{"id":74,"date":"2013-01-10T19:25:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-10T19:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2014-01-22T15:44:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T15:44:54","slug":"common-purpose-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/common-purpose-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Purpose Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As those of you who followed my previous blog will know, I am rather suspicious of the \u2018leadership development\u2019 organisation known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commonpurpose.org.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\">Common Purpose<\/a>. It seems to me to be a kind of \u2018right-on\u2019 freemasonry for <em>Guardianistas<\/em>. A network of liberals and Leftists for promoting certain agendas, controlling certain spheres of public life, and influencing political and other thinking. (It would have been nice at this point to be able to direct you to some of my previous postings on the subject, but the cowardice of Google, in surrendering to pressure, and <a href=\"http:\/\/jacothenorth.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/12\/flag-of-wales-is-just-other-bits.html\">killing my previous blog<\/a>, makes this impossible.)<\/p>\n<p>In my enquiries I came across a very interesting website called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cpexposed.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Common Purpose Exposed<\/a>. Now I\u2019m sure many people would like to dismiss everything said on this site, and I suppose it can\u2019t all be true, but one thing I found there is unquestionably correct. I\u2019m referring to the list of Common Purpose \u2018graduates\u2019. How do I know? Because I went through it and painstakingly extracted those with a Welsh connection. Having done that, there were many names I recognised; leaving me in little doubt that the rest were also correct.<\/p>\n<p>This list, unfortunately, only takes us up to 2005; which makes it incomplete, rather than out of date. I say that because those who were \u2018graduates\u2019 in 2005 obviously remain graduates today. It\u2019s just that we don\u2019t have the names of those who have \u2018graduated\u2019 more recently. Even so, a clear pattern emerges of the kind of people who become Common Purpose \u2018graduates\u2019; the work they do; and the areas they live. The full list of \u2018graduates\u2019 can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cpexposed.com\/graduates\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, and the list of Welsh \u2018graduates\u2019 <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/file\/d\/0B4K4SZ2l1_qIV18xRVZUcGNrdEk\/edit\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. Regarding the latter, I should explain that, unable to access the original document (and perhaps sort it in Excel), the only way I could extract the Welsh connections was by going through the full list and then copying and pasting. This was time-consuming, but once I\u2019d started I had no real alternative but to push on.<\/p>\n<p>So what did all this work tell me? Looking at the bigger picture, over two islands, the following impressions were gained:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Southern England, if one removes London, the public sector and the third sector, provides Common Purpose with little business. Or to put it another way, private enterprise \u2013 other than legal firms and a few other, \u2018niche\u2019 areas \u2013 seems curiously resistant to the claimed benefits of paying for employees to attend Common Purpose courses.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>A trend one sees repeated elsewhere in England, which results in CP being very busy in what might be termed Labour strongholds, or, another way of looking at it, in relatively poor areas. Those areas in need of a stronger economic base but which, instead, are lumbered with public and third sector bodies \u2018preparing people for employment\u2019 . . . employment that doesn\u2019t exist, and wasting money that would be better spent on building an economy. Cities such as Hull, Newcastle, Sunderland and, especially, Liverpool. In fact, so many \u2018graduates\u2019 can be connected with Liverpool that CP might be a major employer on Merseyside.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Moving north of the border I was surprised by how active CP is in Scotland; and even more surprised by its level of activity in Northern Ireland. Indeed, flicking through the list I got the impression that just every public servant and Third Sector employee around Derry has been on a Common Purpose course. (The region referred to by CP as \u2018Foyle\u2019.) But this should not surprise us if Common Purpose does indeed serve the role many suggest, in being an organisation providing a very British mindset for those climbing the greasy pole.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Remove the small number of genuinely commercial organisations availing themselves of Common Purpose services and it becomes clear that the organisation is almost wholly dependent on a parasitic relationship with organisations funded with someone else\u2019s money: charities, public sector bodies, third sector groups, local government, higher education, police and other emergency services. Is this right? If X amount is given to organisation Y to deliver Z is it right that some of that funding will be spent on Common Purpose courses? Is \u2018Common Purpose training\u2019 ever specified in an application for funding? If it is, then on what grounds does the funder accept it as a legitimate, or necessary, part of the project?<\/p>\n<p>A couple of other things that struck me as I trawled through the list of Common Purpose \u2018graduates\u2019 were the size of the Welsh diaspora, evidenced by the large number of Welsh surnames encountered outside of Wales; and the surprisingly small percentage of Welsh surnames found among CP\u2019s \u2018Welsh\u2019 alumni. Which supports personal, anecdotal and other evidence about the role and nature of the Third Sector in Wales.<\/p>\n<p>The Third Sector in Wales is little more than a means of funding non-jobs for Labour Party members and supporters, most of whom appear to be English grant-spongers claiming to perform all manner of miracles but, in reality, simply creating jobs for themselves by exploiting Welsh deprivation. (And if they don\u2019t find enough indigenous deprivation they import indigents, criminals, drug addicts, problem families, \u2018the homeless\u2019, and others.) Much as the Labour Party capitalises on \u2018Poor Wales\u2019 to rake in the votes of the intellectually challenged. Giving both Labour and its Third Sector allies a vested interest in keeping Wales poor.<\/p>\n<p>Because if Wales has a healthy economy who\u2019s going to fund Lucinda from Islington and her holistic vegan workshops for the unemployed? And how can Welsh voters be persuaded to \u2018send a message\u2019 to the baby-eating Tories in London if Wales is doing well? Good God! if Wales ever became even moderately prosperous the Labour Party would have to work for its votes, have to come up with policies instead of gimmicks, and find it much less easy to rely on deprivation, dumbo voters and pantomime villain opponents to gift them victory.<\/p>\n<p>Against such institutionalised corruption and nepotism we Welsh need a party to expose this scandal, to stand up for Welsh interests, to question why so much money allocated to \u2018Wales\u2019 achieves nothing beyond providing sinecures for Labour\u2019s Common Purpose allies in the Third Sector. All we&#8217;ve got is Plaid Cymru, as committed as Labour to turning Wales into a &#8216;caring&#8217;, socialist, basket-case. At least Labour benefits electorally from this strategy, but what does Plaid think it&#8217;s gaining?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As those of you who followed my previous blog will know, I am rather suspicious of the \u2018leadership development\u2019 organisation known as Common Purpose. It seems to me to be a kind of \u2018right-on\u2019 freemasonry for Guardianistas. A network of liberals and Leftists for promoting certain agendas, controlling certain spheres of public life, and influencing &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/common-purpose-revisited\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Common Purpose Revisited<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[100,15],"tags":[210],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-purpose","category-third-sector","tag-common-purpose-welsh-graduates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3gS9T-1c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacothenorth.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}