Actually I believe we got what we voted for. A very sharp axe aimed with a fair measure of compassion in a very small and overcrowded room. There are going to be a lot of casualties but was it ever possible to avoid that? I don’t think so. So what do we do about it because the situation is clear enough, our fairy godmother is on her uppers and the buck is back where it started, with us.

There will be plenty of opportunities with the reduction of government services. The truth is that only the supply is being removed there is no reduction in demand and this will create significant opportunity. In my sector serving the “start-up company” market the increase in VAT is a positive boon. If you set up a new company and don’t trade over the VAT threshold of £70000 and that’s a lot of sales then you will enjoy a 20% advantage next year and that’s a significant advantage. There were a lot of incentives to help business and more promised over the following years. Those who find themselves on the wrong side of the sharp axe this year could do a lot worse than taking a good look at starting up their own business as well as looking for  new job opportunities in the growing private sector.

Of course there will be very many people probably the majority who can’t find an opportunity in the near future and they will need help and that has to be all our responsibilities, not their fairy godmothers. There are a many places in the world that we have been eager to help and still do. Iit isn’t expecting too much that the same compassion we have found to help others can be directed closer to home when we can personally see the need.

Perhaps, just perhaps we will all be a bit happier with what we have as a result.

Are we all solely responsible for managing our expectations or are we just victims of our own innate desire to be optimistic. It is quite clear that journalism gets a lot of its daily bread from pointing out where delivery of results fails to live up to expectations but it usually leaves me with a very unpleasant after taste.

So if it’s not about football what is disappointing me in particular? It’s the way BP and President Obama have handled the Gulf oil disaster. As usual I had expected better of both of these participants and find myself feeling yet again a little foolish at my well practiced naivety. BP could so easily have handled this situation so much better to the benefit of everybody involved. All that was necessary was for the chairman to go and meet Obama at the end of the first week, apologise and try and work together on the clean up. They would both have gained credibility and created a fine example of good leadership in adversity and instead of that now it’s all about testosterone! BP has shot itself in the foot by understating the extent of the leakage and as a result will be heavily punished for arse covering.

It was also a poor call from the White House not to get involved sooner but for their part they didn’t want to be seen as part of the problem because of the dubious oil regulation arrangements and they are also now hiding behind macho posturing to cover their own arses. I think I could cope with the posturing from President Obama given the extraordinary scale of the disaster if it wasn’t for the timely comparison with the Indian Bhopal gas leak in 1984 that makes this incident look modest by comparison. An American company called Union Carbide virtually walked away free of almost all responsibility from a gas leak that devastated a whole region in India killing tens of thousands of people and blighting the lives of many more survivors for generations. A little more perspective and humility in the circumstances wouldn’t go amiss.

So why does this leave me with an unpleasant aftertaste? Well it’s my own fault because I really did expect more from the players in this game and there they are again our old adversaries avoidable own goals.

Before we had any of our current support services, people managed because they helped each other and no doubt some did it more than others but enough people did it because they believed they had to. We have lost much of that social conscience today and it seems to me very unlikely we can expect that to emerge as a solution to our needs any time soon.

It might however be possible to engineer it, after all we are willing to engineer or at least talk about engineering green taxation to protect the environment so why not a kind of social taxation. The idea is a new social tax that every working age adult has to contribute towards. Let’s say 8 hours worth of effort every month and you can chose either to pay social tax in money or in time. There is absolutely no reason why this should put anybody out of work because there is an almost limitless need for work to be done and the money raised from those who prefer to pay could pay wages to others with time to do more than their own 8 hour contribution.

One advantage of such a system would be to share the load equally and get everybody involved in meeting the needs of our common society. No doubt there are many who would try to avoid contributing and many more who could not get involved because of ill health or parenting responsibilities but by far the vast majority of working age people would be involved. It would have to be managed of course but we seem to be able to manage taxation already so we could manage this if we had the will to do it.

Sure this isn’t the only solution and maybe it’s too radical or just wouldn’t work for a million other reasons but it is an idea and we need ideas if we are going to solve problems. Perhaps you have a better one?

I wanted to pass on this great opportunity as soon as possible. It has come to my notice that there is a significant team building opportunity that might transform Beacons into a nationally recognised brand. At the top of the organisation there is a small group of enthusiastic people who have merged their management teams to form a single entity.

While at the surface this is completely harmonious I believe there is a significant amount of team building required to turn this bon ami into a genuine working team structure. At this level the opportunity is probably no more than 20-40 individuals. There may be some need to be flexible about expenses but no doubt your adaptability in this situation should result in your efforts being honoured!

Moving on and following undoubted success at this level there are 300-400 members of the newly formed team that require immediate help and this may take many months to complete. I understand that the target date for completing the project is May 2015 by which time I anticipate you will have undertaken a roaming series of bonding events and team training that will be required all across the UK for not less than 13 million people.

If you would like me to make contact on your behalf I have a couple of contacts that I can put you in touch with.

This clearly fulfilled my expectation of worker exploitation because £52 per year was not much of a wage even then. So today I decided to look at how that compared with earnings in 2010. Well £52 per year in 1902 equates after inflation to about £5000 per year today which is about the level at which you start to pay tax in 2010 and also near the level of basic benefits and also of our state pension. It’s also true that very few families in 1902 had more than one adult earner in the home so the total family income was effectively limited to something like £5000 in today’s money.

For many people this was probably as good as it got for all of their life and yet we are all here to prove they made a go of it in difficult circumstances. Hard as the next few years’ looks from here in 2010 I don’t think any of those gardeners at Helegan in 1902 would be daunted by what lies before us and neither should we. Without any NHS, pensions or a welfare state these people made it through difficult times and the worst we can expect is a reduction in what we are used to.

They did it because they helped each other and perhaps that’s the answer for us in 2010. The question that gives rise to is how do we get people to pull together today rather than look for scapegoats in our own cynical age. I have an idea but I’ll save that for another blog.

What about all the other numerous local businesses affected like car hire companies, hotel owners, taxi firms etc are they not equally justified in a share of the pot of gold. Surely the oil companies should also be compensated I bet they also lost a fortune.

The justification for the claim is that the long established criteria for closing air space had never been disputed successfully before the event occurred. This was such a complicated task that after only a few days it was established that the risk was less than previously believed. Perhaps the travelling public and tax payers should be seeking compensation from the airline industry for not preventing this from happening in the first place.

Meanwhile the probability of this reoccurring is extremely high in the near future and certain in the long term. I only hope somebody is tasked with solving the engineering involved and calculating the maximum safe limit for the problem because I am certain that when this happens again there will be a new higher number of particles per million that will become an acceptable risk.

In many ways it elegantly showed the basis for both the conservative and labour propositions and highlighted, using the Irish economy as an example, why it may be that somewhere between the two propositions is the least risky choice. It seems certain we here in the UK are all going to be tightening our belts in the next 5 years but if it’s any comfort not so much as the Irish have had to. That said it feels to me like the choice is going to be typically, much more subtle than the rhetoric pretends.

So even here on the brink of an election I find it difficult to get even mildly emotional about the debate. Instinctively that feels wrong to me because shouldn’t I be engaged and vocal about the issues and hold strong opinions about them? Well I come to the conclusion that no I shouldn’t, not at least until I am told what exactly they propose to do and since that isn’t going to happen before the election then there is no strong basis for the argument.

Like most people I am willing to take my share of the pain so long as its shared out fairly but I know fairness looks different depending on where you stand. Squeezing the public sector plays to my prejudice about big government and in the absence of any other real information no doubt that will carry the day.

What do I really want from the next government well in my perfect world I would like them to keep us from falling into this hole again and that would be worth getting excited about!

Value is an emotional term and it depends on whose emotion it is. As an owner I have many value factors that influence my point of view but I tell myself that the strongest is income now and anticipated future income. This value is tempered with the intimate knowledge of the effort and uncertainty of achieving that future income. The potential to sell now and realise some of that future value today and thereby pass on the uncertainty and the effort to somebody else feels very attractive.

Based on this logic it should be simple to set a value on my business. However the moment I try and quantify what the value of my business is I become confused by many factors that are not the ones I tell myself are the strongest. So why is it so difficult to put a value on a business? I think that a large part of the answer is that value is far more complex than setting a price your willing to sell for. The value of my business is bound up in who I am, what I could be, my place in society and my feelings of self worth. It’s one of my children and I live its success and failure every day of my life. I love it and I hate it but it’s hard to imagine a world without it.

How can I put a value on such an emotional object? I believe Ihave to first cut off all emotional connection to enable me to make the decision that I am willing to sell this business and Imust mean it. Then and only then will I be able to focus on the commercial issues of trying to value the business and only at that point will I be willing to accept that my business is worth as much or as little as somebody else thinks it is and even that is irrelevant unless they are willing and able to buy it. So on reflection I am glad I am not selling now!

It’s not laziness that seems to be the problem; in fact it’s quite the opposite. There is always too much to do and consequently there is always something else that is also important which can be prioritised subconsciously or even consciously ahead of the job we don’t want to do. I have experienced this often myself and have witnessed it in others very regularly and concluded this is a normal human response.

On this basis it seems worthwhile sharing an idea on how to manage the problem. To start with, you have to identify that this situation is actually a problem in the first place. It is true at least in my experience that some “important issues” actually do go away if left in the long grass but sadly many just get worse. So how do you persuade yourself to get on with this job you don’t want to do. Task lists work for some people but I still find you can shuffle the tasks until you run out of time and then of course it moves to the next day and next task list and enjoys the same high priority.

This approach is based on guilt if you let the job shift between task lists too often then you believe you will embarrass yourself into taking action. Unfortunately at the back of your mind it’s now joined the dubious tasks in the long grass and perhaps it really will go away on its own. I believe this approach is half way to a really effective solution because guilt can force your hand but to make it really effective you need a witness.

Once you have identified that you are avoiding a problem what you need to do is to agree a deadline. Do this with a living, breathing third party but not your subconscious and not a paper schedule. The very act of creating an audience to witness your failure to do the job usually gets the job done even when all else has failed. Good luck.

I have always believed that I had a reasonable understanding of how the economy worked, i.e. taxation, banking, services and welfare, stocks and shares, productivity, profits. It all seemed to make sense and in terms of what I do every day it still does. What was once reassuring was that it also made sense when I looked at it as though it were all just part of one business albeit a large one.

But here is the nub of my confusion. Since the banks fell off the cliff, for reasons I can perfectly well understand, I just can’t make any sense of the solutions we are adopting. What is even more uncomfortable is that all the economic pundits seem to be in complete disagreement about whether it’s the right solution or not. I realise that politics is playing a big part in all this disagreement at the moment but I generally get the feeling that it’s all no more than a best guess at what to do.

By way of example I would say that it feels wrong that here we are theoretically with very little money and yet money appears to have no value because interest rates are kept low making savers poor. We are in the worst recession in living memory and most people are actually better off than they have ever been. The country has debts coming out of its ears but we seem to have all the money we need to look after our services and infrastructure with nothing more definite than a few possible and as yet undefined efficiency savings to make in the future.

My understanding at the moment is that it works something like this. The banks want low interest rates because that maximises their profits from lending money. It’s no surprise that if you can borrow money at 0.5% from the tax payer and lend it to business at 6.5%. Provided your smart enough to lend the money to people who can pay it back, then you can make a very nice 1300% profit on your investment and this profit is restoring the assets held by the banks. If that’s all there is to it well that part at least makes commercial sense if you’re a bank. Perhaps that’s what quantitative easing actually means, who knows?

I know I don’t understand what we are doing and I find that very uncomfortable because I do understand numbers and the ones we are reporting in a very matter of fact way on television every day are very big numbers indeed and it’s all our tax money they are talking about.