...Actually, I WILL give a view on it.

It was a politicians speech. It blamed everything on everyone else. It promised jam tomorrow. It said "We're the good guys, everyone else is bad". It had a nice collection of soundbites for those too stupid to follow the whole thing.

In short, it was a politicians speech. What did you expect? The same was amde by the Lib Dems and the same will be made by the Tories.

Nothing changes.

Well if you did follow the whole thing you would have picked up on one idea that is very worthwhile and that is measures to attempt to end the short term-ism in company thinking by removing the 3 month reporting schedule and mention that it is far too easy to take companies over in this country led by a desire of hedge funds to make a killing rather than there being any business logic behind it.

There were a few things in there like this but I am under no illusion they will go as far as they should. He mentioned putting business in charge of the money used for training so they can have people trained as they want. This would seem to be giving business what they want. How can they complain if they control the purse strings is probably part of the motivation for this but I can't say I think this is a good idea as it I think it will simply result in more public money heading into private company hands for little real return.

All the three parties are far too wedded to private sector involvement in just about everything.

That said Ed M does in my view represent the lesser evil of any of them. If we have to put up with this private sector involvement and an economy run on neo-liberal lines regardless of who wins then voting Labour on the promise to repeal the NHS bill is good enough reason to vote that way for me.

I do not think Cameron would be PM today if people thought he was going to do what he has to the NHS regardless of Labour's supposed blame for the world financial crisis.

One business leader this week was heard to moan: "what happens to my business if I train someone and they then leave to go to a competitor"?

He was answered with: "what happens to your business if you fail to train anyone"?

Short-termism in all its glory

The various Industry Training Boards were (by & large) great institutions. Funded through an industry levy, they became persona non grata when some of the bigger companies, that by extension contributed more, complained to government about this "needless cost" on their business. As each board fell away, so training also reduced, even at the macro-company level. IIRC the Construction Industry Training Board is the only one still in existence.

There has been a driven agenda to de-skill as much of the workforce as possible. This may have the short-term effect of reducing labour costs but it invariably presents problems because those left in the workforce do not possess the skills to tackle any "out of the ordinary" problem. Those who may have the ability to do so have usually been put out to pasture, so the solution then is to buy-in "expertise", usually at exhorbitant cost to the business. - Short-termism again.

Take the vehicle repair business as an example: 30 years ago a lad would be apprenticed, he would study at night school & day release tech college and once qualified, he would be a competent technician and was called a "fitter". Now we have someone who receives training on a diagnostics machine, identifies a problem component and fits a new part. For some reason, he is now called a technician.