I did a video yesterday on campaigning and why most of it is just moaning.

I put up a poll on YouTube asking why most campaigns fail. An astonishing 5,400 people have voted. This is the result:

Then I listened to the third of this year's Reith lectures last night, by Rutger Bregman. It was as bad as the second. The promise of the first has been lost entirely. Bregman is a headless heart, wanting status and not change, and name-dropping rather than offering solutions.

The second lecture felt elitist, at the very least. It could have been worse than that, and the Liverpool audience for it called it out for what it was.

This third lecture fawned and made wildly inaccurate claims (neoliberalism is, apparently, dead and gone, which shows a stunning lack of economic insight on Bregman's part). But like the second, it had a giant hole in the middle, except this time there were three. It lacked moral vision, which was called out. It lacked a plan and any idea of delivery. The Edinburgh audience called it out.

Bergman is like so many campaigners: he wants to be thought of as a nice do-gooder, buit hs no idea what he really wants to do, where he wants to do it, why he wants to do it, to whom he really wants to do it and most especially nhow he wants to do - hoping at best others will work that out for him. As a Reith lecturer, he is a failure.

And if he wants to know how you campaign, you start with the details. Take this, for example, which was the first ever publication on country-by-country reporting, written by me and issued in January 2003 by the Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs website run by Prem (now Lord) Sikka. This was a complete plan for what country-by-country reporting would be, written as an International Accounting Standard so no one could be in doubt what was meant, and why it was deliverable. That is how to campaign. That is why we got country-by-country reporting: the devil was always in the detail, and there was never any doubt as to what that was. Why is it so hard to work out that this is how to win?

This was the standard: