Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

There has been an interesting thread running through the various high profile interrogations by Parliamentary Select Committees as well as the appearances at the Leveson Inquiry, which leads always to the same place. It is not a good place. It is the place of third rate leadership. It matters little whether it is a newspaper tycoon, a bank boss, a security company CEO or even a government minister. At worst they come across as little better than scoundrels and at best untrustworthy. There are some worthy souls such as the Bank Governor and the Head of the FSA, but they appear almost bemused by the scale of duplicity and incompetence among those supposed to be cream of the City.

This is all alarming. We now know that the economic theories underpinning the belief that free markets always find equilibrium are flawed. We also know that globalisation based upon those theories leads to unsustainable imbalances. We know that markets are easily rigged and that excessive financial rewards drive the wrong people forward into positions of command. We know that the Anglo-Saxon economic model sucks resource from the poor into the coffers of the rich and fails in return to create new wealth. We know that the whole western economic model is crippled by debt.

Yet when those thought hitherto to be the great and the good appear in public to explain, they fall far short. They do not appear either charismatic or clever. Whether it is security guards, LIBOR, phone hacking or whatever their answers and explanations are neither convincing nor complete. Denial is the state in which all seem to live. It used to be argued that to get the best people you had to pay more. At least we know now that the more you pay them, the worse they get. Ministers, who feed their egos not on money but on power, have become utterly detached from responsibility for the cock ups of their departments, to the point where they are little short of brazen.

We cannot go on like this. We need a new generation of leaders who are neither greedy nor selfish, who are not just clever but are also informed, who are creative and inspiring, who have worked out what needs to be done and what its effect will be, who have the conviction to support their plans and who have the leadership qualities to inspire us all.

Where are they?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.