I was debating with a friend the other day about the planned energy price freeze which Labour* are proposing. I said it wouldn’t work and they would be far better to just tell the energy companies that they could make a maximum of 10% profits and would then have to give all their customers a rebate, meaning a drop in energy prices and investment in the system. My friend said she reckoned I should be in charge – what a good idea!
Anyway it got me thinking about a world run by VAs… I had a small glimpse of this at the VA Conference a few years back – they were VAs organising cars to transfer us to the conference hotel, someone else was tweeting the whole event as we did it, my choices of meal had been emailed to the chefs the day before, and someone else had organised my hotel room for me.
So what would a world run by VAs be like?
- The trains and buses would all run on time.
- Public sector savings would be phenomenal as they implemented efficient systems and processes utilising a variety of online tools.
- Flexible working for everyone would be the norm.
- Spelling and grammar would be consistently excellent (I now fully expect to get 400 emails telling me I’ve mispellt something in this article!)
- All children would learn how to touch type at school.
- Being small business owners, we’d encourage more people to start up and stay in business for themselves, thus kick starting the economy.
However the downsides would be:
- Security would be rubbish as we’d all spill official secrets all over Twitter and Facebook. In addition, our cloud computing would probably get hacked and initiate bombs over France or something…
- Google would seriously influence official policies.
- We’re not very good at saying no or charging what we are worth, so we may go bust…
So: Am I right? Did I forget anything?
*In the interests of full disclosure, I’m very apolitical – I think they are all equally useless, so this isn’t a dig at Labour specifically!