Category: Business

CategoriesEducationQuakerismTravelBusiness

Buying a Language School in Spain

Posted on May 23, 2023by Andrew Gray

It’s 8:30pm, on Sunday 21 May 2023. I’m sitting, alone, on a bench in Puerto De La Cruz, North Tenerife. The photo above is my current view. I landed just a few hours earlier.

By this time tomorrow, when this blog has been emailed to my subscribers, following a meeting with a Spanish notary, which will be interpreted by my translator (whom I’m yet to meet), I’ll be the owner of this premium English language school, here in this town – a town that I barely know.

Whilst pondering my unusual predicament, a white transit van, fitted with loudspeakers, crawls past me, electioneering. I love this place! The van is promoting the coalition candidate, I think.

Despite what Brits might think about Tenerife, I haven’t heard anyone speak English for some time. In a nearby rock pool two small boys are looking for treasure. This town is both familiar and unfamiliar. I wish that my family was here with me.

The scale of my impending obligation gives me pause for reflection. The academy, formed by a highly capable English couple 15 years ago, currently educates 90 students. My first task is to ensure that the high levels of tuition are maintained.

But what do I know about education? Not so much. Although my mum was a teacher, and my dad runs children’s nurseries. My in-laws were both teachers. And I used to work as a classroom assistant in Salford (before choosing law). And my awesome wife taught English in Greece. And I have trained hundreds of doctors, and represented dozens of teachers. But does any of this qualify me for this role? Only time will tell. Certainly, I don’t have any formal teaching qualifications.

Not too long ago, I was on other the side of the fence – selling my main business (although I had previously sold two other businesses). When it’s been your baby, I know that the founders will want to ensure that I don’t trash their legacy. That’s how I felt, for sure. If, for them, they felt like I did, the moment of sale is a time of melancholy. A time for pause. A time for freedom – freedom from obligation. I extracted no pleasure, no pride, from selling. For me, it was necessary – necessary laced with monumental sadness.

At times like this, I follow the Quaker instruction to “live adventurously”. I wonder what the Spanish is for that expression. My Spanish is too immature to translate it.

This purchase is six months in the making. It feels like the right thing to do. Logically, it makes sense, too. I do hope that this bold purchase works for me, for my family, for the founders, and for the students and for the teachers. Please wish this venture, luck.

CategoriesInternational AffairsPoliticsThought of The DayBusiness

Money

Posted on April 5, 2023by Andrew Gray

I’m typing, 36,000ft in the air, on my return flight from Milan to Gatwick. Guess how much my flight cost, just for me, without a bag? £12. Two hours, plus taxes, for £12.

 

A few weeks ago in Harrogate, I bought two drinks in a bar: a pint of beer and a large glass of red wine. Guess how much I paid? £15. And it wasn’t even table service.

 

In Tenerife, a few weeks ago, at a locals’ restaurant, I paid £5 for half a chicken, chips, salad, bottle of water and a glass of wine. And remember that Tenerife has to import the overwhelming majority of its goods, from mainland Europe.

 

None of this makes intuitive sense to me.

 

In 1998, when I started university, the average salary for a solicitor was around £42,000. Fast forward twenty-five years and the average has increased to £50,000. In the same period of time, the average house price has leapt from £70,000 to £276,000, yet wage growth has been miniscule. During this time, petrol prices have trebled.

 

A few months ago, due to my poor health, I sold my business. I paid a tax rate of 9.5% on the sale price. In contrast, high income earners – as opposed to sellers of capital – pay tax at 45%. As switched-on readers of my blog might have spotted, a few weeks ago, Prime Minster Sunak released his tax returns on the day that Reckless Boris appeared before the Privileges Committee over Partygate. On substantial earnings, Sunak paid a tax rate of 22%, because his earnings came from capital gains, at a rate which he voted to lower. As I discovered and as Sunak knows, the system is rigged in favour of the owners of capital. Employees, generally speaking, get hammered by tax.

 

A few weeks ago, my primary school-aged son received a lesson about money. The key takeaway was that debt is bad. Although 11-year-olds might not grasp the finer points of macroeconomics, the lesson was deeply flawed (and he knew it). As the statistics above reflect, the higher the inflation, the faster that debt is eroded. Therefore, if being rich is your goal, it is usually prudent to borrow as much as you can and let inflation erode away your debt.

 

High inflation is a gift to owners of capital, but disastrous for those who are least well-off. This, in part, accounts for the rise in the number of billionaires and the widening disparity between the super wealthy and everyone else. Owners of assets benefit most from rising prices. If you therefore think that the powers that be want lower inflation, I suggest that you think again.

 

Psychologically, many people dream about paying off their mortgages, but this is quite often financial madness. Furthermore, in the UK, if, say, a couple, whose children have left home are living in a £500,000 house, with four bedrooms, if they then want to downsize to a £250,000 house, if house price inflation is at around 10%, then by moving home to something more sensible, each year their financial pot is depleted by around £25,000. The system, as configured, favours house-blocking, with millions of vacant bedrooms in the “wrong” hands. I am not proposing a fix – as I don’t have one – but I am pointing out how ridiculous our system has become.

 

During the pandemic, we saw second hand cars – not classic cars, by any stretch – change hands for more than the equivalent new version of the same car, even though VAT isn’t payable on second-hand vehicles. This hasn’t occurred before. A new car for less than a second-hand version! And readers might recall that, for a time, oil had negative value – i.e. the producers of oil had to pay people to take it off them. Read that again: not just free oil, but oil producers would pay you!

 

The recent spike in inflation appears to have caught the Bank of England by surprise. This is bizarre given that the only iron law of economics is that if money is printed – as it was during the pandemic to pay for furlough etc – inflation will inevitably rise. Hey presto, that’s precisely what happened. If printing money was always the answer, no government would need to levy tax and every political party would run on a manifesto of zero tax.

 

Internationally, what has escaped scrutiny in the UK is the rise of the organisation BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These countries are hatching a plan to create a new currency to supplant the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Such a currency will likely be tethered to precious metals, akin to the gold standard, and therefore such a new currency could not be printed, willy-nilly.

 

And with Saudi Arabia selling oil to the Chinese in Yuan, rather than in dollars, the dollar’s dominance is under attack. As a by-product, any nation whose economy is tethered to the US will be in trouble. Here, in the UK, with the highest inflation in the G7, with Brexit battering our economy, with an economic cycle which follows the US, and with our reputation for financial prudence destroyed by the Truss Budget, we should expect further financial craziness.

 

Let’s consider physical money. These days, most payments are made by contactless. As a result, our relationship with money is changing: we don’t get the feel of handing over money. Money, therefore, is becoming less real. What will accelerate this is the creation of digital currencies by nation states. Such government-sanctioned digital currencies – as opposed to the Wild West of cryptocurrency – will lead to greater government control of what we can and cannot purchase.

 

With high inflation proving sticky, with most people experiencing below inflation pay rises, with the near total dominance of contactless payments, and with asset prices out of kilter with incomes, we now live in a world in which what we – the majority – think about money is wrong. Money – we should never forget – is just a means of exchange, and units of currency come and go. My advice: be prepared for rapid change.

 

 

CategoriesInternational AffairsPoliticsThought of The DayBusiness

Seven Recent Observations 

Posted on September 28, 2022by Andrew Gray

  1. On the Budget from Dumb and Dumber

As I highlighted in my penultimate blog, Truss is an ideologue. She doesn’t hide it. Her recent budget was a piece of work: never has a new Prime Minister committed political suicide so quickly. I will, though, defend Truss to some extent.

During the unfathomably and unforgivable leadership campaign, during which we had no functioning Government, despite being mired in crisis, and with Reckless Boris taking two holidays – holidays he could have taken following his jettisoning from office – few people would have noticed that Truss said in an interview that the ideological, swingeing cuts to the State between 2010-2015 carried out by – until this week – the worst Chancellor in British history – George Osbourne – went too far. That is an understatement, but she was right. Those cuts triggered a double-dip recession, a rarity in post-war Britain, because they damaged confidence in the economy (as well as diminishing the State’s massive spending power). I shall award half marks to Truss for understanding half of the lesson from that period and having the guts to say so.

For me, campaigning against those wicked cuts in or around 2010 remains something that I am proud of (though I might have gone too far by making our baby deliver leaflets in the winter).

andrew gray cuts

To her credit, Truss understands that economics – and I studied it – is no science. Truss knows that modern economies, particularly ones built on the service sector and the housing market, react to psychological factors, more than anything else. Hence her misjudged budget of boosterism on steroids.

This was not the time for financial imprudence, as Sunak kept telling the Tory members, but they didn’t listen. Cuts to taxes, particularly to stamp duty, with the hope that this will stimulate our economy, would always be counterproductive if the independent Bank of England had to rapidly increase interest rates to stave-off a run on the pound. This last week has wreaked havoc to the nation’s economic psychology and guarantees an end to Tory rule, with Labour enjoying a massive poll lead, even though they have nothing to say.

Although flawed and damaged goods, at least it was Truss who had to handle the Queen’s passing. My guess is that Reckless Boris’s tenure embarrassed the Queen. It remains fascinating and more than coincidental that she died so quickly after the ejection of Reckless Boris. Classy to the end.

  1. On Dealing With Putins

Having litigated for 17 years, I have learned a thing or two about disputes, particularly about the psychology of a dispute. One memorable and nasty piece of litigation I was involved with, reminds me of the situation facing Ukraine today.

In my case, the Defendant had all the appearances of a smart, sophisticated and logical opponent, but they then made decisions which dumfounded my colleagues and me. As a litigator, we are taught to put ourselves in the position of our opponents, in order to second-guess what moves they will make. In this case, our opponent made illogical and self-defeating moves. Rather than emboldening us, we were left – and still remain – bamboozled. Settlement followed due to the erratic nature of our opponent, despite the weakness of their position. The litigation was hellish but as Robert Louis Stephenson once said: “Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.”

Litigation is a form of war – war in a legal context, and with some rules, which are zealously enforced. War, on the contrary, is not really bound by any enforceable law. My view is that the situation for Ukraine is, sadly, unwinnable. The threat of nuclear escalation is real: what might deter a tactical nuclear strike is the prevailing wind. Of course, Russia isn’t going away any time soon and any successor to Putin might be more competent as well as being equally determined to seize Ukrainian land. In international affairs, bullies with nuclear weapons succeed – that is realpolitik.

Absent any new world policeman – which of course is prevented due to the Russian veto on the Security Council – a rapid settlement is urgently needed. Although I have seen not one single report of recent settlement talks, the only signal of a possible settlement is the Truss-Kwarteng budget. If peace is declared, the real – and psychological – world-wide boost, will promote financial growth internationally. In that case, the Truss-Kwartang budget was clever, but premature. (For clarification, absent an immediate ceasefire, the budget was lunacy.)

  1. On Doing Business Deals

From my experience as a lawyer and an entrepreneur, I can tell you that exchanges of emails, or letters, is the worst way of negotiating business deals. If you can, do it in person, when everyone has eaten and had enough sleep. The written word can be poison. The same word spoken always lands more gently and is therefore more conducive to finding agreement.

  1. Thoughts on the Queen

By far the most interesting analysis I have seen on the passing of the Queen was from Professor of Psychology, Jordan Peterson, here. Peterson was delivering a live Q & A when the news of the Queen’s death landed, so he had to think on his feet. To cut a 14-minute monologue short, Peterson’s key point is that the alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an elected Head of State. Peterson said that most people cannot handle the fame of being Head of State, pointing to Donald Trump, who acted like a Tzar. To have one family, albeit a financially hyper-privileged family, carrying the burden of fame and constitutional power, solves many of a nation’s difficulties. I don’t like the idea of a monarchy, but perhaps the alternative is worse.

Peterson’s second point is that there is wisdom baked into our monarchical system. He said that the Queen was able to intimidate the 14 Prime Ministers who served under her – and listening to former PMs talk about her, it seems that Peterson was onto something.

Would I want to live with a President Johnson? No. Would I like to live in a country with an elected President in addition to a Prime Minister? Probably not. Who is the President of Germany? Exactly. On the countless times that this nation was embarrassed internationally by Reckless Boris and now by Truss, at least these two were not our only figureheads.

But would I bow to a Queen or a King? Never. Would you? I should add that I pity the royal family: just imagine having your relative’s funeral televised for billions to see. No thank you very much.

  1. Magic Mushrooms and Philosophy

Someone recently told me of the psychedelic effects of eating the “right” type of mushrooms – mushrooms which grow throughout Yorkshire. For clarity, I don’t support, nor recommend, such actions: it seems dangerous to me, as well as being illegal. The description of the mind-altering “qualities” reminded me of my recent experience of Nietzsche’s key findings (I know this sounds pretentious.)

But I challenge any reader not to be thrown by Nietzsche’s ideas, particularly that of nihilism. Nothing clears my mind better than a batch of Nietzsche – the YouTube videos do a superb job of summarising his work, as his writings are, for me, mostly impenetrable. This quotes sums up his work for me:

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

Meditate on that if you will: imagine that there is no right way – no right way, of anything, of being, of thinking! All value structures fall away: now that is mind-altering!

  1. On Onshore Wind

Over the last few months, I have become increasingly interested in onshore wind. With the country facing an energy crisis (years in the making), we must remember that it was Cameron’s Government which made onshore wind virtually impossible, due to their draconian planning regs. This point was hammered home by opposition MPs during the recent House of Commons fracking debate.

But what was most interesting about the debate on fracking is that – not once – did Jacob Rees Mogg let on that anything would change in relation to onshore wind, despite the barracking he was taking. Then, the next morning, without fanfare, his department declared that they would permit onshore wind. You couldn’t make it up. At last, commonsense has prevailed.

  1. On Inflation and Crypto

Where has all this inflation come from, people are asking. Simple: although I have seen wildly different figures, between 40-80% of all dollars in circulation in the world – remembering that dollars are the world’s reserve currency – were printed since Covid. Digest that fact.

This printing of money, deployed by most countries in the world, is the main factor behind inflation. High inflation is no surprise. If there is an iron law in economics, then is it that the printing of money will eventually lead to inflation. And when there is inflation, coupled with low interest rates, there is no point putting money in a bank account, hence why people buy assets, which then inflate prices. High inflation post-Covid was obvious.

As an owner – and an advocate – of crypto currencies, my view is that crypto or other digital currencies soon to be deployed by governments, stand to gain significantly from global high inflation. So far, this hasn’t occurred. On the contrary, crypto is down this last 6 months, due to the strength of the dollar, because, in tough times, people buy dollars. But give crypto time.

If inflation remains a global issue, which I suspect that it will, particularly if Ukraine and Russia settle, my ignorant recommendation is to have a portfolio of crypto assets, if only £10 here and there, just to get a feel for how it works.

CategoriesLegalHealthQuakerismBusiness

Leaving my own law firm after a decade

Posted on September 20, 2022by Andrew Gray

(Due to poor health, three of my colleagues at Truth Legal are buying my shares in a Management Buy-Out. A few days ago, I gave a speech at our 10th birthday party in Hotel Du Vin, Harrogate. Below, is my speech, though, I have omitted all the personal comments that I made about my wonderful team, as well as removing the never-ending list of “thank-yous”. For posterity, I record here what I said that night. As with other speeches, I write down what I will say, just in case I get lost. Another time, when I have processed it, I will write more about this monumental decision.)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

10th party truth legal

Welcome, everybody, welcome to the Truth Legal 10th birthday celebration!

 

Somehow, we made it!

 

Wow, I’m honored that you all came here today to celebrate with us. Thank you.

 

I hope that you all have an excellent and useful evening, and that you drink the bar dry.

 

For those who don’t know me, I’m Andrew Gray. I’m the founder of TL and its my job this evening to explain how we got here and to say a gazillion heartfelt thank yous.

 

How did we get here?

I’m going to explain how we did it, and I’m going to introduce you all to our team, most of whom are here today. After all, a law firm is really just a collection of people.

 

When I left my last law firm, Thompsons, where I used to work with Navya, Sarah, Catherine, David and Julie, Hardev, Shabana, Joel and Sarah, I was either going to be at stay at home dad, or was going to set up a law firm.

 

Crazily, I was only four years qualified and my wife and I had two kids under 2, the youngest of whom just didn’t sleep. And still doesn’t sleep. It must have been the option to sleep in an office which made me set up.

 

I shall let you into a secret: as you would imagine, I calculated the costs of setting up a law firm and working out how far we could last on our meagre saving and on Julia’s maternity pay. I then added up all family outgoings. Although it would be a scrape, as Personal Injury law firms aren’t paid for a few years, I thought we’d get by. So, I handed in my notice.

 

A few weeks later, I realized that I had forgotten to take into account our mortgage payments.

 

So, TL only came into being because I can’t budget or count.

 

Why Truth Legal?

 

Because I am a Quaker. If you don’t know Quakers, think of Rowntree, Llloyds, Barclays, Cadburys and Waterhouse, Judi Dench. Essentially, we believe in equality, sustainability, peace, simplicity and Truth – hence Truth Legal.

 

For me, a law firm had to be about something more than just making money. I wanted a law firm that would take a stand. Be unpopular, if needed. Do the right thing.

 

And I believed it then and still today, that there’s no point in living in a democracy if you can’t use the laws enacted by our representatives, because you can’t afford a lawyer.  Access to law should be akin to access to the NHS.

 

(Here came lengthy thank yous to all the staff individually and to our friends, clients and suppliers)

 

Finally, before we talk about what happens next, let me tell you about our MD, Georgina Parkin. When she was a trainee solicitor, she took a new phone enquiry. She said that the caller was a “Secretary” and that the secretary was making the call with “a member”. When I pushed her, she said that the Secretary was a typist who does a variety of rolls in an office. The caller was a “General Secretary” of a Trade Union!!

 

Despite that blip, Georgina has been the safest pair of hands. She qualified quickly; became a director; then perhaps the youngest Law Society President; became our MD; became a mum; and then an equity partner. That’s a meteoric rise and we wouldn’t be where we are today without Georgina.

 

The Future

Initiated by me, because I am not able to work as I once did and I don’t want people generating profit for me, I am pleased to tell you all that we have agreed a Management Buy Out. Georgina, Louis and Navya will be buying my shares and I will become a consultant of the firm.

 

My wife asked me to not to quote Boris Johnson who finished with “Hasta La Vista Baby”.

 

So, I’ll finish with:

 

“In heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here”

 

CategoriesInternational AffairsTravelThought of The DayBusiness

Duolingo and the Future of Geopolitics 

Posted on August 29, 2022by Andrew Gray

For those who don’t know, Duolingo is an awesome app which helps you to learn a language. Each day, for the last 112 days (as Duolingo tells me), I have studied Spanish on this app. Averaging 20 minutes per day on this app – bolstered by weekly online Spanish lessons with a real tutor – I now comprehend quite a lot of Spanish. At school, I despised language learning.

Duolingo gamifies language learning and uses the latest research to enhance the tutee’s time on the platform. Me encanta Duolingo! When I look at the apps assembled on my phone, there are only a few which bring me joy; most are there for functional reasons. Duolingo is good for me. Opening the snazzy app each morning brings me great pleasure.

Duolingo’s methodology of cajoling tutees to stay engaged ought to be copied by all learning establishments, because it works. Over 1.5m people have used the app each day for over one year. Using Duolingo’s simple user interface is a pleasure. I recommend that everyone has a play with this app: 97% of users don’t pay to use it. With half a billion users, Duolingo has improved the planet and made a massive profit.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast interview with the co-founder of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn. Nice guy. For me, there were two important takeaways from the wide-ranging conversation. First, Duolingo’s mission to – for free – educate hundreds of millions of people motors most of the platform’s staff to keep improving the tech in order to educate more people. The platform’s commitment to its mission is the reason for its success. It is a potent example that the best businesses have a mission over and above profit-making. In fact, without their missionary zeal, their wild profits would not have materialised. My own experience is that colleagues working in a mission-driven business go above and beyond.

The second key learning point for me is a cultural one, which I believe will shape geopolitics for decades to come. The co-founder explained that, broadly speaking, of the half a billion users, there are two distinct groups of learners, roughly in two equal camps. Half of users are people learning English language because they need to for financial reasons: to get on at work; to get into a better university etc. The other half are, like me, learning for fun, and usually opt for languages such as Spanish and French.

Surprisingly, given that the top echelons of society are forcing their children to learn Mandarin, only around 1% of the tutees are choosing to learn Mandarin. In fact, possibly more people are learning Korean than Chinese, because of the brilliance of South Korean movies. People are voting with their fingers and eschewing Mandarin. Before hearing these stats, I would have guessed that around one-third of tutees would have been learning Mandarin.

With the meteoric rise of China as an economic and military force there is much talk that this century will be China’s. This is what I assumed would happen, but given that hundreds of millions of people are still choosing to learn English, my interpretation of these stats is that there is significant and worldwide hostility to Chinese influence. And with hundreds of millions of people voluntarily choosing to learn English it seems to me, that culturally at least, the West – primarily the English-speaking West – will remain dominant, even if economically its superiority has been neutered. English remains the lingua franca.

Certainly, part of the reason why people don’t learn Mandarin is due to its inherent complexity, but having travelled in China – albeit twenty-ish years ago – it is not a country that I am eager to return to. When I reflect on my time in China, I do not do so with any warmth. Seemingly, hundreds of millions of people have a similar antipathy towards China. My estimation is that the vast “soft power” provided by the English language and, to a lesser degree, its culture, ought to mean that although Chinese economic and military power will continue to rise, Chinese cultural dominance will not occur this century.

 

 

CategoriesLegalBusiness

Here Comes The Immigration Lawyers Organisation       

Posted on August 26, 2022by Andrew Gray

Eighteen months after I first concocted the idea of the Immigration Lawyers Organisation (ILO), the new website is finally live here. What do you think? (But for my ropey health, I would have launched this project eons ago).

The purpose of ILO is to become the international quasi-regulator of immigration lawyers. A bold ambition, if ever there was one. Naturally, regulatory powers are normally bequeathed by governments. Here, I am using online reviews coupled with my own investigatory prowess to perform the semi-regulatory function.

Although I am no immigration lawyer, over the years I have sued some dreadful immigration lawyers for their negligent advice, and I remain appalled by what my clients experienced. Lawyers frequently makes errors, and thankfully only some of those errors cause “damage” for our clients. When errors occur, a lawyer is obligated to explain their mistakes to their client and to recommend that their client seeks alternative independent legal advice, which is code for: sue me, for I have done you wrong.

In the immigration legal field, the impact of negligent legal advice could lead to the deportation of someone and, possibly, a death sentence. And once deported, a client, from afar, will struggle to bring a claim against their negligent law firm. Therefore, many errors in the immigration field go unpunished.

The negligent advice experienced by my clients, with the dreadful ramifications for those individuals, lead me to found the ILO. At the ILO, we have created a charter, which the law firms and lawyers must adhere to before they can become verified members. Verified members can show their certification to their clients. My secondary ambition – though allied to my first goal – is that I can drive quality enquiries to the very best immigration lawyers, so that their practices thrive. Through negative online reviews on the platform, the worst lawyers will rightfully be penalised.

When choosing an immigration lawyer, a client is usually in a vulnerable position and could even be choosing their lawyer from their home country, with no personal recommendations upon which to base their decisions. Bringing online reviews – so common in the UK, but less in other countries – to the world at large, should ensure quality.

And it would be remiss of me not to point out that, as with some personal injury law, immigration law can have its dark side. I have done my best to run an ethical personal injury department. ILO is my attempt at improving the quality immigration legal advice.

Currently, we have around 1,000 unverified lawyers on the platform, in 150 countries. My hope is that, over time, the platform becomes the go-to place for people looking for the very best immigration lawyers. Perhaps, in time, clients will be able to instruct quality immigration lawyers via the platform…..

Will this platform make the world a better place? I hope so!

If you know any immigration lawyers who want to engage with the platform, please send them my details.

CategoriesEnvironmentHarrogateBusiness

Woodlands in the News

Posted on February 17, 2022by Andrew Gray

For posterity, news of the woodlands that we at Truth Legal planted, appeared in a whole range of local news outlets this week. I’m very proud of this endeavour, partnering with the awesome people at Make It Wild.

 

https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Yorkshire-Law-Firm-Truth-Legal-Plants-1500-Trees-At-Nidderdale-Woodland

 

https://www.yorkshirebusinessdaily.co.uk/2022/02/15/yorkshire-law-firm-truth-legal-plants-1500-trees-at-nidderdale-woodland/

 

https://www.harrogate-news.co.uk/2022/02/14/harrogate-law-firm-truth-legal-plants-1500-trees-at-nidderdale-woodland/

 

https://yourharrogate.co.uk/news/harrogate-district-law-firm-plants-1500-trees-at-nidderdale-woodland/

CategoriesEnvironmentPoliticsBusiness

The Crowd Wisdom Project

Posted on January 2, 2022by Andrew Gray

Welcome to the world: The Crowd Wisdom Project!

 

Spawned from my passion for, and frustration with, standard party politics, particularly local party politics, 2022 sees me launch the CWP. Founded as a birthday present to myself in 2020, had my health not been so topsy-turvy in 2021, CWP would have launched six months ago.

 

CWP springs from my prediction (which must be a borderline future fact) that the way we vote today – with a pencil and paper in a voting booth – will modernise. With bank branches closing, so that most people – regardless of age – now do their banking online, voting – the last vestiges of a bygone era – will – must! – change.

 

The recent election for the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner in North Yorkshire witnessed a shameful 13.5% turnout. The victor – who remains a councillor twice over AS WELL AS BEING the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner – secured circa 3.5% of the possible votes. This is not a mandate: this is a stain on our democracy.

 

My hope for the CWP is that, in a small way, CWP nudges us towards a fairer, more consensual system of decision-making.

 

So, what is the Crowd Wisdom Project?

 

CWP – run through the not-for-profit company, Consensus Politics Limited (by guarantee, not by shares), uses open source, copylefted machine-learning technology – Polis – to run online conversations. These facilitated conversations are living, breathing, thinking affairs, unlike all other survey tools before it. Polis has been used to seismic effect in Taiwan, revolutionising their decision-making, whilst quelling antagonism. (Taiwan certainly has much to teach us about responding to a pandemic.)

 

Polis was created by some altruistic geniuses at the Computational Democracy Project in Seattle, led by Colin Megill. My hope is that I contribute to the development of, and awareness of, Polis – a tool of enormous potential.

 

Polis allows all voters to anonymously suggest statements and for all voters to vote on all statements. Polis then finds the consensus points and the cohorts within a group of people. Polis allows shy people (like me, believe it or not) to ventilate their thoughts. Social media works by pouring petrol onto disputes: whereas Polis is interested in the best ideas, not the ideas most shouted about.

 

When a Polis conversation is over, transparent organisations send the detailed reports to the voters. Of course, organisations don’t need to adhere to the discovered consensus points, but if they do, they know that the issue has been fully explored and that the best ideas have come to the fore.

 

With CWP, I offer my time, expertise and resources to environmental groups – at zero cost to them – to help them to find the best ideas and help build consensus, and compromises, around these positions. With New Year’s Day being the hottest on record, I fear that this limited effort is too little, too late. To save the planet we all need to make dramatic compromises in how we live: Polis could help us to find those compromises.

 

CWP will also help community groups at the half the cost we charge businesses (business being charged £150 per Polis). For business, as I have found with my law firm, anonymous Polis conversations work very well for navigating tricky issues such as Covid risks, as well as for planning for future business strategy. I also believe that Polis’ anonymous modus operandi could work well for improving the mental health of a workplace.

 

I have always been obsessed with the power of good ideas: what CWP does best is to unearth the finest ideas. Humans have it within us to solve all human-caused problems. With my health uncertain (and isn’t this so for us all?), I want to be as potent as I can be in 2022. Wish me luck!

And if you know of any business, environmental group, community group or political group who are brave enough to try the very best of technology, please give them my details.

 

CategoriesHealthEssaysThought of The DayBusiness

Surely, we can do better than this, right?

Posted on August 1, 2021by Andrew Gray

Wired-up to a portable ECG monitor whilst I type, I feel like a hybrid human-cyborg. Doubtless this state-of-the art gizmo is cleverly reading all the electrical signals going to my heart, but the contraption’s poor wearability contrasts sharply against the brilliance of the tech. When my heart plays up – or, when I think that it does – I press the green button on a small, dangling pad. The pad is the end point for all the wires criss-crossing my torso. The pad will attach to a belt in such an ungainly manner, wires hanging everywhere. Even more cackhandedly, the pad might just squeeze into a pocket, with the wires protruding as if I’m wearing some form of suicide vest.

Design-wise, clearly what would be optimal is if the pad could be strapped to the body – somehow – because when, say, one needs the bathroom, down goes the trousers, which in turn yanks the pad downwards, straining the wires stuck to my chest. What a palaver! Should the wires become disconnected from the pad, the ECG test fails, to be repeated next week, probably. Showering or bathing is out of the question, which again is a preventable inconvenience. If the pad attached to my chest, then I could then wash waist-down, but no.

Not in the least do I feel put out by this minor imposition, which will only last 36 hours or so, but what has fired me up is that the solution to the dangling pad is so very simple. Over the years hundreds of thousands of people will have gone through this process, but nobody has yet thought to improve its user experience. Why is this? Is it because the user – i.e. me, the patient – doesn’t purchase these things, rather it is the medical practice which does?

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Famously, from its seemingly impregnable position as the leading player in video rental back in the 1990s, through foolishness, Blockbuster didn’t become Netflix. When Blockbuster’s CEO recommended to the board that they moved into streaming services, the Board poo-pooed the idea, stating that they made too much money from late returns – returns which wouldn’t happen with a streaming service. Goodbye Blockbuster Video!

Similarly, due to inertia throughout all car manufacturers, a start-up electric car company, founded by someone who knew nothing about cars or manufacturing products, became the most valuable company in the world: Tesla. The other car manufacturers continue to play catch-up. Thank goodness for Elon Musk.

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Speaking to a senior paramedic recently, I asked him – just how invaluable did he and his colleagues find the health apps stored on smart phones, available to emergency workers? He had no idea what I was on about, so I showed him what I meant. (If you don’t know, your smartphone should allow you to record some basic health information about yourself, ideal if you’re unconscious and someone needs to know why that might be.)

Of all the thousands of paramedics, most will have smartphones. Of these, many will be aware of the healthcare app functionality and, I imagine, a fair percentage of these will have updated their own information. Despite this, it has not become standard operating procedure for paramedics (and police, we think) to access such information. Why has this happened? It seems so obvious to an outsider. Does the culture of ambulance services stymie positive change?

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Since Facebook became omnipresent, most users realise that they are the product; that data is a new currency. The more in-depth a platform knows its users, the better it can allow third parties to sell to their users. Mass data is powerful.

Though the internet is readily available in the West, I am only aware of Stuff That Works as a means of collating vast amounts of data on health conditions and using AI to link various conditions, for the benefit of all humans. This is a new entity, set-up by a lady whose daughter had a chronic health condition. Spending hours scouring the internet for tips, with a background in tech – having helped found the awesome app, Waze – she created this tool which I predict will revolutionise medicine. Watch this space.

But why did the NHS, or a similar organisation somewhere in the world, not create this? Why has an outsider – a non-medic, like with what Elon Musk did with electric cars – create this game-changing health tech, rather than an insider?

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Three interconnecting theories spring to mind.

First, as Tony Blair talked about in his famous 1999 speech to the Labour Party Conference – The Forces of conservatism speech – he outlined that in all elements of society, including within the Labour Party itself, forces of conservativism hold back progress. Many people don’t like change, goes the argument, blocking improvements in all sorts of organisations – be they public sector, private or third sector. Conservatism, with a small “c”, delays human development.

Blair said:

“And it is us, the new radicals, the Labour Party modernised, that must undertake this historic mission. To liberate Britain from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working and of doing things, that will not do in this world of change.

To be the progressive force that defeats the forces of conservatism.

For the 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.

They are what hold our nation back. Not just in the Conservative Party but within us, within our nation.” My underlining.

Blair was right.

Second, as David Epstein argues in Range, often the most successful people in a given field, hadn’t specialised in that field early on in their careers. Citing numerous, compelling examples, Epstein posits that the generalist is more likely to make a breakthrough in a field than someone who has been working in that field for far longer. He says that generalists deploy orthogonal thinking to solve problems, drawing on their wider knowledge of often unrelated areas.

Third, in the case of the ECG machine’s dangling pad, capitalism isn’t at work here in the traditional sense, as the user isn’t directly parting with their money. Had Amazon reviews been an option, the minor adjustments needed for the ECG would have been made long ago.

Well, that’s my take on matters.

CategoriesBusiness

The Mother of All Recoveries (The Sequel)

Posted on June 22, 2020by Andrew Gray

Fasten your seatbelts. Our cryogenically-frozen economy, though in tatters, will recover at a never before seen pace. As an SME-owner here in Yorkshire, let me explain.

Last week brought confirmation – as if it was needed – that the economy took a 20% fall in April. The only surprise was that it was only 20%. Of course, some businesses are booming, but the majority have been hit, just as my law firm has suffered. Large swathes of businesses are in stasis, never to be seen again, when (word of the year) furlough is ushered out.

With our economy heavily dependent on the pursuit of pleasure, our economy ought to be permanently poleaxed. A 1930s-style depression – not just a recession – ought to be a sure thing, right?

The Bank of England defines a recession as 6 months – i.e. two quarters – of concurrent negative economic growth. Q1 – January to March – saw a small Covid-caused contraction, which won’t be a patch on what awaits us in Q2, taking us to the end of June. But will the recession be a continuous feature as many argue?

Brexiteers should be quick to recall “Project Fear’s” warnings, some say led by Bank of England economists, that a guaranteed Brexit-induced recession would commence at 10pm on 23 June 2016 if the people dared to vote against “The Experts”.

Like many Remainer Economics grads, I was convinced that a recession was here to stay. As the economy tanked, “We told you so,” was going to be the refrain to every Brexiteer. Although post-Referendum the Pound took a pummelling, there was no recession.

Which leads me to the failure of economists. On the left, there are Marxist economists, and on the right, we have Thatcher’s and Reagan’s go-to economists at the Chicago School, with every shade in between. Science, medicine and law do not suffer such polars. Economists agree on little. Despite our fetishisation for the opinion of demi-god economists, we must remember that economics simply isn’t a science. And we now know that scientists aren’t always right!

In forecasting what economic fortune awaits, economists frequently miscalculate likely consumer behaviour. People rarely act as anticipated and our economy is powered by this unpredictable force. Economically, Brexit was like the Millennium Bug: we survived it and thrived. Post-Referendum, confidence – the currency of capitalism – was not dented. As the queues I saw outside Sports Direct in Harrogate attest, the confidence gained from the opening of shops will power us out of the carnage.

Whilst my colleagues trickle back to (socially distance) join me at work, Yorkshire’s economy awakens. Listening to my SME clients and witnessing all around my town, I can feel the most powerful economic positive multiplier spinning into action. As a result, Quarter 3 must be better than Quarter 2. If so, recession over, second wave or not.

Though for millions the economic misery will be devastating, unlike when a typical recession hits, such devastation will play out in a rising economy. Capitalism which got us into this mess, through its intrinsic creative and dynamic juices, will get us out of it. The AC – After Corona – economy won’t resemble the BC – Before Corona.

Like pulling back a giant elastic band for three months, either the band will snap, or fly. Fly it should. April’s collapse in GDP wasn’t caused by the economic cycle, which Gordon Brown told us he would conquer, rather it was a choice we had to make. Consumers will ignore the war-era debt mountain and the inevitable tax hikes, and buy that coffee.

Shortly unimpeded by EU State Aid rules, given the need to shorten supply chains, manufacturing will return. With our lower cost base, Northern areas should benefit most. And assuming the Prime Minister survives, we will have a leader oven-ready for the good times. Like him or not, he will be better at getting the country going than in mastering Covid minutiae. My only hope is that in recovery austerity is confined to the ash-heap of history.

From Boris to Karl Marx, accurately bogeyman Marx, in a little-read passage, explained how crime had economic utility, arguing that crime caused better locks, and locksmiths, police, lawyers, judges, law books and law tutors etc. Already, Covid has been the midwife to numerous businesses. More will follow. Excitingly, some of the largest companies were founded in recessions.

In closing, in the US Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan used to study male underpant sales. Why? The theory was that men – and their partners on their behalf – would only buy new underpants when they were feeling confident about the economy – i.e. the ultimate discretionary spend. I don’t know about you, but I’m off to M&S.