New Projects

Into 2010 and there are new projects on the horizon. I’ve been recently liaising with Philip Hammond MP's office (Shadow Chief Sectretary to the Treasury) and I’ll shortly be starting work on his public sector efficiency taskforce. This will prepare our plans for government to rein back public spending and restore the public finances back to health, without undermining the delivery of public services.

I’m working with a London-based literary agent to develop my plans for publishing a political text titled “Towards a New Politics”. This will propose how we might reform our formal political institutions and processes, as part of a wider rethink of our approach to politics and to show how we can bridge the growing deficit between political practice and the average citizen’s experience of democracy in this country.

I'm also planning a second book titled “Building our Future” which will focus on the post-war period and provide a survey of the leading industrialists, engineers and public servants of the 1950s and 1960s. The period after WWII is normally associated with the UK’s relative economic decline compared to other developed economies (see this paper for further background) but I hope to highlight the significant advances made by the post-war generation across the private and public sectors. For example there will be a significant section on Lord Weinstock and the way he built up the General Electric Company (GEC) from an annual turnover of £100million to £6 billion, before new management wrecked the company in the dot-com era. It’s worth quoting Lord Weinstock: "Dreams have their place in managerial activity, but they need to be kept severely under control."

Speaking of which, back to the grindstone to make sure these dreams are translated into reality…