SOME REFLECTIONS ON (HORSE) MANAGEMENT

I recently caused some unintended offence by suggesting that consideration be given to a horse's management regime. With hindsight, options would have been a better word to use than regime. However, I was doing some research on Iran at the time. Better still, I might have initiated a discussion about the objectives of horse management. For me, these are encapsulated in the soundness, wellbeing and safety of animal and keeper or rider. Others may have more aspirational objectives for their horses, but "soundness, wellbeing and safety" are values which many organisations - the National Health Service, for instance - would do well to make central to their management.

INTOLERANT (NEO) LIBERAL VALUES IN UK MEDIA

Today's Financial Times has an article on "the rise of liberal intolerance in America". This is a serious matter, but the irony of the title could not help but give me a quiet chuckle. As I've noted previously, the paper - whose objectivity I've come to value over the years - has embarked upon some fairly hysterical coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. Whilst this is by no means exclusive to the FT - the BBC is just as bad -  it does beg the question whether this is a Liberal or Neo-Liberal bias, or indeed, a combination of the two.

BRITAIN: OSBORNE'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS

Although today's front page of the Financial Times attributes a "great leap backwards" to his Labour shadow, in fact this potentially disastrous economic manoeuvre has been led by Chancellor George Osborne, and John McDonnell's "coup de theatre" has only served to draw attention to it.

Like Mr McDonnell, I keep a copy of "Quotations from Chairman Mao-Tse Tung" (see above) at home for reference. However, it was former UK Coalition government Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, who in 2010 started the Maoist discourse in contemporary British politics: "There is a kind of Maoist revolution happening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control" (1). This "revolution" is clearly still underway and the Labour Shadow Chancellor decided to highlight the ongoing "great leap backwards" yesterday.

It was the UK government's sale not just of the family silver but also of the furniture -  "this government is selling off to a Maoist regime British assets" - that  Mr McDonnell emphasised in a humorous reference not just to Chairman Mao but also to former "One Nation" Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, who upbraided the Thatcher government for public asset stripping (2,3). Unfortunately, such allusions proved too much for the intellectual capacities of most of his colleagues and the media: something which is just as worrying as the fact that the UK is increasingly run like a combination of real estate and asset disposal agency.

However, the news is not all bad. Recent reports by the Conservative Bow Group on the need to restrict foreign acquisitions of property in Britain and ditch the High Speed 2 Rail project suggest there may still be a revival of common sense politics amongst the Tories as well as Labour (4,5).

Postscript: Journalists on the Financial Times recently voted for strike action in a pensions dispute. Therefore, they must be old-fashioned political left wingers (6). Spot the irony!

References
1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/23/vince-cable-mao-coalition-marxist-capitalism
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34931047
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1ssGrq5S3w
4. http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/nov/21/foreign-buyers-british-property
5. http://www.bowgroup.org/policy/revive-britains-railways-improve-capacity-says-bow-group
6. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/19/financial-times-journalists-vote-to-strike-over-pensions