‘The proposed solution, so characteristic of the modern state, is regulation. In place of internal mission comes external monitoring’.

These arresting sentences occur at the start of a recent piece by the FT’s Martin Wolf attacking the government’s proposals to open up the UK university sector to market forces. In this case, the problem which regulation, in the shape of an Office for Students (OfS), is meant to be an answer to is ensuring quality of provision, and to do this it has a battery of nuclear-powered weapons at its disposal – including, extraordinarily (this is a directly government-appointed body, after all), the ability, by order, to revoke any university’s historic right, granted by Royal Charter or Act of Parliament, to award degrees.

In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker observed that in time all ‘institutions, systems, policies outlive themselves, as do products, processes and services’, and turn into a new problem to be solved. This is surely the case with regulation. One reason is what has been called ‘the tyranny of misapplied doctrine’ – the indiscriminate application of faddish nostrums (privatisation, lean, digital are three that instantly come to mind) to any institution or organisation thought to need reform, whether the remedy is appropriate or not.

Wolf does a good job of showing why turning the UK’s highly regarded university sector into a competitive market-driven one is a thoroughly bad idea, and I won’t rehearse it here. But it’s worth pausing to consider where ‘regulation’ is heading and the issues it is leaving behind.

Recall that the idea behind the formula ‘privatisation plus regulation’ was to put essentially commercial activities such as telecoms, energy generation and the railways out of reach of political meddling so that markets and competition could work their impartial magic unhindered. In spheres that couldn’t be privatised, regulation was intended to extend the positive functions of the state in a predictable, rule-based rather than arbitrary fashion.

Good luck with that. Relocated in the private sector, energy policy is a complete political and practical shambles. The railways are never out of controversy. ‘Big Bang’ and light-touch regulation were heavily implicated in the Great Crash of 2008 – regulators never even twigged that a crisis was brewing. In the public sector, by contrast, ever-tightening regulation has signally failed to prevent tragedies and scandals such as Mid-Staffs, Baby P and countless others. The truth is that not only has regulation not improved public services; it has actually prevented improvement. To put it another way, regulation fails the bottom-line test. It costs more than the sum of its benefits.

Fallacies live on both sides of the privatisation-regulation equation. Privatisation and markets aren’t always the right or only answer, as in universities (and education generally), health and other social fields. Even when they are a conceivable answer, regulation often doesn’t help, mostly, as John Seddon explains in The Whitehall Effect, because ‘regulators bring with them their own theories of management and control’. These are as ideologically based as privatisation itself, reflecting a fixed belief for example in efficiencies of scale and command and control and incentives to get the work done. Thus regulation arbitrarily decrees that public services should be target-driven, outsourced where possible and ‘digital by default’; in the private sector all that matters is that there should be competition on price.

Regulation-by-decree largely explains how we have ended up with a command version of the market economy which is more flexible than that of Soviet Russia, but only in degree. So we may have a market economy, and therefore ‘choice’. But ‘choice’ in the regulatory sense has a special and limited meaning. It doesn’t mean getting a service that you actually want or meets your individual needs; it means getting a service from providers using methods that the regulator approves.

Those methods rely heavily on compliance, budgeting and performance management activities which add little or no value, and the emphasis on unit cost and scale efficiencies effectively lock services into the industrial-age paradigm of low-cost, low-quality mass production, as (shamefully) in care services. If you ever wondered how in an age when ‘adtech’ boasts of its ability to micro-target ads according to everything from your age to weight to your gastronomic or sexual tastes, your long-time banking, financial services, retailing, energy and public service providers are all indistinguishable from each other in their mediocrity and inability to tell you from Adam, here is your answer. By extension, this is also the reason why all our High Streets resemble each other – for all these organisations it is the regulator who is king, not the customer, and regulators care about economic competition, not distinctiveness or quality.

There is a role for regulation – but it categorically does not include decreeing method, which on the contrary is exhibit No 1 in the museum of regulatory howlers. For a start, there is no so such thing as ‘best practice’, which is contingent on purpose and measures; and setting the means in stone is Soviet-style management that stops innovation dead in its tracks, which is why we have fragmented, lowest-common denominator public (and often private) services, hopeless banks and dismal High Streets.

Regulation – where needed – should be about holding organisations to account against their ‘internal mission’ (Wolf’s words) or purpose. Seddon proposes that regulators should be entitled to ask one and a half questions: What are your measures and how do they show that you are improving against your purpose? After 1000 years, British universities have developed a fairly good idea of their internal mission, and have powerful traditions of defending it, which is one reason they rate highly in international comparisons. That mission has already been compromised by government pushing of market forces: UK (like US) universities now have more, and more highly paid, managers and administrators than lecturers, and compete through marketing and ‘credentialling’ as much as by teaching and research. Using the screen of a regulator to justify and enforce what threatens to be a full-scale government takeover of the university sector is another large step in the Sovietisation of UK society, and the exact opposite of the advancement of the public interest that regulation was supposed to achieve.

Read my article ‘Advertising war’ in FT Business Education, 12 September 2016, here

The silly season used to consist of two or three weeks of summer torpor when newspapers used up their stock of daft and inconsequential stories that couldn’t make it into the paper on normal days. This year the silly season started early and shows every sign of becoming permanent – it’s now not the daft but the normal that’s in short supply.

After the mega-daftness of Brexit and the accompanying rounds of governmental musical chairs, the latest sign of soaring unreality is the much-trailed suggestion that Theresa May’s government is about to sanction a return to selective education and grammar schools. If you take the view that part of Brexit was a cry to stop the world and return to the imagined insular certainties of the 1950s, there’s perhaps a certain mad logic in taking steps to try to bring that world about. But in any other sense it’s a policy that would give even the Monster Raving Loony Party (‘Vote for Insanity!’) pause.

It’s quite hard to know where to begin, but let’s give it a try.

In an age of headlong technological advance which eats jobs for breakfast, lunch and tea (more than 40 per cent of all jobs will be automatable by mid-century, according to one much-quoted estimate) one thing that everyone agrees on is that an essential step in easing adjustment and heading off mass long-term unemployment is to equip people (all people) with better qualifications and broader skills.

In a pre-digital era that was the thinking behind the comprehensive movement and then the ambition that 50 per cent of every age cohort should attend university. The application was flawed, and such supply-side measures are, as I keep saying, in any case pathetically insufficient. But that doesn’t make the reasoning wrong.

The second reason why selection at 11 is criminal as well as crazy is that no one these days still believes that intelligence is fixed. Sir John Harvey-Jones always used to say that the root cause of the UK’s disproportionate contingent of unskilled, poorly-paid workers was low expectations. He was right. Countless experiments at school, in the military and at work have shown that those expected to do well perform better than those who aren’t, and conversely that treating people as failures is the surest way of ensuring that that’s what they become. A neglected part of Steve Jobs’ success at Apple (albeit at high personal cost) was his use of impossibly high expectations to force results from people that astonished even themselves. Selecting by ‘intelligence’ at the tender age of 11 is as unacceptable and arbitrary as selecting by class, gender or colour.

The third reason, and one that amplifies all the others by orders of magnitude, is the ‘100-year life’, the prediction that on present trends half of those born today will still be alive in 2116. Increasing longevity makes a nonsense of the straightforward linear progression from education to work to retirement. If the extra years are to be a blessing rather than a grinding burden, multiple mini-careers will have to become the norm interspersed with education that is lifelong, not bunched upfront at the beginning. In this context, a narrow education determined at an early age is a complete disaster, the exact opposite of what is needed. In their book on the new demographics, Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton emphasize the importance of keeping the widest spread of options open for possible futures. They also warn that it will be up to the individual to do this: neither governments nor corporations (if there are any left in a generation’s time) will do it for you.

This of course widens out into a bigger debate, perhaps the biggest of all, about education seen as a whole, not just schooling. Just as it makes no sense to select academically at 11, in a world where human life is lengthening and technological cycles are shortening loading 20-somethings with huge debts at the start of an uncertain 60-year working life for a one-off, possibly depleting university investment is plainly crackers.

What is really needed is an entirely new look at at what education should mean in the age of big data and the truly smart machine. What are the roles of man and machine? What does it mean to be human? In front of such issues, the ‘why’ questions trump those of ‘what’ and ‘how’; as machine capabilities develop and algorithms drive ever more of our world, the study of history and thought may become the key factor in preventing the sorcerer’s apprentice from taking over entirely. A greater distance from today’s instrumentalist, reductive, teach-to-the-test teaching it is hard to imagine. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, ‘As long as you have greater insight and self-knowledge than the algorithms, your choices will still be superior and you will keep at least some authority in your hands. If the algorithms nevertheless seem posed to take over, it is mainly because most human beings hardly know themselves at all.’

Read my London Business School Review article on Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton’s ‘The 100-year life’ here

Dear Prime Minister

The two most striking non-Brexit-related announcements of your premiership so far have been the promise of an industrial strategy and action on runaway executive pay. Let pass here the eye-popping ability of governments in general, not just yours, to switch something as important as industrial strategy on and off overnight – no one would quarrel with your criticisms of ‘anything goes’ capitalism or your desire for a ‘Britain that works not for the privileged few but for all of us’. You are of course right that something is wrong. But, pardon me for saying that I don’t think you gauge the extent of the wrongness, or the nature of the reforms needed to get it right.

For a start, excessive pay and an unbalanced economy aren’t separate problems: they are the symptom of a deeply dysfunctional ‘business as usual’. You don’t actually need an industrial strategy in the way it’s usually understood, and action geared solely to cutting outrageous pay will miss the point by a motorway-wide margin. What you do need is for companies, and your government, to do the jobs they are supposed to do. It’s not just corporate derelictions that are responsible for the misfiring economy – just as implicated is the compliant, toadyingly ‘business-friendly’ behaviour of of your government departments.

You will be well aware of the exemplary cases of Sports Direct and BHS, which just happen to be a perfect embodiment of much of what’s wrong with both business and its rotten relationship to government today. The collapse of BHS and the plight of the workforce at Sports Direct have absolutely nothing to do with globalisation, job-eating robots, immigration or any other of the impersonal forces usually trundled out to carry the can for bad news on the wages and working conditions front. They are entirely the result of discretionary decisions made by Sir Philip Green and Mike Ashley, with the connivance of governments like yours that have done nothing to block the path that leads to their exploitative business strategies.

Green is now blasted from all sides, including yours, as the unacceptable face of capitalism. But don’t forget that while he was knighted by a Labour government (for God’s sake) under Tony Blair, it was your predecessor, David Cameron, who, no doubt impressed by his tax-efficient methods and financial-engineering skills, invited him to advise his administration on cutting government spending. As for another adviser, it’s unclear what the government’s ‘business tsar’ is actually for, but his or her identity is a dead giveaway of what ministers think business is, or should be about. In this context, Cameron’s recent reconfirmation of Sir Alan Sugar as ‘enterprise tsar’, a crusty old dinosaur whose chief claims to fame are a floppy-disk-era also-ran personal computer and being the UK face of Donald Trump in the appalling TV show ‘The Apprentice’, needs no further comment. Similarly, your choice of new business spokesman will tell us a lot about both your attitudes to business and your intentions.

When you come to draw up your industerial strategy, you may want to cast your eye, among other things, over an important recent post by Stanford’s Professor Jeff Pfeffer. He notes that the main reasons for disappearing full-time jobs, stagnating pay and economic security – in other words the things that indirectly led to your sudden elevation to this office – are actions by governments and companies. Companies have a choice between ‘high road’ (high trust, high commitment, low turnover) and ‘low-road’ (low trust, low commitment, high turnover) employment policies. High-road policies are hard work and more expensive to set up, but pay off in the long term. The low road, being transactional, is easier and cheaper (in the short term); and it’s the one that the US and UK economies have been travelling for decades – not least because they have been tacitly encouraged by governments that have weakened organised labour and employment rights, and, especially in the UK, subsidised sub-living-wage pay (as at Sports Direct) with in-work benefits.

If you really intend to curb such practices, you will have to stop listening to the self-serving business advisers you have used in the past and radically alter the incentives that govern the employment behaviour of those who run all of our big companies, not just BHS and Sports Direct. It’s not an issue of giving more power to shareholders, as you seem to suggest – we’ve been trying that for the last 40 years and it doesn’t work: as Michigan’s Professor Gerald Davis notes, shareholder capitalism is now largely incompatible with full-time employment.

Peter Drucker always argued that public corporations were too important for the health of the societies that licensed them to be controlled by any one constituency. How right he was. Shorn of responsibility to anyone except shareholders, public companies no longer have either the energy or the will to provide the economy’s motive power. They have abandoned their historic function of investing in new markets (too risky), new capacity (too time and capital consuming), or good jobs (too expensive) – this despite a plethora of long-term opportunities in energy, transport, housing, and healthcare, all of which would yield a positive return and benefit future generations into the bargain. To add insult to injury, they do their best to avoid paying the taxes that fund the informational and physical infrastructure that they depend on to operate. None of this, note, is an aberration: it is sanctioned in the company law and governance codes that successive governments have appproved.

A functioning industrial policy, a balanced high-road economy and a more equal society have nothing to do with ‘picking winners’ or a ‘pay policy’. Instead, the ingredients are, in Mariana Mazzucato’s phrase, an ‘entrepreneurial state’ that invests in the fundamental research whose outcomes, though huge, can’t be directly predicted; a private sector strong on ‘animal spirits’ that actively accepts its role as a creator of new resources for society as a whole, including full-time jobs; and confident government departments that play their own creative part in nurturing the infrastructure and holding the balance between the sectors in a plural economy.

If your government can bring those elements together, it will be an achievement whose importance dwarfs even that of engineering a soft Brexit (in fact it would make the latter much less urgent). It’s a big ‘if’; but there is not much wiggle room, and if the bold and painstaking work of institutional renewal is not done now, then the best we (you) can realistically hope for is a continuing slow descent along a low road which leads nowhere. The worst – well, I leave that to your imagination.

Yours

It’s nearly as impossible to write about Brexit as it is not to write about it. It does indeed change everything – but unfortunately that includes the things you were going to say when you sat down to write but which the latest improbable twist, betrayal, reversal or reaction has magicked into its opposite before your eyes. We may even have to wipe the grim grin off our faces as the one apparently unalloyed gleeful moment in the whole dismal farrago – the political assassination of Boris Johnson – melts into a Pyrrhic victory (but more of that, briefly, in a minute).

There are however a couple of things that can be said without fear of contradiction. There is more pious twaddle spouted about leadership (‘lay preaching’, as Jeff Pfeffer calls it) than any other subject, and I have no wish to add to to the compost heap. But whatever leadership is, as Andrew Hill noted in the FT as he helpfully enumerated five kinds of failure on show in the episode, this isn’t it. Indeed, accidentally severing our ties with the the rest of our continent and then leaving the country effectively leaderless, planless, and witless must be the most inept leadership miscalculation since King John ordered his baggage train bearing the Crown Jewels to take a short cut across the Wash in 1216.

To be bounced into holding the referendum on someone else’s terms in the first place; to set no prior conditions (allowing a decision of this importance to be made by 36 per cent of the electorate?); to spend years blaming Brussels for all our home-grown ills and then insult voters by expecting them to swallow Project Fear; to have no contingency in case the electorate called their bluff – all of those were needless eggs that duly hatched into the chickens now flapping cackling home to roost. And this is just on the Remain side. And people call the EU dysfunctional!

It somehow seemed unsurprising that English footballers subsequently proved unable to pass the ball to each other, let alone push forward to an agreed gameplan, under pressure in the match against Iceland. The analogies between sport and politics don’t go very deep, but then they don’t need to. The squabbling among members of the management team and the inability to get individuals to work as a team were strikingly similar.

Anent the football failure, a kind reader sent me back to a piece I wrote in 2007 pointing out that the real British disease was a total inablility to think in terms of systems. I’m all for pragmatism, but if you want synergies (in other words, overperformance, as in Iceland and Wales in France), you have to have a minimum of ability to join things up. The unfortunate product of British management is all too often the opposite: reverse synergies that make two and two equal not five but three.

Perhaps we should ask for a couple of seminars from Eddie Jones, the blunt Australian head coach of the England rugby team, who has overseen the conversion of almost exactly the same group of players who had been sad World Cup losers in 2015 into clean-sweep victors of a series down under for the first time since 1971. (This occasioned one of two great Brexit newspaper front pages: ‘WELL DONE ENGLAND. NOW ANOTHER CONTINENT HATES YOU’, crowed an Australian tabloid, while French daily Libération carried an image of Johnson dangling from a zipwire above the headline ‘GOOD LUCK’.)

The second thing that is beginning to sink in is the realisation that the political crisis is the septic symptom of a deeper economic one. The popular two fingers, or punch in the face, to the political class signals that something is deeply broken, and that something, as I have been arguing for ages, is our current debased and dysfunctional version of capitalism. People have a right to be angry, even if the EU, the spectacular casualty of the referendum, in the event was collateral damage in a mostly shameful leave campaign whose rallying cry of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘control’ was really code for ‘kick out the immigrants’. Capitalism as currently practised in the US and UK is a zero-sum game in which the dice are heavily loaded against those who don’t already have wealth. As John Gray noted recently, ‘The stabilisation that seemed to have been achieved following the financial crisis was a sham. The lopsided type of capitalism that exists today is inherently unstable and cannot be democratically legitimated. The error of progressive thinkers in all the main parties was to imagine that the discontent of large sections of the population could be appeased by offering them what was at bottom a continuation of the status quo’.

Quite. What the status quo has delivered – increasingly large and frequent crises, declining real wages, growing insecurity, fewer good jobs, and inequality – is not anything anyone signed up to. They didn’t sign up to it because there wasn’t a deal. Or rather, the deal was no deal – trust us, everything will be fine as long as we intervene as little as possible and leave it to the markets. That’s why blaming impersonal forces such as globalisation or technological change, still less immigration, for our current ills is disingenuous. We’ve had these things for centuries, and they work when there’s a deal, a negotiated balance in which state, public and private sectors all play an active and complementary role. At the moment governments have opted out in favour of a rent-seeking private sector which accepts no responsibility to the wider community, while a scorned and demoralised public sector is is reduced to eating itself by austerity. With nobody driving the bus or doing their job, it’s not surprising large swathes of the population are marginalised.

The question now is, who is going to construct a deal to put Humpty Dumpty together again? Normally this would be natural Labour territory, but let’s not go there. So, the dour safe-pair-of-hands May? The dreadful City ‘banker’ and mother Leasdom? No, me neither. Which is where we circle back to Boris Johnson. The breathtaking opportunism of the blond bid for the Tory leadership and his fundamentally dishonest campaign made Johnson’s comeuppance deeply relishable. But as well as an opportunist, Johnson is also by instinct the most liberal of the Tory postulants and also, unlike them, a chancer who is quite up for a risk or two. Indeed it is just this racy combination that may have persuaded the fanatical Gove to unsheath his stiletto. The final irony, it now turns out, is that with Johnson may have gone the last best hope for something different from bankrupt, brain-dead business as usual.

Read my article in Professional Manager, June 2016, here

There’s a more than respectable progressive case for voting to leave the European Union in the forthcoming UK referendum. It’s set out here by the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott, someone I like and respect. The lack of democratic accountability, the austerity that has driven Greece to its knees when it voted for the opposite, the failure of the euro, the inability to come together over Putin and migration, the environmental and other failings detailed by another Guardian writer, George Monbiot – all these are dagger blows at the heart of the limping half-century-old European project, and they can’t be wished away.

Yet I passionately believe that we should remain, and shall have no hesitation in voting so on 23 June.

My reasons are personal, historical and political.

First, having married into a French family, half my close relatives are French. I care about what happens to France and know at first hand that for all the cross-Channel barbs and incomprehension, the French on the whole, like other Europeans, care about us too. Read this letter of affection in the TLS signed by, among others, footballers, football managers and rugby players, authors, architects, restaurateurs, actors and film directors, and musicians from Greece to Sweden, Italy to Poland. Or these. Despite our best current efforts to make ourselves as dislikeable as possible, Europeans believe that traditional British tolerance and fortitude are an important counterweight to different continental qualities – and any honest inhabitant of these islands would have acknowledge that the trade is equally advantageous in the other direction.

There is another personal reason. My father’s physical and intellectual journey from committed pacifist to lieutenant in a reconnaissance regiment fighting its way through Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in 1944 and 1945 is vividly preserved in the letters that he wrote home at the time. Reading them now, there is not the shadow of a doubt that he and his colleagues knew perfectly well that they weren’t only fighting for their and their own families’ futures; for them, the terrible bloodshed and mayhem that they witnessed (and suffered – my father was killed a week before the armistice) was only redeemable by a settlement that cemented all the nations affected, including the defeated, in a binding democratic embrace. (So well did these soldiers do their peacetime work that, as I only realised much later, German teenagers in the British occupied zone grew up as familiar with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other icons of British popular culture as I did; while the German postwar economic miracle owed much to the company governance regime of two-tier boards and co-determination instituted under strong influence from our own TUC.)

I’m dismayed that the remain camp has ignored these broader issues to focus on the economy and Project Fear. I don’t doubt that there would be short-term shocks to the economy from a Brexit, but that’s not why I’m voting to remain. I don’t trust any of the numbers. But more than that, to collapse the European idea to name-calling over numbers, as both sides have done, is both embarrassingly reductive and beside the point. Given the government’s well proven ability, not least over the last eight years, to make a pig’s ear of the economy without any outside assistance, using economic freedom from Brussels as a rallying cry for leave is almost comically brazen. There is a real economic argument to be had, about the nature and purpose of business, but like all the other important issues we face, it can only be addressed at supra-national level. Only at EU level is it conceivable that a counterweight could be developed to the dangerous arrogance of Silicon Valley and the excesses of US finance and shareholder-dominated capitalism.

As for immigration, the shrill, angry discourse about migrants reminds me of efforts 20 years ago to block the building of the Channel Tunnel for fear it would bring in an epidemic of rabies. Scapegoating is as old as history. But so, as a dispassionate New Scientist analysis reminded us recently, are waves of human migration, the inseparable companion of wars, famine, natural disaster and, although this is usually left out, gross global inequality. Of course, it would be mad to deny that an influx of incomers seeking a new life creates uncomfortable issues. But they can be managed, as they have been before, by tackling them head on with thought, effort, sympathy and state help, usually temporary, with cost. For those responsible for austerity to whip up anti-migrant feeling by blaming the latter for stretched public services and lack of affordable housing is breathtaking in its dishonesty, while to believe that any country can pull up the drawbridge and shut out these global tides is wishful thinking of the most vapid kind.

Also disappointing is the narrow vision of other European leaders who don’t seem to see the UK referendum for what it is, an existential challenge that can only be met by imaginative and sweeping restatement of what Europe is for. ‘What has happened to you, the Europe of humanism, the champion of human rights, democracy and freedom? What has happened to you, Europe, the home of poets, philosophers, artists, musicians, and men and women of letters? What has happened to you, Europe, the mother of peoples and nations, the mother of great men and women who upheld, and even sacrificed their lives for, the dignity of their brothers and sisters?’ I’m not aware of having quoted the Pope before, but the reproach implicit in the questions he raised in his Charlemagne award speech can’t be easily swept aside.

‘Europe,’ as Churchill once put it, ‘is where the weather comes from’. The migration surge welling up from the Mediterranean, the Eurozone crisis and the outbreaks of right-wing populism all underline that that’s as true today as it ever was; and now as then it’s no more possible for Britain to negotiate an opt-out than from European isobars or the Gulf Stream. We’re in, and we have to deal with it. Do we face up to the challenge, or run away in a way that we never have before? What’s at risk in this misconceived referendum, it’s now apparent, is not our economic future but our soul, our identity and an idea of Europe that our parents and grandparents helped to shape 70 years ago.

‘Why the annual company budget doesn’t add up’: read my piece in FT Business Education, 23 May 2016, here

Comparisons with May 1968 have been hard to resist in Paris this month as noisy students take to the streets to protest against capitalism and an unpopular government. Also unavoidable is the irony that while 48 years ago the protesters were in revolt against stifling corporatism and chanting ‘power to the imagination’, this generation would like nothing better than to inherit the safe jobs and secure pension rights at the same companies that their long-haired grandparents so despised.

That of course is one measure of the extent to which the world of work has changed in the interim. The focus of today’s protests is government labour legislation that, modestly by Anglo-Saxon standards, aims to make it easier for employers to dismiss people in times of economic stress and to inject more flexibility into the notorious 35-hour week. The protesters see both as further blows for insecurity against hard-won employment rights.

There is an important point here. A running debate at each annual meeting of the Global Peter Drucker Forum pitches faith in gung-ho Californian techno-optimism as potential purveyor of a new surge of prosperity and employment against European-style social measures to protect or at least prolong existing jobs.

Yet much as I sympathise with the European view in general, and with French youth’s identification of itself as ‘la génération précaire’ in particular, the debate is already out of date. President François Hollande’s political ambition to boost employment totals is equally understandable, and equally doomed. It’s a fight neither side can win, and those seriously concerned about jobs should save their energy for bigger and even tougher ones to come.

As ever, it’s important to be careful what you wish for. To begin with, the cost of French employment protection is appallingly high. This is only partly a matter of employment itself. While French youth joblessness at 24 per cent is obviously unacceptable, it’s not clear that alternative employment policies are much better. The ‘successful’ UK, for example, suffers from a toxic tradeoff of its own: while its nominal unemployment rate is half the French 10 per cent, UK pay rates are so low, and contracts so precarious, that employment à l’anglaise, and draconian welfare measures that drive it, are not so much a route out of poverty as a high road into it. So much for ‘flexibility’.

A less obvious part of the price for making it so hard to move people on is poisonous French workplace relations. Most new jobs in France aren’t permanent but short-term renewable contracts. But even the lot of those in permanent employment is less enviable than you might think. French employees are among the most stressed in the world, according to a recent report. One powerful reason is a feeling of being trapped, unable to leave permanent jobs people don’t like or have grown out of for fear of never getting another. Another is that French workplace relations increasingly resemble a zero-sum game which both sides treat as warfare. One tactic used by some employers, even large state-owned ones, is to make life so unpleasant for unwanted individuals that they eventually leave of their own accord. HR departments have become departments of dirty tricks. Favoured methods of dismissal by 1000 cuts include bundling off managers to work in a different department or unit, call centres being a destination of choice, transferring workers to a distant part of the country or simply cutting off communications. There’s even a name for this limbo – ‘le placard’, the closet. A spate of workplace suicides made headlines made headlines a year or two ago.

There is of course no defence for such behaviour. But even if it could be stopped at source (it is already illegal); and even if company law were reformed (as it should be) to weaken shareholder value as the corporation’s motive force in favour of greater duty of care for other stakeholders, there are good reasons to believe that the era of large companies as mass employers is over. In his fascinating book The Vanishing Corporation (of which more on another occasion), Jerry Davis notes that the industrial-age connection between corporate growth and employment has broken down. Thanks to technology, a company can now be simultaneously ‘radically tiny’ in employment and globally dominant in its sector. Unlike industrial plants, websites and platforms such as Uber and Arbnb don’t need human bodies to scale. One bold London start-up believes it would need no more than 30 employees to turn itself into a global brand used by billions.

And even that isn’t all. A final disrupter of the old employment patterns is the steady upward march of life expectancy. As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott eloquently outline in their self-explanatorily entitled The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, even if all the other factors undermining today’s employment practice could be nullified, life itself will have the last word. When half of those born today will live a century or more, each part of today’s linear three-stage life – education, work, retirement – will have to be rethought. Each becomes more personal, more fragmented, more a matter of personal choice. Individuals will have to take more responsibility for their working life, and organisations, for which anyway talent and career planning will become fiendishly complicated, correspondingly less. The inevitable temptation will be for more companies to opt for the ‘plug-and-play’ model of HR pioneered in the so-called sharing or gig economy.

As Davis points out, the shifts now afoot could lead to a ‘new dark age’ for labour – or the opposite, the liberation from corporate paternalism that the May 1968 protesters demanded. In the same way, a 100-year life could be a burden or a gift. At this stage the options are open – each requires choices. But to reach the sunlit uplands we need to start thinking through the implications now. This is what Paris students should be debating at their nightly ‘Nuit debout’ (‘Up all night’) meetings at the Place de la République, not a Pyrrhic last-ditch defence of a system whose day has gone. In another 50 years, their own grandchildren would have cause to say ‘merci’.