The Language Business

Ed says

Ed says that he wants to end the “fast buck culture”. In Westminster some MPs make bucks faster than others, and recently things have become so bad that it has been necessary to make an example “pour encourager les autres”. Few seem to have made bucks faster than Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson in the last couple of years, and Ed might want to look a little more closely into that. In fact it is when people and organisations can combine guaranteed substantial income provided by the taxpayer while also having the freedom to pocket what they can from “enterprise”, mainly meaning contacts (and contracts) made as a function of public office, that bucks can be made superfast.  

The British Council makes money in many ways. The first is by the priming provided by the taxpayer which ensures that it is there – about £600,000.00 per day. It makes money by not having to fund its employees’ pensions, as these are paid for by the taxpayer on the current account. It makes money from contracts which are not open to others such as the “Connecting Classrooms” programme which you will surely have seen advertised nightly on the BBC (who have no business to do any such thing), or the Military English programmes with the MoD, and others with the DFID – i.e. more taxpayers’ money. With security and unwarranted prosperity assured by the taxpayer they have a substantial, indeed bloated, platform to enter into competition with genuine enterprise at home and abroad. Then, in addition to their tax-privileged schools and other resources, they use their taxpayer funded network to win further contracts overseas for themselves which are simply not offered to genuine enterprise. And because that, plus tax breaks at home and abroad, is still not enough privilege for them, they also own a for-profit limited company which can sell access to Britain’s diplomatic network to international banks, airlines, oil companies and so on. And that company, BC Trading International Ltd, pays no tax because it “donates” all its profits to charity. The charity being, of course, the British Council. It sounds too good to be true, but that is what organised privilege is all about.

Ed says “you’ve been told that if companies are big enough and powerful enough they can get away with anything”. For companies read organisations. The devious British Council gets away with the absurd claim that it “builds trust”, while being at one and the same time an arm of government, a charity and a club with a license to charge for the facilities paid for by the taxpayer, and also having a mechanism which ensures that it can do things for money which are not consistent with its (Royal) charter. It deadens enterprise, increases public expenditure, reduces the tax take and encourages cronyism, cynicism, inefficiency and unwarranted privilege. It also does a crap job. I say to Ed: start there.  

GREAT Embarrassments

Bretagne is in North West France, and Grande Bretagne is the large island to the north of France from which I write this piece. So it’s Great Britain, much as we say Great Missenden or Greater Manchester. But the political spinners are now using the word “Great” as an epithet to pretty much everything, and it is embarrassing. Greatly embarrassing we might say.

I remember reading somewhere about a failed national campaign called “Exciting Finland”. No doubt Finland can be as exciting as anywhere, but that’s not why people want to go to Finland, so the campaign pressed the wrong buttons. And the word GREAT is being horribly over extended. Look at our performance in, say, the Eurovision song contest in recent years. There was a time when Britain really made a mark, but who could call our entries over the past ten years or so “great”? Who can even remember what they were? This year the country has been demonstrating to the world that Britain is pretty much out of control, that it doesn’t like foreigners, and that it can’t manage its own affairs but reserves the right to tell everybody else how to manage theirs. And at the heart of this fatuous campaign we find, inevitably, the British Council.

Whenever the British Council turns its hand to anything more demanding or technical than smiling weakly at foreigners nominated by the Foreign Office (such as the Gaddafis) it makes a hash of it. It is entirely a propos to bring in here the story of Education UK. The dreadful Tony Blair launched the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” which had the British Council running up his trouser leg faster than a rat up a drainpipe. Then, with the help of the present Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, whose company is still intimately involved with the British Council’s effort, the organisation employed taxpayers’ money to grab attention through hype and misrepresentation and thus generally to foul up the lines of communication between British educational institutions and the international market place. Mr Hunt’s company is today contracted to sell the British Council’s “Education UK” service and has had that job since Education UK was first launched. From the results we can see that either the product is unsellable or the British Council has contracted the wrong company. Or both.

• In what should be their strongest sector,  English language courses, where the British Council has enjoyed monopoly control of accreditation for years and claims some sort of expertise, the British Council, with government support and with a unique network of offices in over 100 countries, has in ten years recruited just over 20% of course providers
• In Higher Education (where “knowledge is GREAT”), the British Council has managed to recruit around 35% of institutions
• It has a miserable 6% or so of FE colleges (the Education UK site rustles up a handful more but they are not FE colleges at all)
• They have about 11% of Independent Colleges and less than 1% of Boarding Schools.

It’s really not hard to see why. Try the "institution search" and select boarding schools and choose Wales as a location. And see how many you can find in Shropshire. Look for English language Teaching institutions in Scotland: only 6 have paid up and one of them is in Bournemouth.[ed. Well, the BC certainly read this blog because the Bournemouth school is no longer listed in Scotland as at 11.30 a.m. and may be found in Southern England. Let's see if they read this... Hitchin, Bedford, Luton, Dunstable are all towns in Bedfordshire [ed. I stand corrected: Hitchin is in Hertfordshire], and all according to the British Council are, like Bournemouth, in Southern England]. Institutions are not categorised reliably, the course search mechanism is arcane with bizarre results . I chose “Career based and foundation” started typing “catering” and was offered a list of possibilities such as catering technology, but selecting that option (and most of the others) produced a nil result and “Did you mean…”.  So we might sympathise here with Mr Hunt on the basis that his company is contracted to sell the unsellable. But we might also ask why it is that a government funded organisation is interfering in this market, why the company of a government minister is selling the services of a government funded organisation at all, and indeed why he has for over ten years had a complete monopoly of selling these or any other services of this government funded monopoly organisation. It is a demonstration of exactly why this Great Britain has lost credibility in the eyes of the world. It is a monument to British incompetence, a formula for enduring corruption and waste, and a truly great British cockup.

Going Mobile

“Everybody” is going mobile. It’s not just airports where you see people stabbing, pointing or waving around (or even listening to) their smartphones these days, but everywhere. A lot of that is to do with text messaging, apps, games and so on, but a lot of it is web use too. Google Analytics and Web-Stat provide me with a record of what is happening on my sites, and what is happening today is very different from one year ago. Numbers are up and that’s always welcome. But whereas one year ago the proportion of visitors using a mobile device for site access was about 1 in 70, today it is 1 in 12. And I expect that to be history by Christmas. This is a phenomenon.

As a web publisher I have to decide what to do about this, and I don’t think there are necessarily simple answers. Technology moves so fast that I am quite likely to be embarrassed in a few months’ time by what I am writing today. But right now here is how I see things.

1)      A mobile user is probably less leisured than a user sitting at a PC. He or she will probably have less time for reading, research and analysis and little use for purely aesthetic embellishment. I conclude that functionality should be simple and straightforward and yield fast results.

2)      However adept a mobile user is at sending text messages, and generally using a virtual keyboard, he or she is never going to be able to write as freely, fluently and fully as with a conventional keyboard. I for one would not consider writing this article on a phone. At the same time we should expect keying to become easier, faster and more predictive even on the smallest keyboards, and – where it is an option - voice activation to become more banal.

3)      Mobile means quite a range of things. An iPad is a mobile device but accessing websites on an iPad is a very different sport from using a phone, especially a smaller one. And iPads (and other tablets to varying degrees) cope well with most unmodified websites. I conclude that “mobile” users should not be forced down a mobile alley if they choose to stay on the conventional main road.

4)      And screen technology has moved forward dramatically in the past two years or so, so that even small phones can blow up parts of any “page” with very little effort on the part of the user. And given that, it seems highly likely that it will move forward again from here with ever higher resolution, easier pinch and zoom etc. This makes it difficult to make decisions today which we can confidently expect to look good a year or two down the line.

Doing nothing is not an option for most however. Many sites don’t “work” well on mobile devices because the page is too busy, full of text and/or large images, and designed for use on a big screen with a wide-ranging, fast-moving rodent. You can create a version of your website for mobile devices and send visitors there automatically, or you can show that the alternate version is available and offer an optional link. A good example of the former is the site of Lake School of English where mobile users are sent automatically to a natty mobile version of the site, which also offers a route back to the main site. On English in Britain, and Colleges in Britain, we offer links from the main site to optional cut-down and much simpler .mobi versions (and routes back to the main site for any refugees). Although the links to these alternate sites are fairly discreet, the take-up has been instant and striking.  

Those are perhaps satisfactory if unspectacular provisional answers to the question of how to respond today. Things are moving very fast, however, and we may anticipate an overhaul of website design generally in the coming months in order to provide for the multiplicity of platforms that are and will be used to access sites and apps and TV and games, and provide mobile (or fixed) communications in the near future.  Comments  welcome.

Oh, that sucking up to the Gaddafis

The story is giving off a particularly evil smell. No wonder the British Council was so keen to ingratiate itself with Saif-el-Islam Gaddafi  and Hana Gaddafi . It is now horribly and revoltingly clear that the org had been given the green light by the FCO to spend their money (our money, that is) keeping the Gaddafis on the right side. The British government had clearly decided that because Muammar, or else his offspring, were clearly going to be in charge for another 40 years, Libya was a suitable place for our torture export, otherwise known as “extraordinary rendition”.

Did the British Council know about that? No, probably not, although there may have been a member of MI6 working there at the time who knew more than he was letting on. But, lest we forget, read these two excerpts again.

First, this from the British Council Director, Libya, trying to explain why he had falsely described a student as an employee of the Libyan National Oil Company when he was no such thing:

“Student X is the son of one of the British Council’s most important contacts in Libya - the Executive Head of the Gaddafi Development Foundation and one of the right-hand men of Saif El Islam Gaddafi, the possible future leader of Libya”.

Second, this from the Freedom of Information division of the British Council in connection with paid places at their school in Tripoli, including specifically the student referred to above:

“In all of the above cases, the sponsorships' full class fees of 360 Libyan dinars each (approx. £140) were debited to BC Libya's country education budgets, which is funded from "grant funded services", ie. from the funding we receive via our core grant-in-aid from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which amounted to a total of £186.2m for the year 2005/6.” 

Taxpayers’ money, supposedly granted for the purpose of the promotion of British culture (or something like that – it is less and less clear what the British Council actually stands for unless it is safeguarding privilege), via the FCO, was deliberately and specifically used  to keep the Gaddafis onside. So it wasn’t just because the British Council likes to use taxpayers’ money to subsidise its so-called enterprises, and it wasn’t just to help the org win more contracts for itself in Libya. It was because we, in collusion with the Americans, were using the Libyan regime to host prisoners and extract intelligence under torture.

Somebody has a lot to answer for.