Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-01-29 - 10:49 a.m.

First thing - I got immersed on some thematic improvisation possibilities for Wednesday week. I suppose whats happening here is similar to several tracks on Plundafonix where a theme from one domain is used as an improvisation over a track from a different genre. From a performance point of view it means that you see the theme in a completely new way.

Lots of mail � Paul Wheeler said that a tape of a lullaby should be in the post soon. Peter Chatterton said that he had come across an Irish female barbershop quartet who wanted to do a lullaby. Gilbert and I exchanged some thoughts on how the programme might look for the St James venture.

I sent some research proposals to EMTA following on yesterday�s meeting � and I did a bit more on procurement and logistics � and on the commercial incentives on the whole qualifications market plus a summary of the latest market research on the training market. Keith quite liked the latter. I also put in a few more meetings with research associations � PERA and MIRA. Paul Bell me some of his course material and I wrote to my boss about. I had an hours discussion with Barry Oxtoby where we planned a seminar on the concept of �workforce development�. Strangely active bt my standards.

Paul W provoked me to dig deeper into the Indian situation � I found a Yahoo newsgroup which I joined which included some messages from somewhere near the frontline which didn�t offer any grounds for complacency. I also found a story where Richard Gere seemed to get into conflict with the Indian authorities over what they judged to be unjustified endorsesment of the CIA estimates of the rate of diffusion of AIDS/HIV.

Nick Brown phoned and we talked about this stuff a bit. I took the opportunity to sound him out on the US view of the European inaction over the Bosnian genocide. Roughly the US line is � who are you Europeans to lecture the US on global morality when you squabbled amongst yourselves while the Serbs pursued genocide in your own back yard. Nick said there was something in this � but that the US always resisted scrutiny of the level of barbarity not least against women and children which characterised its own civil war. What a wonderful world.

The concensus seems to be that US public opinion is deeply skittish and that Bush�s inability to fix the economy was trying his electrorate�s patience with his eccentric foreign policy. Certainly there are some postings on eg the BBC site which support this interpretation.

The Democrats lost the last election despite the strong growth throughout the Clinton era. But that doesn�t mean that politics has disconnected from economics to the degree that Bush can win again without economic recovery.

The Labour party here has a terrible record in importing US political techniques. They copied the news and policy management techniques that Clinton used to win a second term and converted it into a long term political strategy. This has been disastrous and persuaded an entire generation that politics is vacuous and venal. There s some material on the BBC site which shows just how disconnected from the whole process people under the age of 30 have become in the last seven years. I suppose the lack of genuine choice is part of this.

Keith, Barry and I were kicking the ball around in this area today too � particulary New Labour�s inability to learn the right lessons. They assumed that the 17 years of Tory rule had been an utter disaster and there was nothing to be learned from any of the initiatives undertaken in that era. This was another serious mistake � and helped them to expensively repeat many of the earlier mistakes. Not that I liked their politics but the average Tory minister has usually run something more successfully than the average New Labour minister who hasn�t run anything except his own reputation in the party. The attitudes of people under 30 plus the violence of the press guarantee that even fewer good people are now going into politics so we get a much more strategic incompetence in the public sector in future.

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