Speak, Memory - the UK in the late 1960s – part VI of the current series about “Change”

 This post has proved quite a challenge – forcing me to confront the question of the reliability of our own personal memories compared with the sort of collective accounts you find in post-war social history which has become so popular in the last decade  with publics everywhere – eg in the UK David Kynaston and Dominic Sandbrook. Speak, Memory is, of course, the title of Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography

Take 1968 - which was, in 2018, the subject of celebrations for, and disputations against what it was assumed to stand for – freedom and disdain for authority and tradition. But for me, 1968 was significant more for my election as a councillor for the municipality of a Scottish shipbuilding town and my appointment as a Lecturer at Paisley College of Technology.

After all in 1968 I was 25 – no longer a student - and had more important things to do than tear up Parisian cobbles. Community action was very much in the air and chimed well with “the community power debate” which had been an important one for me during university just a few years earlier. In 1956 C Wright Mills had produced his famous “The Power Elite” - a radical critique of the structure of power in US society – which pluralist political scientists such as Robert Dahl tried to take down. And it was probably Steven Lukes who settled the debate eventually in 1974 with Power – a radical view in which he argued that 

Power has three faces –

·         the public face which Dahl, Polsby and others had studied,

·         a hidden face, which served to keep issues off of the agenda of decision making arenas (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), and

·         an even more ‘insidious’ third face, through which the relatively powerless came to internalise and accept their own condition, and thus might not be aware of nor act upon their interests in any observable way.

 

Lukes’ analysis of what he called the three ‘dimensions of power’ has spawned a series of debates and studies about how power affects not only who participates in decision making processes, but also who does not, and why. 

Those who want to know the details of how that debate has gone since have only to consult the magnificent website kept by William Domhoff for the past 50 years – Who Rules America?

And one of the first books I called for in 1968 - with the library facilities at Paisley College at my full disposal - was Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein. This had come out in 1967 and was the more analytical complement to the  activism of Saul Alinsky as I took my first steps in community action.

The promise of change was heavy in the air we breathed in those years - Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70 had started well with official and open Inquiries into so many fields which had been causing deep concern – not least the civil service, local government and devolution – and was sufficiently influenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty to set up its own Community Development Programme which is described in this short article.

It also to set up an enquiry into public participation in planning led by Arthur Skeffington, a Labour MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Tony Greenwood. It arose from growing interest in the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ (that ordinary people need to be engaged in decision-making rather than simply voting for representatives to make decisions on their behalves). What became known as the Skeffington Report or “People and Planning” published its report in 1969 with a famous review by Sean Damer and Cliff Hague giving an excellent sense of the issues and prevailing context. The review mentions only at the end Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation

But all good things have to come to an end – and the Labour government duly ran out of steam. 

Recommended Reading

1968 Memories and Legacies of a global revolt (Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 2009) Trust the Germans to produce the best account of the global wave of protest!  This detailed account looks at all corners of the globe and includes a fascinating last chapter involving a discussion between New Left Norman Birnbaum and Tom Haydn

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) The most famous of the titles which came from the UK anti-poverty programme

local government and the local state – from crisis to crisis a submission as a Conference paper on austerity which gives a good sense of academic discussions a decade ago

Telling Stories about post-war Britain; the crisis of the 1970s (2017) a very thorough and superbly referenced long article which gives a great sense of this turning point in UK history

From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back Norman Birnbaum (2018) Memoir of a sociologist who helped found “New Left Review” and was in the middle of an amazing global network of intellectuals and activists

Aftermath – life in the fallout from the Third Reich 1945-1955 Harald Jaehner 2021 a German journalist covers the period with the harrowing stories I remember from Heinrich Boll’s novels

Social history of post-war Britain; a few books selected by David Kyanston. 

Writing

Writing seems to be even more a tool of power than it was in 1947 when George Orwell wrote his Politics and the English Language. University specialisms have multiplied; professions have developed and expanded their empires; management has developed its own language. Obfuscation in the pursuit of an unchallenged life is the name of the game.

I’ve spent a significant part of my life writing papers – but only recently recognised this. This blog tries to explore the reasons why I have spent so much time struggling in front of a keyboard. I started by writing quasi-academic papers simply because I was looking for ways to improve the way local government in my country worked.
I had become a local councillor and was horrified at the way the municipality (staff and councillors) treated the (low-income) citizens who had elected me. Instead of responding positively to their efforts at self-help, they ridiculed and undermined them. And this seemed to be systemic – something to do with the assumptions which came with the bureaucratic structures we used.

 This was the early 1970s and these structures were under fire (from writers as varied as Bennis, Fergusson, Toffler and most memorably by Donald Schon whose 1970 Reith lectures (published as Beyond the Stable State) had me riveted in front of my father’s radio. I was summarising the more interesting books and papers – trying to apply their open, participative processes to my situation – and describing what happened in Occasional Papers in a Local Government Unit I established. No “peer review” – so perhaps I fell into some bad habits! I was writing for myself – trying to make some sort of sense of the confusion I felt. On the other hand, it gave me the freedom to develop my own “voice” – and adjust my style in the light of direct feedback from readers as distinct from academic custodians of good writing norms!

At the time I was a lecturer – but being a politician forced me to simplify my language to make myself understood by colleagues and the electorate! That was a great training! I had to “unlearn” a lot of big words and complicated phrases which university life had given me; and to learn to call a spade a spade!

Then I wrote a short book to try to explain in simple terms why some major changes being experienced by local government were necessary and also trying to demystify the way the system worked. That made me realise how few books were in fact written for this purpose! Most books are written to make a profit or an academic reputation. The first requires you to take a few simple and generally well-known ideas but parcel them in a new way – the second to choose a very tiny area of experience and write about it in a very complicated way.

After that experience, I realised how true is the saying that “If you want to understand a subject, write a book about it”!! Failing that, at least an article – it’s amazing how what was a clear understanding in your mind is mercilessly exposed as deficient when you put it on paper! Gaps in your knowledge are exposed – and you begin to have the specific questions which then make sure you get the most out of your reading.

My first real publications were chapters in other people’s books and national journals – which described the experiences in community development and more open policy-making processes some of us had introduced into Europe’s largest municipality. I was “sunk”, however, when one journal then asked me to write one page every 4 weeks. I just couldn’t compress my thoughts that way. Although I was reading a lot, I couldn’t write in abstract terms – only about my own experiences, trying to relate them to the more general ideas.

Since I became a consultant in Central Europe and Central Asia and have written less passionately and more analytically for very targeted (and narrow) audiences. Basically what I have been trying to do in the last 10 years is to summarise our experiences in Europe of changing systems of government (eg decentralisation) and indicate what it might mean for the countries in which I was working. It has always been the HOW – rather the WHAT – of change which has fascinated me. One of the things which has disturbed me in the last decade or so is the way complex processes have been reduced to simplistic formulae in subjects such as the management of change and government accountability – their ethical dimension being sucked out in the process. British Governments have become impatient and have imposed one (centralised) fashion after another – in the process making us cynical about both change and the specific nostrum of the moment.

At one stage I wrote a short paper about the writing process – and presented it to some students. I was intrigued to learn that many of the ideas reflected a paper I had never heard of written by C Wright Mills - On Intellectual Craftsmanship

The painting is an Ivanov - I think Savi