The Daily mail says… “Mr King wants to see root-and-branch reform and calls for a full review of the way the banking industry is structured and regulated” (he says much more to boot – well worth reading.)

From the beginning this grey, bespectacled gent has been the true voice of the people. There has been some suggestion that his personal style isn’t always conducive to a receptive audience – such gripes have no place when so much is at stake.

Give him a sabbatical to edit the Sun, lets see what happens! The fact that the government continues to argue against his advice shows them in an increasingly poor light.

The sooner everyone crawls out of banker’s pockets, blinking pitifully into the light of well-founded public opinion, and pays due obeisance to common sense as spelt out by the glorious Mr. King – the better it will be for all of us, specially the millions of recently jobless.

p.s. if anyone’s talking to Mr. King – being right about this doesn’t mean that he’s right about everything – such incipient hubris (so easily fallen into) is only one of the many fatal flaws the banksters are in the grip of

There’s a very easy, convenient story which tells us that machines have pushed out craftsmanship. Richard Sennett traces the much deeper relationships between physical touch, tools, how we work together and how we relate to the things we create.

Understanding craftsmanship is particularly important for the marketing industry which is inherently craft based. One challenge for the profession is that as a society we have lost the underlying understanding of what it means to be a craftsman. Marketing professionals cannot help but bring into their work assumptions of more mechanistic management, of command and competition.

We have allowed what Sennett convincingly portrays as a deeper human need to be bartered away as we have adapted to industrialised production. In place of mutual respect for skills, our teamwork is more often driven by command structures and competition. These management approaches suit mechanistic production but undermine the workshop culture necessary for developing craft skills.

Its easy to make the link with obviously craft based businesses, but this thinking may have far broader relevance. Crowd-sourced development which is being applied in so many industries is a crafts based management approach.

As global supply changes, putting more emphasis on local production, suppliers will be less able to rely on lower cost production to create differentiation and will need to relearn a crafts based approach.

There is a lot up for grabs as we come out of the credit crunch. Much of the commentary is about how quickly banks are returning to ‘business as usual’. There’s a lot of reason to believe that craft skills will remain to be seen by capitalists as something difficult to scale and monetise, and therefore of little value. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that despite this, the tide is inexorable.

It could be that the major industrial and social shift of the coming period is towards a renewed understanding of craftsmanship. There is no sense of judgement from the author who offers no simple answers. Craftsmanship itself is thoroughly described and we are left to decide whether this is a quaint part of history, or something vital for our future.

When times are tight (and even when they are not) its human nature to re-trench into cultural niches. In other words for elites to form. The only circumstance that can structurally promote social mobility is an excess of job-supply.

Coming at it from the other side to see the phenomenon from the ground up; on the individual level its easy to imagine that two things add up to making a difference: motivation and a pathway to change. Easy to give an individual, more difficult for a crowd.

Motivation is a very human, therefore hard-to-scale phenomenon. You could imagine a sort of social movement to support this but in management speak its the ‘soft’ part. The ‘hard’ factor is pathways, also highly varied by individual so the practical route is to identify the pathway barriers that affect the largest number of people.

Its surprisingly easy to forget that the major pathway barrier here is ‘a job I can get’, followed by a step up the ladder to ‘a job I can enjoy’. Pre-crunch there wasn’t so much competition for any individual job so the ‘…i can get’ was a lesser issue than it is today. Despite this, even in a post-crunch scenario, the most instrumental pathway issue is supply-side – what jobs are available.

This is structurally true because very few people in society are entrepreneurs. The normal behaviour in job seeking isn’t to say ‘what opportunity can I create’ – its ‘what opportunities are there for me to get’.

This brings us to a sort-of conclusion, or an idea, that the best way to manage a capitalist, democratic society is to proactively stimulate economic growth. Not a mind blowing revelation – but take a look at the government’s efforts in this area. At the risk of offending Lord M (oh that he might read my words – swoon) there isn’t an obviously strong, systematic, professional approach to this.

There is outstanding talent in this country but, to take two typological examples, they are either sucked into socially pointless banking or have been so successful there is little pressing need to take on near-impossible challenges, or no easy mechanism to allow it even should they want to. The example of Gerry Robinson’s ‘Can he fix the NHS’ comes to mind, the answer being ‘probably, if only they would listen’.

Handouts, new deals and a competitive environment are all needed to cope with the present needs. A strong, proactive, disciplined approach to putting our (or the world’s) best talent to work creating growth (not cost cuts) is what we really need – and only the government is in a position, in a competitive economy, to instigate such a unilateral approach.

And that’s what will create social mobility.

Of course endless growth is rapidly proving itself to be a thing of the past. All that means is that social mobility requires growth in ‘…that I enjoy’ rather than ‘…that I can get’ but that’s a subject for another lunch time.

But you do run into a fatal flaw almost immediately – LTCM and ‘crunch’ disasters were of an un-predicted scale. According to Taleb, our current system systematically reduces the frequency of problems, while multiplying the severity of any given problem. Which leaves you not knowing how much is enough, and suspecting that ‘enough’ would be an uncomfortably large amount to keep sitting still, doing nothing.

The example of Scottish Free Banking shows that a less regulated, more competitive environment can be stable and successful with very low reserves. The competition commission, treasury, FSA and BoE need to collaborate – not to increase reserves, but to increase genuine, customer-beneficial, competition. Fundamentally this means that banks need to be made more vulnerable to the risk of failure, not less.

Saint Turner (as I now call him) laid bare many of the reasons why there is not genuine competition. The system is – as many highly sane and impartial commentators have pointed out – a huge casino operation, rigged to provide huge fees. The products are not ‘overly complex’, they are just plain fraudulently unnecessary. There shouldn’t be any need to investigate individual products, however in a truly competitive market you would expect a competitor to point out underpriced risk or other product flaws.

Rather than try to deconstruct established players – it would be more useful to carefully foster the growth of new competitors who are somehow isolated from the contamination of the existing industry – and therein, of course, lies the rub. They would need to operate under a new, public service banking charter which guarantees complete transparency – so that external experts can scrutinise to the last detail and confirm fairness. It would need to operate under a separate regulatory framework because almost every time you talk about banking reform you get the same old bleat that regulations prevent any real change.

By doing something like this you would get genuine competition, by adding new competitors rather than destabilising existing players by change.

These may meet no deep customer need and fail – however they might be able to establish a new customer relationship, based on real trust and value. A true Tesco of banking would really shake things up. However, it just shows how strong the banking cartel is, that it would require extremely (to the point of impossibly) strong oversight to ensure that the same old characters, playing the same old tricks didn’t end up just recreating another face for the beast.

This is the American dream – that every person gets to live or die by their own hand, under neither the patronage nor tyranny of any other. This belief is only tenable when your resources far outstrip your needs. While every person can stake their claim, grow their crops, build their businesses – creating real growth by consuming uncontended resources and serving unmet needs.

In this instance, for the sake of relative brevity, we will forgo the living rebuke which is the Native American population.

Universal healthcare cuts into the heart of this now-rotten dream. In the dream world its every man for himself and everyone prospers. Accepting that everyone needs to chip-in to help out their fellow men is to accept that they can not prosper. It is to accept that growth without consequences is at an end. It is to accept that you can no longer live without responsibility.

That’s why poor-white-male America is so poisonously bitter. Its why republicans (with a small ‘r’) are choking on their bile. They have lived with this unacknowledged truth for some time. Its been a canker in their miserable souls.

To allow universal coverage in would be to face up to their deepest fears – and there’s not many people who do that without a fight.

British, upper class (‘U’), conventional wisdom would be that good, solid, old boys of the empire would never wear their heart so shamelessly on their sleeve. Such girlish displays of emotion are for pansies and dilettantes – not people of substance and position. Many generations of inner circle, elite cadre politicking have branded ‘secret squirrel’ lessons deeply into their scarred souls.

These are stunted attitudes, kept alive and defended by stunted people (i.e. the English). If Mandleson should by some utterly surprising accident find himself reluctantly leading the party or nation – then I’d applaud the success of someone with the balls to cry (or indeed get himself into a towering snit, in public).

They pride themselves on ‘gaming systems’, ‘taking on the bank – and beating it’, ‘playing the market’ they thrive on brinksmanship and testosterone fuelled dick waving – egging each other on to make ever more sophisticated ways to break laws and codes without being caught. Just look at the ‘high speed trading systems’ that’s fuelled Goldman’s new ‘gordon gekko’ image.

Well they’ve gamed global governments. Right now they’re chucking back Crystal and lighting their golden farts with $100 bills while they mercilessly mock Gordon, Obama and the rest for being gullible fools.

Tax payers money has guaranteed their risk, quantitative easing and companies desperate to get money flowing again are feeding them a fat upside again. In other words they are making billions out of the problem they created, and directly out of your money and mine – money that is now lost to us to put food in the mouths of our children, or to the country for maintaining a desperate healthcare or educational system.

They are quite literally stealing the food from our baby’s mouths.

Is it in any way a good thing? After all we do need banks to get back on their feet. I think it emphatically underlies the ‘no real change’ worry. I haven’t yet seen any proposals that are bold enough to seriously tackle this issue. While that is the case, the Godon Gekkos of our world will continue to mock us and recklessly endanger of security and wellbeing – with our own money.

Education is our primary means for shaping society, in a liberal and empowering sense. What’s at stake here is the degree of success and fulfilment we can achieve as a society and thus as individuals – constrained by the capacity and the base level achievements of the society we live within.

There’s no question that you can be a happy and fulfilled individual without the slightest hint of education. Of course a little reading helps to read signposts and important information but that’s more of requirement driven by social norms than an ontological truth.

So what is the point of education? What do you get, that you otherwise wouldn’t have or more to the point what can you do? Remember that I am specifically addressing education in any form and of whatever human quality, not the native intelligence of whatever sort (emotional, academic etc.).

While doing some recent work ended up asking people about their experience of education. The almost universal view was that you get qualifications, which give you the points to get through a competitive CV review stage to actually be seen in an job interview. That’s all. From the interview and forward into a job, it is then all about personal qualities and experience that were never taught in a classroom.

That’s pretty damning. It implies a massive waste of a very chunky part of your vital and precious formative years. So if what we actually get is a disappointing waste of vital years in our life, what should we be getting? The details of what people will state they want will change with environmental and personal circumstances. In the pushy eighties everyone wanted a power-job, in the noughties work-life balance grew in popularity, a pretty straight-forward reaction to excess.

Underneath this there is a universal and constant desire for security, esteem and self actualisation. Equipping ourselves to achieve these ought to be the purpose of education.

The realities of our current situation are complicated by social class issues. Esteem and self actualisation can be achieved by going to the right school, getting the right degree which together provide a passport for the right job – which comes with esteem and sufficient seniority to allow some sense of self actualisation. These are all driven not by the content of the education, but by the social attributes given to particular schools and their relation to social sets.

Knowledge in itself can get us none of these things, unless esteem is determined by success in a quizz. The skill of study or of preparing for and passing exams has only limited value. Only within the very narrow and artificial setting of the school itself can these offer esteem or an opportunity for self actualisation. Indeed in later life the habits learnt to succeed in exams can become a liability.

In normal society it is easy to see that security can best be secured by a positive, active, problem solving and warmly social attitude. Esteem can best be won by learning to be a team player, to lead when leadership is needed, to work and deliver when delivery is needed, to learn the art of judging the mood and modifying your own approach appropriately. Self actualisation is hard won so the best preparation for it is a combination of experiencing the immense satisfaction that can be derived from it alongside a taster of the perseverance needed to get there.

Set against these fundamentals, the detritus of scientific knowledge is mere trivia. Equipped with these qualities an individual will as a matter of course acquire whatever knowledge they need for the task at hand, be that the most obscure scientific arcania or the most basic of manual craft skills.

Without these qualities a person may possess all the knowledge of the ages and still fail to be a productive member of society.

Interpersonal communication and shared problem solving should be at the heart of our education system. In the system we have created, we do not discover the nuanced magic which inspired Galileo but learn by rote the reduced, dry, dead husk of what his investigations uncovered.

Our education system focuses on what is least useful to us and deliberately fails to equip us with the very qualities that would help. How we came to create this hopeless system and to spend so much time trying tweak it without addressing its most important aspects is a mystery worth solving in itself.

What’s on now is a Cambridge, Ma police officer cuffing a Harvard professor in his own home after a good citizen reported seeing two black men trying to break in.

Looking at the photos and hearing the scant first hand accounts from Sgt James Crowley and Gates gives a very clear impression – two rampaging alpha males waving highly overdeveloped and engorged egos at each other.

My own very minor brushes with police in the UK lead me to believe that the standard bedside manner for an officer is to try and establish personal authority over any member of the public they are engaging with, particularly if they are considered a suspect for something. Its easy to see how this could become the normal defensive approach for perfectly decent people who regularly have to confront the guilty with crimes large and small, many of whom would have no compunction about resorting to extreme verbal, psychological or physical violence.

On a personal level – I am happy to admit that a sizeable (although I don’t think abnormally so) ego lurks not too far beneath the surface. When faced with the aggressive, psychologically and physically dominating approach adopted as standard by the police, I have to forcefully restrain myself from responding in the way that I would be perfectly happy to if any other individual treated me in that way – namely with a mirroring level of aggression. I have to bite my tongue and be explicitly subservient, complying and agreeing until the officer moves on their way.

This is understandable, but ultimately to my mind not excusable. It may be a superhuman calling to ask officers to deal with very aggressive and abusive people daily, and maintain a normally polite demeanour but that is at the heart of the job and what the public has a right to expect of them.

I think that Gates was very likely treated like a criminal from before he said a word, because that is my experience of how the police act, and instead of having the good sense to be meek and subservient, he allowed his own ego to get the better of him.

Possibly because he was tired, possibly because he had a little alcohol in him – I don’t know. The situation is nothing more than what the police spokesman called it, regrettable.

It highlights the defects in cultural norms for male ego, defects in cultural norms for police attitudes and behaviours, defects in cultural norms for interpreting the behaviour of black people in public (would the lady have reported an older white gentleman with a walking stick struggling with his front door?) and defects in the President’s willingness to abuse his position of public authority.

In itself however, as the President is banking on, the press and the public well knows, it’s a storm in a teacup.

The public are not stupid. They are not stupid enough to believe that what has been done is for the best, nor are they stupid enough to believe that raising their voices will have any effect. Let no-one even begin to suggest that to vote Conservative, or for that matter any party, is sufficient. And neither am I so stupid, having carped on and on, I am now utterly bored and repulsed by my own pointless words of protest.

The press have already apologised for the inconvenience they caused to politicians and have returned to tit-for-tat pre-election tendentious party political campaigning. The Times started early, but after a good start the Guardian hasn’t been slow in its response. The small hope of our fourth estate seeing beyond myopic tribalism has been shafted by Rupert once again.

In the longer term I am not a pessimist. The trend of human progress while being extraordinarily circuitous has always ultimately been for the better. However, all too little of that progress can be attributed to a deliberate act of individual or collective will. It feels very much as if history drives us towards a better future despite ourselves.

Do we really have to leave the rapacious, insatiable vacuum in collective purpose alive and bleeding its pustulous corruption to accommodate the baser veins of greed and excess in our nature? What will it take to make a future collective good seem tangible enough, under a sufficient threat, for us to take radical action prioritising it over the security of inaction?

There is of course Obama. The single shining beacon of hope in the whole world that someone who may actually be inclined to selfless care would have sufficient powers of organisation to effect some real change. His intervention on Africa is a welcome relief from oil-fuelled war-mongering.

Regardless of whether he can live up to the promise or ultimately gets shafted by the cynics – whatever he does is utterly outside of my power to have any influence on either by action or inaction, speech or silence, belief or cynicism.

The only thing any of has any reliable control over is our own actions. In that at least we can have some small comfort, so long as the people we live and work with can be persuaded to care.

I am now desperate to write of anything with some lightness and hope.