The Public Trust Partnership

Twitter Interview Western Mail Business Pages

The Twitter Interview

May 26 2010 by Sion Barry,Business Editor- Western Mail National Newspaper of Wales

Siôn Barry talks to director of the Cardiff Business Partnership and the Public Trust Partnership, Roy Thomas, via Twitter where responses are limited to 140 characters

@SionBarry: How would you rate Cardiff in entrepreneurial terms?

@RoyJThomas: High. As I meet people every week in business small to big who have built businesses of great value – we do not lack talent.

@SionBarry: Is Cardiff well served by WAG in terms of business support and infrastructure investment into the capital ?

@RoyJThomas: Without a capital of growth Wales will not lever in investment – WAG looks at redistribution but not creation and positioning.

@SionBarry: Has the merger of the WDA into WAG civil service been a failure?

@RoyJThomas: Judging by our economic performance and position in terms of UK and European economic growth – yes.

@SionBarry: Do you agree that there needs to be far greater input from private sector in strategy and delivery of biz support?

@RoyJThomas: Yes – private sector not been taken seriously no urgency in public sector -real business switches off at the lack of pace of.

@SionBarry: In terms of “support” what do you think companies in Wales would most benefit from?

@RoyJThomas: IT grants are key – private sector wants more skilled people -needing growth with more strategic direction and overseas marketing.

 

@SionBarry: If you had say £10m for a biz start-up would you be confident of the best possible ROI if based in Wales?

@RoyJThomas: Yes. It would depend on sector and market and of people wanting to execute plan – Admiral started with £1m public funding.

@SionBarry: I agree with that completely.

@SionBarry: Do you see merit in a Welsh Stock Exchange, in particular a non LSE electronic version?

@RoyJThomas: No an exchange is no substitute for business growth/value and is only a means for funding – Silicon Valley attracts VC funding.

@SionBarry: But without access to growth finance surely business growth/value cannot be achieved?

@RoyJThomas: Two hours away from the leading financial capital in the world – growth capital is attracted to good business and profitability.

@SionBarry: But if it was cheaper than say raising money on AIM with less regulatory cost could you see a merit in it?

@RoyJThomas: Listing regulations there to protect investors from Madoff type. AIM has its place so does LSE – as does venture capital and debt.

@SionBarry: You seem to be an admirer of India. Anything Wales plc can learn from one of the world’s fastest growing economies?

@RoyJThomas: India knows how to create wealth from use of IT/culture- it has driven its economy We can learn a lot way its used diverse culture.

Milan and Cardiff will be different today - it meant more to Cardiff

Milan and Cardiff will be different places today.

Why do some teams succeed? Why does sport especially football play such a big part in these Cities and to the lives of the fans?

Cardiff lost to Blackpool in what was known as the the most profitable soccer match worth £1 million pounds a minute and Inter Milan beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League Cup Final to win the most prestigious competition in Europe.

The unfortunate fact for Bayern Munich and Cardiff was that the teams they faced were on a streak of success. Blackpool had each time come back from being behind in their games at the end of the season and psychologically they were tuned into that. Inter Milan psychologically knew that they needed to defend all night and score on the bounce. Two moments of brilliance from Cardiff disturbed but failed ultimately to unsettle matters. Bayern found that a brick wall had been put up between the posts. Throw in some luck like JayBothroyd and Franck Bilal Ribéry not playing and you get an answer.

In sport performance is easy to to define and measure and fans will look for those to blame.

Tversky published “The Hot Hand in Basketball:  Misconception of Random sequences” (Cognitive Psychology).He found that success following success was just as likely as success following failure. Nobel Prize winning physicist E.M .Purcell claimed bad players and teams have longer and more frequent streaks of failure than great teams and great players, and great players and teams have longer and more frequent success than lesser players and teams. That is too easy and obvious. It is a law of averages. Sport and performance is in the mind. It is on the day that counts.

For the fans happiness in football we turn to Aristotle who wrote of eudaimonia translated as happiness or more often human flourishing.

Eudaimonia is a high level of happiness, measure of quality of life, of fulfilling one’s potential. Yesterday I had a sense that football was not at its basic sense of happiness –a momentary feeling that makes us happy. It meant more to Cardiff .It was more complex.

Cardiff will one day grace the Premier League and flourish bringing eudaimonia to those who want it but perseverance, flexibility and a sense of   “it will happen”  - need to continue to pervade. Let Cardiff not give up when they have achieved so much.

Translations of English into Welsh- what a fuss?

Wales rightly can get passionate about rugby football and the welsh language. The world's languages are disappearing at the rate of one a fortnight.

The National Assembly Commission which runs the National Assembly has been warned it could face legal action if it abandons written translations of debates from English into Welsh.

The recommendation by an independent panel that a fully-translated record of proceedings should no longer be published yesterday has promoted debate. In view of public expenditure cuts this is sensible but surely there are bigger issues like the activities of S4C and preservation of its budget.

I will be interviewed tomorrow on BBC Wales as to my views on  whether business should embrace the welsh language. The answer is simple business will do it if it benefits customers and the company  and those they serve from a community responsibility perspective. Businesses will adopt the language of their employees and customers.Over regulation will not win the day in this regard.

The late Kenneth Hale, who taught linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), put the issue of language more passionately: “When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum.”

At present the world has about 6,800 distinct languages (and many more dialects), according to Ethnologue, a database maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.Worse, probably 3,000 or so others are also endangered. Linguists classify languages on a scale ranging from “safe” (learnt by all children in the group, and spoken by all its members) to “critically endangered” (only a few old speakers). On that scale, “endangered” comes in the middle, meaning that children no longer learn the language and only adults speak it.

The Assembly Proposed Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2010 is intended to modernise the existing legal framework largely governed by the Welsh Language Act 1993 regarding the use of the Welsh language in the delivery of public services. This proposed Measure will include provision with regard to the official status of the Welsh language in Wales; make provisions about standards (to eventually replace schemes) relating to the Welsh language, which may include service delivery standards, policy making standards, operational standards, promotion standards and record keeping standards; the preparation, imposition and enforcement of which to be, in the main, carried out by a new Commissioner.

At the last count, 575,730 individuals could speak Welsh, some 20.5% of the total population of Wales. Between 1991 and 2001 there was an increase in the number of Welsh speakers in 14 of the 22 counties with a significant rise amongst schoolchildren.

It is nonsense for some to say the Assembly does not promote the language when it does. But what is more critical is the budget of S4C being cut. S4C's budget is set each November, adjusted upwards for the retail price index, and paid annually as a grant through the Westminster Department for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport.

The broadcaster's current grant is worth £100m annually, and it receives a further £25m subsidy, in the form of programming supplied by BBC Wales, including Welsh language news and Pobol-y-Cwm, the long running daily soap. The Welsh Assembly does not have devolved powers over broadcasting, but S4C's contribution to the nation's creative economy is up for debate. The funding formula has been set since S4C was founded in 1982 and is protected by statute.

S4C faced criticism after the Western Mail published ratings data revealing that only 20% of its programmers attracted more than 10,000 viewers over a three-week period in February and March.

Concentrate on the big picture.

The demise of any language is a loss for all mankind, but most of all a loss for its speakers. As one Navajo elder told his grandson:

“If you don't breathe,
There is no air.
If you don't walk,
There is no earth.
If you don't speak,
There is no world.”

Sources

Endangered languages
Babel runs backwards Dec 29th 2004
From The Economist print edition

http://www.clta-gny.org/article/endangered_language.html

Proposed Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2010

Government Proposed Measure – Introduced by Minister for Heritage

The Proposed Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2010 is intended to modernise the existing legal framework largely governed by the Welsh Language Act 1993 regarding the use of the Welsh language in the delivery of public services.

http://www.assemblywales.org/bus-home/bus-legislation/bus-leg-measures/business-legislation-measures-wl.htm

S4C braced for cuts to £100m grant

Welsh-language broadcaster's chairman admits it needs to change its output and expand online activities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/20/s4c-cutbacks

 

Politics of Trust -What's trust got to do with it?

What's trust got to do with it?

 What’s Trust Got To Do With It? – a Briefing Paper examining public trust in and expectations of politicians and Parliament draws on the latest academic research about public trust, politics and Parliament and is based on working group discussions conducted by the Hansard Society, the Political Studies Association (PSA) and the Centre for Citizenship, Globalization and Governance (C2G2) at the University of Southampton.
Politicians have rarely been trusted, and the expenses scandal did not therefore lead to a collapse in trust in politics and politicians because levels of trust were already so low. But public dissatisfaction with politics is based on deeper problems than lack of trust in MPs and Parliament. This briefing paper identifies the more urgent challenge as being the decline in the relevance of politicians and political institutions to people’s everyday lives.

What’s Trust Got To Do With It? highlights the fact that distrust of politicians is long-standing – pre-expenses research in 2004 showed 27% of the public trusted politicians ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’; the same question asked post-expenses in 2009 showed a marginal decline in trust to 26%.  The expenses scandal did not therefore lead to a collapse in trust in politics and politicians because levels of trust were already so low. In addition, for a majority of the public (53%) allegiance to a political party overrides perceptions of wrong- doing by candidates – they would still vote for them.

The briefing paper identifies declining rates of satisfaction with the country’s system of governance as a major challenge for politicians – while 60% of the public think Parliament ‘is worthwhile’, only 19% see it as an influential institution in their everyday lives. Furthermore, 85% of the public believe they have ‘not very much influence’ or ‘no influence at all’ over national decision-making. This perceived lack of influence is rooted primarily in the belief that politicians do not listen to what the public has to say and that the political system does not allow them to have influence.

What’s Trust Got To Do With It? recommends that MPs should concentrate on reforms to tackle lost satisfaction, relevance and influence rather than trying to address trust. Policies introduced to address issues of trust through the provision of greater transparency and accountability (such as Freedom of Information legislation) often have the opposite, unintended effect of engendering a culture of suspicion rather than trust.

Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society’s Parliament & Government programme and author of What’s Trust Got To Do With It?, commented: ‘The events of the past year have opened up an opportunity for a serious dialogue about what kind of representative democracy we want for the future. Politicians, by focusing on policies designed to engender trust, have missed the bigger, broader underlying concern – the declining levels of public satisfaction, perceived influence on decision-making and confidence in the relevance of Parliament to their lives. MPs in the new Parliament must tackle essential questions about the role and function of politicians and Parliament – if it’s just business as usual, public attitudes to politics and Parliament may plummet still further.’

To download a copy of the briefing paper, visit http://hansardsociety.org.uk/blogs/parliament_and_government/archive/2010/05/05/what-s-trust-got-to-do-with-it.aspx