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Brexit – a Tragedy of Shakespearean Proportions

Last Friday, many of us in the UK woke up to discover that our world had changed. Despite every poll indication to the contrary, the country had voted to leave the EU. There’s an irony in that vote – Tory ministers repeatedly berate our education system for not putting enough emphasis on Shakespeare. The result showed that they have no room to talk, for as Coriolanus would have told them, the people have resoundingly spoken with the yea and no of general ignorance.

The question is, what now? It has been a particularly nasty campaign, devoid of facts and based on the basest of emotions as rhetoric sank to the lowest common denominator, dividing friends and family in a manner which I have never seen before. Truth has been a casualty, as has Jo Cox. There is no question that many, assured by the polls that the result would be a vote to remain, took the opportunity to vote against the Government, attempting to bloody the eye of what is almost universally seen as a disconnected posh elite. They were shocked to find that rather than pecking the eagles, the crows had ripped out their own eyes on Friday morning.

So what now?

I shall vote YES – the vote for Scottish Independence

As usual in August, I’ve been in Edinburgh for the Festival. This year there’s been the added frisson of the debate about Scotland’s vote for independence. However, debate seems to be the wrong word. The vote that could result in Scotland becoming independent from the United Kingdom seems to centre around a very limited number of unsubstantiated claims from either side, with almost no critical analysis of what it might mean for the future of the nation.

The proposal put forward by the SNP is that Scotland will control its own destiny, funded by a belief that tax revenue from North Sea oil will grow. It’s a bit like an established company saying that it is about to embrace a fundamentally different business model, for example M&S announcing to the City that they’re going to stop selling food and revert to just being an underwear retailer. If that happened it would come with a strict warning that future performance could go down as well as up. The independence debate has no such caveat for Scotland’s populace, seeing only a future upside. So it seemed appropriate to update Christopher Logue’s poem “I shall vote Labour” to help the undecided:

I shall vote YES

I shall vote yes because
I believe in wind farms.
I shall vote yes because
Tartan is my favourite colour
I shall vote yes because
I’ll have had my tea before I get a chance to vote.
I shall vote yes because
Alex Salmond kissed my sister Mary’s baby.
AND
I shall vote yes because
My hairdresser told me to.
I shall vote yes because
My Jamie found an image of Sean Connery in his deep-fried Mars bar.
I shall vote yes because
I love Edinburgh’s trams.
I shall vote yes because
I believe Greggs can solve Scotland’s obesity problem.
I shall vote yes because
I want my pension and my children’s pensions to be paid for by oil taxes, and
Alex has promised that oil will be $150 a barrel by Christmas;
I shall vote yes
Even though my milkman thinks the oil will run out;
AND
I shall vote yes because
I believe in saving the NHS.
I shall vote yes because
Peter Capaldi is the best Doctor Who.
I shall vote yes because
I think Scotland should keep the pound, but mostly
I shall vote yes because
Deep in my heart
I want to be English.

London. The Nexus of Big Data and Data Science

Over the past few years I’ve been working more and more with the large volumes of data that come from M2M and the Internet of Things. It wasn’t that long ago when “Big Data” was a novelty that was largely a vision of the future – more talked about than done. In a few short years it’s morphed into the “next big thing” that everyone needs to have and which will save our planet and our health systems. Of course, Big Data itself is of limited use. What changes the game is the insight which can be extracted from it. That’s why the headline description of big data can be unhelpful. By concentrating on the “big”, it places the spotlight on the mechanics of database structures, diverting attention from the real skills that the industry needs to make it valuable.

I’d like to share some things I’ve learnt from my experience working in this area. The first is the continuing hype. When I put together a conference on the use of big data at the Cabinet Office last year I was hard pressed to find anyone really doing it commercially – the hype was still far greater than the practice. I don’t think that much has changed since then. We’re still on the lower, gentle slope of the Gartner hype curve. My guess is that the only companies making significant money from big data at the moment are conference organisers and consultants. But attention is being paid.

The second is the type of skills we need to cultivate. We talk about Data Scientists as the new breed of practitioner, but that’s largely a self-invented title from data analysts who want more recognition. Extracting value from big data, or broad data if you want to be more accurate, is more than that. The best definition I’ve heard is that it’s about telling stories with Matlab. It’s not about Hadoop or Cassandra – they’re just the mechanics. The reality is that Big Data needs to be about Data Storytellers if it is going to be transformational.

The third thing is that this is something we do exceedingly well in London. Other places may collect more data, build bigger server farms or invent more capable database structures. But we tell better stories. So if you want to generate value from big data, London’s the place to set up your business.

Rigoletto and the Automaton
(or Shaking up the NHS)

I’ve always thought that the music for the opening chorus of Rigoletto foreshadowed the modern party political conference. It is a piece about court sycophancy and conspiracy which says everything about political intrigue.

There’s a long tradition of resetting opera to make satirical points. Ned Sherrin and Alistair Beaton did it in the Kinnock and Thatcher era with the Metropolitan Mikado and the Ratepayer’s Iolanthe. More recently Music Theatre London set the trend for pithy new translations which led to a resurgence of exciting new small scale opera productions. But we seem to have lost the politics.

Rigoletto feels as if its authors had anticipated our most recent political incumbents – the powerful, confident stride of Blair the leader, imperiously parting the faithful as he strides with his sycophantic train to the dais. And in the shadows the poison dwarf, reviled by the rest of the party, who will ultimately aid his leader’s downfall, played by Alistair Campbell. I often thought there was great scope for a New Labour Rigoletto with that pair and possibly Prescott as a lumbering Sparafucile. But the opportunity passed by.

However, when Andrew Lansley started putting forward his health reforms, with the Lib-Dems performing U-turns on a daily basis I realised that the music and story fitted the current administration just as well.

PublishedDecember 6, 2011
Make a comment on Sexy Cheese?

There are times when the serendipitous becomes just too compelling and you feel you need to share it with the world. As I was doing some brand research for a future article I noticed that Neilsen’s recent survey of grocery brands places Dairylea in Position 69. Does that make it the world’s most sexy cheese?

In an equally serendipitous coincidence, Position 70 in the same survey goes to Innocent.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Festive Christmas Ravioli

This year the mother-in-law’s coming over for dinner on Christmas day. The main course is fine – we’ve got the goose patiently waiting to be roasted. The desert’s already organised as Chris is the Christmas Pudding wizard of the known world. But what do we do for a starter? It’s Christmas Eve, the shops have shut and all that’s left is what’s in the freezer along with a desperate need for inspiration.

We do have lots of sprouts. And because I keep on thinking we’ve run out of pasta flour and buy more and more until we have a cupboard full of it, fresh pasta’s a distinct possibility. And what could be more festive than Brussels Sprout Ravioli? So, armed only with a pasta maker, a ready supply of alcohol and a daughter bravely taking the triple roles of photographer, glamorous assistant and general dogsbody, it seemed time to break new culinary boundaries.

And just before we started I remembered I’d also got a piece of Zebra fillet lurking somewhere in the freezer waiting for a suitable recipe. A quick search of the web revealed a shameful lack of recipes for either zebra or sprout ravioli. Time for inventive genius to put right the deficiencies of the Internet for the benefit of the gastronomically adventurous…