As a gentle warm up it might be useful to think about some tools that I’ve been playing with lately. Some of them useful for this sort of thing, some less so.

The first to talk about is a reasonably recent service; Storify. This is a curation service, allowing the user to draw together material from a range of sources and put together a coherent narrative. It takes material from a range of different services, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr for example but also allows individual URLs to be drawn in. It then presents the story either on the Storify site or in an embedded format on services such as WordPress. Storify is a really powerful tool, but it has one big weakness as a relatively casual user. It assumes that one is accessing it through a browser. There is no mobile app, and at present few of the other useful apps easily direct material to the service.

The main workhorse is Google Reader, what has become the dominant RSS service both user facing and as an underlying engine for other services. I consume a lot of news and RSS is the way to do that quickly and easily. It’s reasonably simple to send links to individual articles either from the Reader interface or other services that use it. Recent changes have reduced it’s usefulness, trying to lock the user into the Google+ empire, but it still serves a useful purpose.

Moving on to Evernote, the ubiquitous capture tool. Essentially a service that allows the user to send links, text, images and a host of other data to, that then becomes searchable. It’s useful for capturing ideas, and supporting information. This one has a range of different ways to sort and manage the material so suits many different ways of thinking.

Those are the main tools, others would be Dropbox for online file storage, Flickr for imagery and inevitably Twitter to keep track of ongoing discussion.

All in all it’s just a question of exploring the tools available and working out what works for the individual.

Served chilled to below cellar temperature the bottle instructions suggest decanting before serving. Straight from the bottle gives very little sediment and a very gentle head.

The sweetness of honey is strongest on the nose with only a slight hint of heather coming through. The first mouthful is rich with a thick texture permeated with a sharp gassiness. Rather sweet it’s more reminiscent of a summer ale as its slightly lacking in hops or nuttiness and seems to vanish quickly from the palate.

All in all a very pleasant bottle, probably suiting white meat, fish or hard cheeses.

Feel free to join me over there, if you haven’t already seen it.

Interesting that they chose not to contextualise the photo they used, which in other sources appears to show a group of schoolkids surrounding the van and shielding it, although given the damage whether that was a useful move or not is debatable.  Pretty shoddy journalism, but that typifies the coverage yesterday across the media.

Still, protesters complaining that they were going to miss transport home, and they’d be late for tea do suggest a lack of forethought.  If one is unprepared to deal with the consequences one shouldn’t participate in the protest.

I’m also interested in the latter part of the article, students trying to lay blame for the violence on truanting children.  Lack of moral courage springs to mind as the immediate response, again take responsibility for ones actions.  But I guess that’s not the point of the protests, they’re not wanting to take responsibility for their own lives, they want the state to provide, yet not compensate the state for the benefits received.

Still, one hopes that the schoolchildren are punished for their non-attendance at school.

He’s not well, hasn’t been eating and when he does he’s sick very quickly.  We’re treating that medically but it really looks as if that’s not having any significant effect.  It’s possible a surgical intervention might have an effect, but at his age there are big risks around giving him a general anaesthetic. He’s listless and clearly in pain, but still walking around, making his way up and down the stairs, and responding to being talked to or fussed.

We have a decision to make, and at the moment that decision is when we take him on his final journey to the vet.  There is a possibility that his heart will give out before we do that, and in some ways that would be best for him, as he hates being in the car.

As a Buddhist, it’s a difficult decision to make: the taking of life, or being responsible for the taking of life, is itself something that one should avoid.  I tend to take a western view of these principles though; rather than the fairly simple ”reincarnation” concept, lifetime to lifetime, we experience our world moment to moment.  Each of our experiences is the moment of rebirth, influenced by what has gone before.  That has parallels with modern thinking around physics at both the macro and micro scales.

So what is my intent around this life that I have had some influence over?  He looks to us for food and shelter, although he’s demonstrated himself capable of doing both for himself over his life.  I do feel some responsibility for him now, perhaps there was something that I missed and we could have had some form of intervention, whether medical or surgical, earlier.  Perhaps that would have given him a little longer.  It would be easy to play virtual histories, I don’t know now whether we could have done anything, or perhaps an intervention would have brought this moment forward.

The intent is to find the point where his quality of life isn’t sufficient, to find a point where his pain makes him more miserable.  With one of my pet rats I left it too long, and she suffered to assuage my guilt about taking her to the vet.  Again as a Buddhist, I know the effect the choice will have on me; I carry that forward into my next moments, each of which become an aggregate of our decisions and choices, the interplay between them.

I am very glad that it is a decision that we are able to make. We’re driven to think about his quality of life, not his length of life.  As an animal, the end of his suffering has more dignity than a human.

I compare the way we treat pets with the inhumane way we deal with people suffering in similar ways.  Friends have died of cancer, with the associated loss of dignity as they approach their final weeks; friends and family who suffer dementia with an ever increasing reliance on others for help with the most basic of functions.  In the former case there is an opportunity to make a choice, in the latter the opportunity for choice is long gone and with it one’s dignity as  human.

In a liberal society, surely the individual should have a choice over their end of life?  The ability to identify the conditions of the choice, and what triggers should be put in place for others to act if that choice cannot be exercised.

I’m conscious that I’m exposing a dichotomy: our cat is unable to make the choice, so we do, yet I want the same opportunity for myself.  We can’t speculate as to whether a pet would make the choice, and communicate it to us should he have the language.  They communicate with us, but they don’t have the cognitive abilities to make that decision.  They clearly make choices, but they’ve learned the consequences of these through experience.  We can make the decision for ourselves, we know the consequences of ending our life, we should be allowed to do so.

Whilst openness in general is a fair aspiration I have some concerns about the impact, particularly where the openness isn’t thought through.  There are some risks about the effect on future competition, but the market should adapt to that and while it may cause difficulties in the short term the effect should settle down.  The intent is to open up the market to Small and Medium sized Enterprises, but by exposing their commercial arrangements to larger competitors it could have the opposite effect.  That’s both a risk and an opportunity for anyone in the market, so we’ll see what happens.

My main issue with this headlong rush into transparency is the half baked way that it’s being done.  What we’re seeing from DCLG is little more than the amount, the supplier and the dates.  There is no supporting detail that allows this to become useful, and indeed there is no clarity around what the money was spent on.  I’m sure that some judicious use of Freedom of Information Act requests would flush out some detail, but that ends up costing money itself, and in FOIA-land the question asked very much defines the response received, if one is received at all.  What the release doesn’t give us is detail around the service, whether what was paid for that service was in any way discounted, what comparisons to other alternative suppliers may have been made, what route was used to source the service,what the rationale for the expenditure was in the first place.  As an example £1359 spent at Manchester United might just be for the a conference room and catering, the fact that Manchester United is the service provider may be tangential.

There is plenty fodder in the release for media outrage, foaming at the mouth about Jazz workshops and trips to Blackpool, but there is a lot of potentially useful material that Mr Pickles’ reliance on his armchair auditors won’t really allow.  DCLG spent a reasonable amount of Money on hotels, the Telegraph picks out a couple in London, again this may have been for conference facilities, indicating possibly one of two things; there aren’t enough conference facilities in the government estate to meet the demand, or that the conference facilities that do exist are expensive in comparison to private sector provision in London.  The extensive facilities in The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in Victoria Street charge other departments at market rates, and might be driving this behaviour.  On the other hand it could quite easily be questionable use of public funds for accommodation, but with the information to hand, we can’t know that.

Apparently the department spent £3670 with Halfords, again one wonders what that was for?  Halfords are one of the service providers for the Cycle to Work scheme where the employer acts as an intermediary, buying bikes that employees then pay for through salary sacrifice.  So the department could easily have recovered all of that money anyway.

So, nice try, more effort required from Mr Pickles and his colleagues in Cabinet.  Rather than rushing headlong perhaps a little thought and preparation would have been a useful exercise.  Similarly a lot of this data is of limited value in isolation, we need to see the same information, in meaningful formats, from all departments.  And we need to see ”why” the money was spent, not just how much and where.

While he has a reasonable position to take I disagree with his recommendation.

For me this raises issues around the principle by which we elect our representatives.  There are a very limited set pre-requisites, in addition to the ability to pay the fees, for an individual to become a candidate for parliament.  From there on success is at the whim of an electorate, and they’ll base that on many things; tribal affiliations, local engagement, national issues, personality, protest or the pure electoral numbers game.  The result of that is a parliament which, in principle, will have a people with all kinds of backgrounds and educational levels.   In practice that’s heavily skewed by the candidate screening and training process of the three main parties, as well as a culture driving towards parliamentarians having lived blame free existences and not expressing any non-party opinions.  It’s fair to say that some parliamentarians probably aren’t well equipped to deal with complex policy issues, although they may be very conscientious and effective constituency representatives and case-workers.  Equally some of the brightest may be very reliant on their local teams to take up the slack of their casework.

In a democratic system we have to acknowledge that sometimes the outcomes will result in people elected to parliament, or indeed any tier of government, that one wouldn’t trust to walk a dog.

As an engineer I do lean towards the argument that policy making should be evidence based and subjected to critical analysis, but equally there are other factors that come into play when dreaming up legislation.  Should we not also expect parliamentarians to undertake training in economics, management of change, principles of education, defence and international relations, service management and delivery?

There is an argument that we could spend the first two years of any parliament training up the new MPs, and from a libertarian perspective that would seem to be quite attractive as it would keep them away from parliament and unable to interfere with the lives of the electorate.  Clearly that undermines why they’re there, so moves towards an argument that aspiring politicians should undergo this training before they run for election.  This undermines the principle that pretty much anyone can run for election and presents yet another barrier to entry.

There is also the consideration that regardless of how well one is educated in a particular topic one may base decisions on other things, some of which may be inexplicable.  People don’t always make decisions in predictable, or even consistent, ways.

This also touches on one of the Lib Dem policy pledges made prior to the election this year following the sacking of Prof David Nutt for the crime of pointing out that the Home Secretary was making policy decisions that were contrary to the scientific evidence.  We pledged that policy decisions would follow the scientific advice.  At the time I felt that this was a mistake, and I continue to do so.  Policy decisions are political in nature, they need to reflect both evidence and a recognition of how they will work in practice.  There are many examples of knee jerk policy making with pretty negative unintended consequences.  There is an argument for legislation to have a business case attached to it, exploring the costs, benefits and disbenefits, risks and consequences.  But scientific evidence is only one part of that picture.

So we could do with better, more effective, parliamentarians.  Perhaps then we’d have less ill thought through legislation.  Unfortunately a crash course in science isn’t going to achieve that.

The Essay

The United Kingdom currently maintains, in principle, the capability to delivery military effect on a global basis either independently or more regularly as part of a coalition. The ability to do so is in question, given the ongoing experience in the Afghanistan theatre, but there is currently the infrastructure in place to do so.

The question of ‘’can the UK continue to aspire to a leading military role in the world’’ depends on several factors:

Can we continue to provide the resources to field adequate military forces?

Can we maintain the broad range of capabilities required to operate independently when required?

Do we retain enough credibility to operate as a military force and be seen as leaders in the field?

Should we aspire to this?

It is first useful to address the question of whether we should aspire to retain this global influence. Our more recent experience has been the delivery of a small scale military effort, such as Operation Palliser, independently, but anything beyond that has been in partnership with other allies, either as part of NATO or other agreements.

Our ability to operate independently in the current climate depends on having permission to do so within the international community. Our small scale activities would not require this permission in most cases, although some may be very diplomatically sensitive, but medium scale upwards cannot exist in isolation and would include an international dimension. As members of the United Nations we are required to adhere to their principles, and as members of the European Union we are expected to work in concert with European Partners. The framework governing the former is well established, and whilst the latter is continuing to develop it would be politically and diplomatically damaging to act in a manner contrary to the opinions of our partners. It would seem likely that any future military operations must have at least the agreement of these, and other, relationships.

However any agreement to act in accordance with the prevailing view must be made with a recognition of the impact on our sovereign interests. There has to be some point at which the United Kingdom is prepared to walk away from these partnerships if the relationship is clearly damaging. These are strongly influenced by our bilateral relationships within these groups, most significantly in our relationship with the United States, and how these might influence the prevailing view. We position ourselves as a voice of authority in the UN, and we are deeply engaged within the EU as both a major funding contributor and a provider of significant numbers of staff to the machinery of European government. In both these cases acting in contravention of the prevailing view would be damaging to our interests, both diplomatically and economically. We would undermine our position within the UN and potentially find the economic benefits of EU membership seriously undermined. It seems unlikely that our interests would be served by undertaking independent action without agreement.

So we are unlikely to want to act independently at the medium scale, however as a leading member of NATO, the UN, and the EU we would be engaged in any military activities undertaken on behalf of one of these alliances. In this case would our interests be best served by taking a leading role, or by providing supporting capabilities under the direction of others. Our position in NATO, the UN and the EU is supported by our ability to lead significant military effort and it would not be in our diplomatic and political interests to take a subordinate role. It is more effective to lead, than allow our resources to be led by others.

From a moral perspective it is also reasonable to assert that by leading and influencing allied military efforts we are better able to ensure that these remain in accordance with our established foreign policy. It is possible to withdraw resources should direction not be in accordance with our wishes however it appears better to drive forward direction, in support of our preferences, than to trust this to others and be faced with extricating ourselves later.

An alternative view would be that it is in our best interests to disengage from military efforts in the world and instead focus on securing the UK and our interests. I do not see this as a viable argument, our economic interests are deeply enmeshed with other states, and we rely on others for energy security, food security and for the trade and commerce that allows us to grow as a nation. A retrenchment into UK security would be damaging politically, diplomatically and economically.

I would take the view that we are unlikely to have to act independently but we are likely to be militarily engaged with our partners, and we should aspire to leading and driving forward that military effort.

Can we aspire to this?

Moving on to the questions of whether we can, or not.

Our current economic position, from a national perspective, is weak. There is a need for significant savings to be made in government expenditure, and defence cannot be immune from that. Retaining the military capabilities that permit us to take leading roles in alliance forces is expensive, the capital costs are high and the operating costs are also high. Personnel are skilled and as a result are expensive to identify, recruit, train and retain. However the defence budget is in the mid-range of government expenditure, savings that we make are dwarfed by spending elsewhere in the public sector. While our defence budget is high in relation to our international partners it is still a fairly small component of national expenditure, roughly the same as our debt interest payments.

Making best use of the funding available requires us to consider the balance between quantity and capability. We could spend our money on high volume, lower cost capabilities or on low volume higher cost capabilities. However making the decision to move from the current system of high cost, lower volumes, towards a lower cost higher volume posture dilutes the niche capabilities that allow us to take a leading role. An example would be a decision to move away from advanced, high capability destroyers such as the Type 45 towards a corvette force more suited to coastal security. There is an argument that more platforms of the corvette type would allow us to maintain a greater presence and be more suited to the constabulary and security tasks that our current fleet is engaged in, however the much more capable T45 is still capable of carrying out these tasks and still being able to take on much more advanced tasks such as the protection of a high value target on a sea lane of communication. Personnel experienced in the T45 are also better prepared to take a leading role in an allied task group, being more adaptable and having a wider range of training.

We still need to balance capacity and capability, and the high technology, high capability fleet cannot provide the same numbers of either platforms or people. While we may have the best people to lead allied military activities we may not have enough of them to do so. So there is an argument for a rebalancing of the force structure to allow us to grow greater numbers of suitable personnel, whilst also giving the best of these the opportunities to develop the advanced warfighting skills needed for allied leadership; a corvette, destroyer mixed force.

Another point to consider, if we are unlikely to operate independently, would be whether we then wish to retain a broad spectrum of military capabilities or become reliant on an international partner for some elements. Our leading position is well supported by our expertise in niche areas of military capability; intelligence collection, special-forces operations, environmental sciences such as hydrography and geo-spatial intelligence. It could be argued that we should focus on these and rely on others for more commoditised services, such as strategic lift.

Our niche capabilities do not exist in isolation, they build on the more commoditised military activities that we undertake. Reducing capabilities in order to focus on the niche would instead undermine these, and would reduce our ability to undertake independent small scale operations.

To take on these positions of leadership we must also have credibility as a fighting force, we need to have credible and recognisable successes, and we need to demonstrate that we learn from our failure. Credibility also needs both capacity and capability. Credibility depends on the political will to provide clear direction and objectives, the people, equipment and logistics to deliver those objectives and the ability to clearly articulate their achievement. We are weak in this area at the moment, there is a lack of political clarity around the desired objectives of our current commitments and we are failing to communicate our successes.

To take on a leading military role in the world therefore, the UK is required to have the political will to do so, the political and military credibility to provide the people for that and the military infrastructure to support their placement in the allied command structure.

Conclusion

So the UK should aspire to have a leading military role in the world. It is in our interests politically and diplomatically to do so, we demonstrate our support to our alliances by doing so and we have the opportunity to influence our international partners, either in their delivery of capability or in their own approach to the practice of warfare.

To take on this position of military leadership within the international community we have to invest appropriately in our armed forces. At the moment we have a credible and capable set of military forces that have the capacity to support our aspirations, however our ability to continue to do this in future is in question.

We have two significant risks to our ability to claim credibility in the future. The first is the investment in defence. If we allow the loss of capabilities then we will lose our ability to take on a leadership role in the international military community. The second risk is our vulnerability to the lack of political will and clarity around our current objectives. Our ability to articulate our achievements is challenged by this lack of clarity, and an inability to do so undermines our arguments for investment. While we can take this on now and in the immediate future, there is a risk that disinvesting in key capabilities will undermine our ability to take this on in future.

I have mixed feelings about this, but really need to see what’s going to happen during transition to new arrangements, and once they’re in place.

My own experience of using the Business Link service was adequate.  I did feel as if most of the advisors didn’t have any real, credible experience, but they did manage to give me a lot of useful information to take away and digest.  The snag was, this was all information that was available elsewhere, in particular from HM Revenue & Customs, or form a couple of books on starting up.  I was also concerned that there didn’t appear to be much appreciation of the market I was thinking about going into, independent project and programme management consulting.  They seemed quite comfortable talking to me about opening a shop, or starting up a ”trade” business like plumbing, but as soon as we got into the slightly intangible they weren’t good.  I know that there was, and remains, a demand for it as other sources of advice were pretty well-informed about it.

I was left with the feeling that the advice I got didn’t really give me anything more than I got from the Chambers of Commerce, a decent accountancy firm or by accessing one of a number of networking groups around.  Even the banks deliver some useful advice, although that is on the basis that they’re trying to sell their own services, although again their small business advisers in the main didn’t have any small business experience.

So is it a great loss?  I’m not convinced that it is.  Clearly coming up with some form of local partnership bears risks, one of the more common comments I’m seeing is that small startups can’t afford the rates charged by professional advisers.  I’m not convinced, a decent accountant should be able to pay for themselves and if demand kicks off in the lower range then someone can step up to provide it.

Is the presence of Business Link actually suppressing market activity?  Quite probably, why pay if someone is there to give advice for nothing.  That said I’m more comfortable with the advice given by someone who’s being paid for it, and has a reputation to think about.

Is it a great loss? I’m not convinced.  There are plenty of other opportunities for startups and small businesses to get advice, some better than others.