what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Wresting the political from the technocrats

The  blog’s masthead carries some quotations which hopefully give readers a sense of the sort of material which will hit them (on the top right – just move the cursor down a bit to the end of the list of titles). This is one of the quotes -

We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes.
JR Saul

John Ralston Saul is a true original – one of the very few who has chosen to carve out his own life of choice, In 1992 he published a blast of a book called “Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West” - which I found at the time simply one of the most brilliant books of the decade. It went on to receive this friendly review which puts the issues in a wider context and turned out to be the first of a series of four books in which he has explored what he identifies as six “human qualities” - of which “reason” is only one.
18 years later, when I started my blog, his words were still in my mind and used for the first-ever masthead quote. I chose the quote, I suppose, because of a certain ambivalence about my own managerial roles.

Feeling the Tension?
For the first 20 years of my adult life, I had been a (fairly scholastic) politician - for the next 20 years an apolitical adviser. It’s perhaps only in the past decade that I’ve been able to go back to being truly “my own man”. In 1973 or so – based on my experience of working with community groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I had written a pamphlet called “From Corporate Management to Community action” (sadly no longer available) which reflected my disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.
A few years later I drew on my reading of the previous decade’s literature (UK and US) about urban politics and community power to challenge (in what is, I grant you, a rather long and academic article entitled Community Development – its political and administrative challenge)  the validity of the “pluralist” assumptions underpinning our democratic practices.

The article looked at how community grievances found voice and power and were subsequently dealt with by political and administrative processes.
I wasn’t a Marxist but the sort of questions I was raising seem now to indicate a greater debt to that sort of analysis than I was perhaps aware of then, I wasn’t just saying that life chances were unevenly distributed – I was also arguing that, from an early age, those in poor circumstances develop lower expectations and inclination to challenge systems of authority. And the readiness of those systems to respond was also skewed because of things like the “old boy network”.

The piece explored the functions which political parties were supposed to perform under pluralist theory – and found them seriously wanting. 

The Technocracy of New Labour
The issue of inequality and poverty was, of course, an important one for the Labour government which came to power 20 years later - particularly one with Gordon Brown in charge of the nation's finances
A Social Exclusion Unit was quickly established in the Cabinet Office as an indication of the seriousness with which this “scourge” would be dealt with
But, despite the talk about “community” this was a centralising strategy with a vengeance. The Treasury became a giant machine for minute tweaking of socio-economic processes across the board. PSA (public service agreements setting targets for Departments) were infamous for their detail and optimistic assumptions about the link between technical means and social outcomes. But it showed little understanding of the literature on the perversity of social interventions.

New Labour had 13 years in which to make an impact and first assessments were on the cool side. A more detailed assessment can be found here.
My particular interest is in the “community power” aspect – where it took New Labour some time to move – with a Social Enterprise Unit being set up only in 2002
Scotland has a high profile in the social enterprise world – as evident in this 2014 report

The Big Society Con
When David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 he launched the Big Society idea.
It was quite something for a Conservative Prime Minister to commit his government to deal with poverty and inequality (I think Bill Clinton called it “triangulation”).
He actually quoted from the Wilkinson and Picket book which strongly argues that healthy societies are equal ones. Having proven (to at least his own satisfaction) that big government (spending) has not dealt with the problem of poverty, Cameron then suggests that the main reason for this is the neglect of the moral dimension, refers to various community enterprises, entrepreneurs and goes on –

Our alternative to big government is not no government - some reheated version of ideological laissez-faire. Nor is it just smarter government. Because we believe that a strong society will solve our problems more effectively than big government has or ever will, we want the state to act as an instrument for helping to create a strong society. Our alternative to big government is the big society.
But we understand that the big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action to make it happen. We need to use the state to remake society.

The first step is to redistribute power and control from the central state and its agencies to individuals and local communities. That way, we can create the opportunity for people to take responsibility. This is absolutely in line with the spirit of the age - the post-bureaucratic age. In commerce, the Professor of Technological Innovation at MIT, Eric von Hippel, has shown how individuals and small companies, flexible and able to take advantage of technologies and information once only available to major multinational corporations, are responding with the innovations that best suit the needs of consumers.

This year's Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has shown through her life's work how non- state collective action is more effective than centralised state solutions in solving community problems.

Our plans for decentralisation are based on a simple human insight: if you give people more responsibility, they behave more responsibly.
So we will take power from the central state and give it to individuals where possible - as with our school reforms that will put power directly in the hands of parents.

Where it doesn't make sense to give power directly to individuals, for example where there is a function that is collective in nature, then we will transfer power to neighbourhoods. So our new Local Housing Trusts will enable communities to come together, agree on the number and type of homes they want, and provide themselves with permission to expand and lead that development.

Where neighbourhood empowerment is not practical we will redistribute power to the lowest possible tier of government, and the removal of bureaucratic controls on councils will enable them to offer local people whatever services they want, in whatever way they want, with new mayors in our big cities acting as a focus for civic pride and responsibility.
This decentralisation of power from the central to the local will not just increase responsibility, it will lead to innovation, as people have the freedom to try new approaches to solving social problems, and the freedom to copy what works elsewhere.

Of course one can make various criticisms – one of the best is in a TUC blog.
It is sad that I never found Blair or Brown singing a song like this – despite some of the important steps they took to encourage social enterprise and community banking.

Conclusion
My intention had been to write about an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving” – but got sidetracked instead by these memories. Treat this post as the necessary context which is completely missing from the article which my next post will hopefully address…

A JR Saul Resource
A review of a Doubter’s Companion; Brothers Judd is a great website I had forgotten about
Power versus the public good – a 1996 lecture
Rethinking Development – Bhutan address 2007
He was interviewed on this great website when a new edition of "Voltaire’s Bastards" came out in 2013.

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