. They delivered my order in FOUR separate tranches. They delivered a bath tap with the wrong fittings (two left “feet”). They delivered the towel rail before they had even confirmed it had been despatched, leaving me surprised to receive a call from the delivery driver from my doorstep while I was at work, and him then forging a delivery confirmation. The bath in the end wasn’t even precisely the size that was advertised. I ordered the wrong size of basin and the wrong sort of radiator valves and while, of course, this was my own stupid fault, a regular shop would have taken them back no problem. I couldn’t send back the badly-packed bath taps in time for the plumber to fit them, so I had to buy new feet. On one level I am extremely pleased that the online world makes more products available at better prices, but any savings I might have achieved were mitigated by the fact that I couldn’t go an sabre-rattle at a real customer-service person nor take any of the wrong stuff back. Never use QS Supplies, of Leicester.

On the other hand, Wickes delivered exactly what I wanted, when I asked for it at about half the price of the same product in their own retail store. It cost a whole £5 to get 600kg of tiles delivered on a Saturday. Very impressive.

And what of John Lewis? I am pretty pleased with the products they supplied (a budget bed frame and budget mattress) but their delivery service has underwhelmed. It was extremely useful to be able to pay £20 to get an evening time slot. This is the kind of service I am willing to over-pay for. I can’t easily take a morning off and “work from home”, so evening and weekend deliveries are “for the win”, as they say. However the first time the mattress turned up it arrived damaged. The delivery guys said it was depressingly common and that they had been raising the issue with the supplier for yonks. But the delivery guys turned up at 10pm for a 7-9pm slot the first time, and then at quarter past six for the same slot a week later. I don’t know which is worse, but it’s not very useful either way. But again, the products are more suited to my needs and significantly cheaper than from the obvious alternative shops such as Dreams. John Lewis even beat Tesco.

And then there are the retailers of small, letterbox-sized items. Gone are the days, apparently, when it was perfectly OK to stuff stuff through the letterbox or leave it at the sorting office. Don’t get me started on Hermes again. But even big names like TNT don’t make it easy. My mum’s Nexus is hopefully at my next-door neighbour’s flat, otherwise it’s a trip to Croydon*^. There may be light at the end of the tunnel. Apparently there are moves towards having small items delivered to your local convenience store. If this becomes mainstream I will be extremely happy. Maybe Tesco could set something up with Amazon?

So do I want the economy to go back to its pre-1999 retail model? Absolutely not. Do I want someone to set up a delivery network that doesn’t require people to be at home during the day for small stuff and a lot more flexibility for big stuff? Yes, yes I do. If I had enough capital and know-how I’d already have done it. I think there’s something of a market failure at present. I would be prepared to pay for things to be delivered at a time and place convenient to me. I doubt I am alone. Yet online retailers seem to compete purely on price and never on convenience. I look forward to that changing.

* update: Croydon it is.
^ update 20.25: IT’S ARRIVED!

While sitting, in the early hours of Thursday morning, at the back of a chartered plane, on the tarmac at Schipol airport, waiting for the last pissed straggler to get himself seated, a smug smile crossed my face. This is the sort of thing, I pondered, that not many people do. I had just seen my team win the final of the (second tier) European club league.

Then other fun stuff started to tumble out of my memory. Forget “thirty things to do before you kark it”!

- Drank a fresh coconut while watching the sun rise on Ipanema beach after a night clubbing at the end of a three-month whistle-stop tour of South America.

- Got the shits on Day One of a four day hike through the Peruvian Andes.

- Was welcomed in Medellin as possibly the only European tourist in the whole city.

- Walked through the streets of San Salvador in the early hours with all my worldly possessions, and survived to tell the tale.

- Woke up being molested by insects on a beach in Thailand after having drunk so much “whisky” and “Red Bull” that I could not find my beach-side hut.

- Followed the England team to random bits of Europe. Seen the England team get knocked out of competitions in the quarter finals, live.

- Stood for the local council in an un-winnable seat, and nearly won.

- Arrested a bloke for being drunk in charge of a bicycle.

- Holidayed in Syria.

- Missed out on the Champions League final because I was on a police driving course.

- Three seasons (and counting) at Stamford Bridge.

- Not gone bust, yet.

Thinking about this hilarious put-down by the Treasury of Salmond’s plan to persuade England and Wales to join some form of currency union with New Scotland next year, I was thinking back to when the Euro was a very new and exciting thing.

I went to Ireland and Scotland a couple of times either side of the point when Euro notes and coins came in. In England William Hague and others led a populist campaign to ensure that Blair’s plan to sell British economic independence in return for some EU sinecure after his retirement failed. So for most Brits, the idea of joining the Euro was anathema. And yet in Scotland shops had big signs up saying they accepted Euros. It is, of course, sound business sense to accept payment in many currencies because a sale is a sale but the signs were not for visiting Irish, Dutch or German visitors. The Scots saw themselves as more modern, more pro-European, more forward-looking than the English. The consensus view seemed to be that the English were holding back Scotland’s ambitions of being a model poster-boy pro-EU small country, like Ireland.

How times change very very quickly.

If Scotland does leave the EU by default (which is a very interesting question in its own right!) and re-joins, it will be committed to joining the Euro as are all new member countries (only Britain, Denmark and Sweden are allowed to choose for themselves). But would New Scotland meet the Maastricht criteria? Well the UK as a whole certainly does not these days. 3% or smaller deficit? 40% or less government debt to GDP? You’re havin’ a laugh! New Scotland would have to take on less than half its share of the UK’s debt and suddenly find some way of reducing its massive structural deficit. I can’t imagine Scotland would be in the Euro for several years.

Lunchtime addition:

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the assertion by Salmond that the English would quite like to have the oil industry’s foreign exchange earnings. Put aside for a moment whether New Scotland would get 100% of the oil money. There are plenty of people who think that mineral wealth can actually be quite harmful to an advanced economy because the effect on the exchange rate makes other tradeable goods and services more expensive for the rest of the world. The argument goes that if we hadn’t had North Sea oil Britain might have retained more of its large manufacturing base. If England did lose a substantial proportion of its foreign earnings virtually overnight it could be pretty painful in the short term, but might it actually encourage investment in modern industrial developments in the longer term? You might have to ask Tony Blair for advice on that one.

Update 29th April:

I read somewhere else (sorry, no credit because I can’t remember!) that to join the Euro a country has to have its own currency to abandon. So if (and it’s a large “if”) Scotland does want to join the Euro at some stage, setting up this weird Sterling single currency zone rather stuffs the possibility of Scotland joining the Euro later.

It feels like it’s been a long week this week!

One of the most surprising comments I read today was along the lines of “why the outpouring?”. It’s a good question. What would be different had she not risen to or sustained her position of power?

The world does not stand still. New industries will always happen somewhere, and a key role of modern government is to ensure that citizens have the opportunity on their doorstep. The British government was one of the first to realise this, in the seventeenth century. Thatcher realised that people need opportunities. If you have talent or skills you will move to where those opportunities arise, and the way for those skills and talents and opportunities to benefit the wider economy is to have those activities taking place in your part of the world.

Thatcher saw that for people in Britain to be able to take advantage of a rapidly-changing world they would need an environment where the new industries could flourish.

It’s easy to assume that the changes Thatcher brought in were inevitable but she didn’t copy an existing model. Many people at the time didn’t even understand what she was doing. Yes, she made mistakes, yes her style was bold. Thank God she had the stamina to see her reforms through.

It is no overstatement to say that she restored Parliamentary democracy to Britain, taking control back from the economic terrorism of the trade unions and other vested interests.

She re-wrote the future of millions. I for one will be raising a glass for her this evening. Thank you Mrs T.

“Confidence in freedom, confidence in enterprise and that is what divides conservatives and socialists.”

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.

3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.

7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have recently resigned from my role as a Metropolitan Special Constable after four and a bit years.

Being a police officer can be really fun. I’ve done things that I would never have done otherwise. I’ve rushed to urgent calls, I’ve sprinted through central London to assist colleagues who’ve got into sticky situations, I’ve policed large events such as the marathon and Royal ceremonies, I’ve learned to negotiate flights of steps on a bicycle, I’ve taken drunk drivers off the street.

Even the relatively mundane stuff can be pretty satisfying: being first to arrive at a house that has been burgled and helping the victim move on from the initial shock of what’s happened; calming down a first-time visitor to London while colleagues search a bar for the people who stole her bag; patrolling a high street after the London riots and being thanked by all and sundry for being there (eventually).

So if I’ve enjoyed it so much why have I quit?

Put simply, the [Metropolitan] police service is broken. We see politicians trading blows over whether police numbers are up or down, but what we don’t hear about is how few of those actually leave their offices from year to year. When the riots kicked off in 2011 no police officer was surprised how few there were ready to respond: the number on duty at night and at the weekend is tiny. Senior police officers have become politicians, presumably having long since become bored of actually walking around preventing and detecting crime.

Number 7 on the list looks good, doesn’t it? Except the Metropolitan police service is not staffed by people who live in London. For various reasons, good and bad, police officers tend not to live anywhere near where they police. Many see London as a place to be fought rather than as their home. As someone who lives on the edge of central London I was regarded as rather an oddity. Why do you live in that shit-hole I was often asked. It almost seemed to be a competition amongst officers to see how far away they could live and still get to work on time.

Number 9, or rather its complete abandonment, is the killer. It’s quite difficult to accurately measure the level of crime on either a hyper-local scale or across the city as a whole. We all know this from the media/political discussion that surrounds the publication of the crime stats each year. So instead of trying to work out whether a good service is being provided, police managers measure how much work is being done. Every station will have a notice-board covered in charts showing how much work various teams have done. Emails will circulate about this week’s figures being worse than last week’s. Whole teams are created and destroyed in order to serve the needs of the “work return” gods.

If a widget manufacturer operated this way it would go bust immediately. But in the police service, careers are made by introducing the next big policy change. Mostly the big new change is a re-hash of one that was in force a couple of years ago. I was only in four years and I was on my fourth Commissioner.

The current Commissioner is a bit of a surprise. Given that he was appointed by a Mayor and coalition government that preaches localism he is a bold centraliser. He is introducing the wonderfully-named Local Policing Model. Orwell would be impressed. It is a mechanism for senior officers at New Scotland Yard to direct the day-to-day operations of everyone in the whole Met. You see, Bernard Hogan-Howe does not believe that the police service should be a local resource accountable to the people who live in that locale. He believes that a police force should be heavy artillery to be trained on whatever the hot issue of the day is. It’s the kind of New York- or LA-style aggressive policing that British people tell the media and elected representatives that they do not want. BHH is Wizard of Oz of policing.

And what happened to the Big Society? David Cameron’s pet project should have been perfectly suited to the already-impressive numbers of people who volunteer as police officers. Yet in the Met volunteering has been repeatedly and systematically attacked. First the MSC was expanded to unrealistic proportions (there are only ever going to be a certain number of people in a community who are willing and able to make such a huge commitment), then it was turned from a voluntary organisation into the only way to get a paid job as a PC. Genuine volunteers (i.e. those who haven’t signed up as interns) need something to keep up their interest. Under BHH’s leadership and with willing assistance from the MSC’s own supine senior managers volunteers are being restricted to neighbourhood duties with little or no possibility of the kind of variety that keeps people coming in weekend after weekend.

And they wonder why people don’t stick around.