Network News
Social networks - the great race.
Well, perhaps not great, but I was mildly tickled by it.
I mentioned earlier this morning - both on Twitter and on Facebook - that our main guest today will be Neville Richardson, chief executive of the Britannia Building Society.
A short time later, there were a dozen questions for him on Twitter.
On Facebook - virtual tumbleweed.
(OK. When I said interesting, everything is relative.)
We'll ask him some of the things you say are important - should mutuals (businesses owned by their customers) have a stronger role in saving and lending? How does the banking industry become more restrained and responsibility in its lending, without choking off the essential flow of cash to businesses and consumers? Have we - as individuals - become too addicted to debt?
And we'll not forget to ask him why he wants to merge the Britannia with the Co-op.
Thanks for your all those Tweets and questions.
Thanks also to everyone who has been commenting on this blog.
"Mesmerizingcommenter" echoes those concerns about job centres that I mentioned yesterday. There have been some angry articles and letters in the papers, suggesting they may not be able to deal with a large number of newly-unemployed bankers, professionals and office workers.
"Mesmerizingcommenter" notes "staff just don't know what to do with anyone with qualifications ... This time around it's going to be lots of highly skilled workers without the safety net of community housing, worrying about paying their mortgages."
(By the way, I hope this reassures you that I DO read the comments, after your suggestion a few weeks ago that I don't!!)
We've had a few emails from people asking - what about the self-employed? When the media mentions unemployment, it tends to focus on staff and salaried workers; that's partly because the coverage focuses on announced lay-offs and redundancies. You're right to raise it as a concern. We're going to do something about it over the next month.
And one quick statistical point. "Hambrook" suggests I gave you the wrong unemployment figure in yesterday's blog. Comment reads - "1.25 million. I thought it was 1.97 million... "
As I wrote in the original blog, 1.25 million is the number of people on the dole - the number of people claiming unemployment benefit. The other figure - 1.97 million - is the number of people out of work, whether or not they're claiming any benefit.
That latter figure is the current Government-preferred measurement of unemployment, but it was only adopted as the official standard in 1997. The former figure - the claimant count - was the measure of unemployment throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
I used the claimant count figure to make sure that, when comparing this recession to the last one, I'm comparing apples with apples.
Declan
Comment number 1.
At 13th Feb 2009, mesmerizing commenter wrote:I take it back, clearly you do read the comments Declan! Just was a while between writing on here I thought you might have given up in favour of that new fangled twitter thing.
One day I will get up to date and learn about social networking...
Something else of interest today in the bbc website, a story about the huge drop in numbers in adult education. Interesting since I had a conversation with my local adult education as to why all the exam courses were gone in favour of flower arranging. They said (off the record) that if they do flower arranging everyone pays, it only requires a class room and the teacher doesnt have to be qualified. If they hold an exam class they have to manage the exam, get a qualified teacher, then they dont get much income because most people signed up are "concession fees".
So they dropped most of them!
Amazing that the backbone of the british adult education system can be dumped without check for local authorities to save money.
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Comment number 2.
At 24th Feb 2009, JamesStGeorge wrote:So much for the Blog then.
Clearly you never had any intention of maintaining it by the huge gap between this last entry and now. Let alone your complete lack of interaction that I have noticed. Reading alone is not even an auto reply e-mail!
The whole ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blog exercise is one of intentional sidelining of the public input.
That you now on the programme promote these trivial twitter junk yet more.
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Comment number 3.
At 24th Feb 2009, mesmerizing commenter wrote:I somewhat agree with JamesStGeorge.
Having just looked at Twitter and the art of the one liner "I'm in a lift" is not very useful.
What we expect is informed and researched comment.
On a business program its about understanding business, understanding the real issues. And then being able to communicate them on multiple levels to help those that are just starting out to understand the basics, and to keep well informed those that have a fuller understanding but not the time to read and analyse everything published.
When certain elements of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ turn the story into digging up who last said the phrase "green shoots" and blow it up into an insult to those that have lost their jobs...instead of actually digging up the evidence that prompted that comment and presenting it...well thats one big slippery slope.
I never quite understood the "lets go visit a chocolate factory" type of report. What people really want to see is a real analysis of how a startup got there, the challenges they faced, how they solved them, what were the critical levers that really turned around their business.
Having a few public faces talking about how people should be upbeat and set up companies doesnt help very much. But Joe Blogs telling us how he set up his cleaning/plumbing business, talking about his marketing, what insurance and training he needed, what were his challenges...what does he know now that he wished he knew then...now that would provide practical help to those looking to get back into work in a recession.
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