Crazy budget frolics, inspirational hogwash – and a magazine with a clueless editor
I don’t know why, but a strange tide of lassitude washed over me last week.
The normal torrent of stupid advertising afflicted me. The normal flood of inane stuff about silly celebrities appeared. The great Cyprus cock-up revealed that our unelected European bosses were, if anything, even more insensitive and clueless than normal. But I just couldn’t be bothered.
However, wallpaper whelp Osborne produced his usual unbalanced budget. Among other witless follies, he replaced one set of child allowances with another which lets people earning as much as £150,000 benefit.
Do people that rich need help? Is this how we reduce the deficit? When will somebody sane simplify our crazy tax system? The liar Cameron said he would before he got the job, but went back on his word as per usual.
For weeks, months and years to come, all over Britain clever people will be paid millions to make sense of the changes and where appropriate circumvent them. And for years to come poor, uneducated people will fail to understand what they are entitled to.
If you wanted to ensure the greatest amount of wasted time and money and the least help for those who need it you could hardly do better.
***
Today, I read an email from someone who states (quite rightly) that most business writing is boring and lacks inspiration. He then asks readers “Have you put your vision of change into context?” Precisely the kind of turgid drivel that drives normal people mad.
***
My copy of The Week arrived yesterday, carrying with it a magazine called Raconteur, which I thought might contain gossip of one kind or another.
No chance. The line on the front is “Women mean business”.
If I had to list the most hackneyed, least effective heading formats that comes near the top. It breaks all the rules of a good heading, whose purpose is to get you to want to read on. You know instantly this is some sort of “let’s get more women in the boardroom” propaganda, and it is.
What is hilarious is that the editor of the mag is a man. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands of women – I can think of one instantly – who could do a better job of choosing a front cover line in their sleep.
Inside many of the pages are in reversed out type, white on black, which research has proved kills readership.
One was even worse with all the copy laid out over a picture and unjustified type ranged left. This means the eye has to work incredibly hard, adjusting at the start of each line. It won’t make the effort, believe me.
The ads were appalling, the worst being from business schools as you expect.
***
By the way …
The ad I mentioned in my last blog got over 70 replies, mostly very good. They were not all from women. But an awful lot were from women who were fed up with working for male bores. Maybe the kind who suffer from visions of change.
