Born to Fail?

50 years ago, in 1973, a small report was published which was to shape my life for the next 16 years. It was ”Born to Fail?” and exposed the intensity and scale of poverty affecting children – particularly in the West of Scotland.

I had spent the previous 5 years as a councillor in a shipbuilding town - working with tenants to help improve their housing and educational conditions. And had just been elected to one of the leadership positions of a Regional Council covering half of Scotland.

The main political leadership was, unusually, shared between its “Convener” (the public face) who was a community Minister, Geoff Shaw and, briefly, the Leader of Glasgow Corporation and the leader of the Labour group which formed the majority of councillors – Dick Stewart, previously a coal miner. The dual leadership may have been unusual, certainly led to the occasional tension (and was discontinued after Geoff’s tragically early death 4 years later), but offered the possibility for one man to focus on developing policy priorities and the other on the mechanics of implementation and discipline. Geoff shared my outrage at the conditions of marginalised people – so we were half of what jocularly became known as the “Gang of Four” who led the Region and therefore able to shape the Region’s priorities – not least because we had a year’s breathing space before assuming full and final responsibility in May 1975 for its public services (which employed 100,000 staff such as teachers, social workers, engineers and police)

I’ve written before about the strategy we developed in response to the “Born to Fail?” report (the full story is here – and a short version here) but focusing, understandably, on a description of the steps taken and an exploration of some of the dilemmas we faced. What I want to do here is instead to look in more detail at how exactly we framed the issue – and at what seemed to be the choices and constraints on offer.

We’ve only recently learned about the Overton Window – a strange term used to describe how perceptions of what is politically acceptable suddenly shift and can be exploited by reformers. I’m fascinated by this concept of “turning points” or “critical junctures” brilliantly dissected in Anthony Barnett’s extended essay Out of the Belly of Hell (2020)

What, by 1982, had become the “Social Strategy for the Eighties” was quite unique at the time – no other government body had dared contemplate anything so bold. It was to be another 2 decades before New Labour made a similar attempt – this time with the discourse about “inner cities” and “social exclusion” rather than "deprivation". Jules Feiffer nailed it perfectly when he had his little cartoon character say

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.

 Basically we suggested four principles of action which had not been attempted before

• Positive Discrimination : the scope for allocating welfare State resources on a more equitable basis had been part of the "New Left" critique since the late 1950s (Townsend). Being a new organisation meant that it was to no-one's shame to admit that they did not know how exactly the money was being allocated. Studies were carried out which confirmed our suspicions that it was the richer areas which, arguably, needed certain services least (eg "pre-school" services for children) which, in fact, had the most of them! And, once discovered, this was certainly an area we considered we had a duty to engage in redistribution of resources - notwithstanding those who considered this was not for local government to attempt.

• Community Development : one of the major beliefs shared by some of us driving the new Council (borne of our own experience) was that the energies and ideas of residents and local officials in these "marginalised" areas were being frustrated by the hierarchical structures of departments whose professionals were too often prejudiced against local initiatives. Our desire was to find more creative organisational forms which would release these ideas and energies - of residents and professionals alike. This approach meant experimentation

• Inter-Agency Cooperation : there needed to be a focussed priority of all departments and agencies on these areas. Educational performance and health were affected more by housing and income than by teachers and doctors! One agency - even as large as Strathclyde - could not do much on its own. An intensive round of dialogues was therefore held in 1976/77 with District Councils, Central Government, Health Boards, Universities and Voluntary Organisations: from which 8 experimental area initiatives emerged, followed in the 1980s with larger ones in Glasgow eventually with central government and private sector support.

• Information and Income-Maximisation : the Region could certainly use its muscle to ensure that people were getting their entitlements : ie the information and advice to receive the welfare benefits many were missing out on. The campaigns mounted in the late 1970s were soon pulling millions of pounds into these areas: and served as a national model which attracted the active interest of the Conservative Minister at the time.

Now strategies are now ten a penny – and we have become cynical of those who attempt them. One of our many current besetting sins! There is actually nothing better for a man’s soul than coming together with others in a spirit of fellowship to explore how the lot of one’s fellows might be improved.

I was so pleased, some 18 months ago, to find a small book (from a Canadian) celebrating the need for “strategies for governing” For 40 years we have been regaled with the ideology of the small state and the time for a new conception of the State is long overdue.

This series of posts will set the Strathclyde strategy in the wider context of the modernisation efforts set in train by the Labour government of 1964-70 – which rarely gets the credit it is due for what it both did and what it attempted. Because the story is told in more detail elsewhere, I will try to compress the basic story in bullet points…..

Whatever Happened to Planning?

The last couple of days I’ve been recalling some of the giants of the Planning field – particularly John Friedmann, born in Vienna in 1926 and part of the infamous brain-drain from Nazi Germany - who died recently at the ripe old age of 91 and whose glorious Insurrections – essays in planning theory (2011) I have been enjoying. It is one of these rare collections in which an author illustrates his professional life with a selection from his key books, each introduced with an explanatory note, In one he writes -   

I believe that I may have been among the small number of postgraduate students to sit in on the first ever seminar in planning theory. It was at the University of Chicago, and the year was 1948. Our instructor was Edward Banfield who was later to become a professor of urban politics at Harvard. At the time he taught us, he was still working on his doctorate in political science.

 “Planning” had a certain resonance in Britain in the 1960s – the winds of change and “modernisation” were blowing hard. Indeed the first three jobs I had after leaving University were all in the planning field (and the first serious teaching I did in the early 1970s was also in that territory) although what status it might have had soon vanished. Norman Macrae was Editor of “The Economist” at the time and wrote this fascinating post-mortem in 1970 of the country’s brief love affair with the concept

My first job after leaving university was in the planning department of a Scottish County Council where I was expected to predict a small rural town’s requirements for shopping space – without ever visiting the place…..I then moved to become a tiny cog in a new Manpower Research Unit which the Labour government – inspired by the French planning system - had set up. There I spent my time reconciling two different sets of manpower statistics – relieved, on Friday afternoons, by a cocktail party…..I soon left that for the private sector – an economic consultancy where I did some work on Irish regions – without, inevitably, ever visiting them!

In 1968 I got the job I had been hankering after - a “lecturer” at the local polytechnic which consisted for the first 15 years of “liberal studies” rather than academic work – although in the 1970s, planning students at the famous Glasgow School of Art proved to be a captive audience for musings about my practical experience as a reforming politician initially in a town of 60,000 and then as one of the leaders of a Regional strategy which covered half of Scotland. Those were the days of works critical of planning – from the CDP stable and from writers such as Norman Dennis and Jon Davies…..

I may not have helped the students in their examinations – but at least I gave them a foretaste (and forewarning) of the games they would face in their future careers.

Just how critical I was of the Local State is evident in the long academic piece Community Development – its administrative and political challenge which the well-known campaigner Des Wilson kindly invited me contribute in 1977 to “Social Work Today” which he was editing at the time.

By the stage, all wind had gone out of any sails left on the SS Planner – and a couple of years later Margaret Thatcher duly became Prime Minister and her market ideology prevailed not only for the 18 years of subsequent Conservative rule but, arguably, thereafter. Certainly “planning” virtually disappeared from our vocabulary - although we were still allowed to talk of “strategies”.

This is the first of what may be several posts about the significance of the changing fortune of key concepts in the English language – such as “change”, “development”, “government”, “management”, “public administration”, "rationality", “reform”, “reinvention”, “transformation”.

part VI - trying to tame the system

I realise that I am breaking the rules of blogging (and writing) by using it to serialise a longer paper. What you are reading first on a blog is the last thing written - and, at the moment, these "blogs" have references which can be properly understood only by looking at earlier "blogs".
But it's a useful process for me - since placing the text on the internet (accessible to everyone and anyone) forces me think of the reader and therefore helps editing. Generally, my first thought is for the ideas - and this is very obvious by the size of the original paper from which the text is excerpted is key paper 5 on my website which you will find on "links" (publicadmin reform).
And I do have to be clear why I bother to draft these papers (on "key papers" on the website) about the lessons from the various initiatives I've been involved with - and, in particular, about events of 30 years ago. Part of the answer, I suppose, is that international consultancy is a lonely business. You don't get the chance to take part in internal seminars - so you have to talk to yourself! That may explain the more recent papers - but not the accounts of earlier events. I suppose the reason why I still think and write about these older events is because so few others do. Those who write books are pursuing the modern - which carries with it the implication that what went before was useless. And few books are written about the work done by the hundreds of thousands of officials and councillors at the coal-face. I do feel that our sense of who we are requires us to have an historical perspective - particularly about our working lives. Who was it who wrote that without a sense of history, we are doomed to repeat all the mistakes??

In those days (the 1970s) the mythology was that the urban ghettos (which were actually the new housing schemes on the periphery of the towns and cities) had a disproportionate amount of money spent on them. The opposite was in fact true: it was the middle class who benefited disproportionately from state spending - particularly education and housing subsidy.

Up until then the attempts of a few of us to persuade our political and officer colleagues that (a) the conditions in the housing estates were unacceptable and (b) that there were better ways of using local authority resources had met with indifference and hostility. There was, we were patronisingly told, nothing we could do to change the behaviour of such people.
In 1975, however, a national Report (Born to Fail) gave us proof that the conditions were much worse in the West of Scotland than in the rest of the UK: each town had its collection of housing schemes which were seen as problematic. They could not therefore be fatalistically accepted. They were not God-given!
And, furthermore, this was not an internal report with confidential status and restricted circulation. It was a public report which had aroused the interest of the regional and national press. It could not be ignored. Some sort of response was called for.
In trying to develop a response we faced strong resistance from two sources - first the left within the Labour Party who argued that economic realities meant that there was nothing that could be done at a local level (and in this they were joined by Keynesians). Growth and redistribution were matters for national Government.
The second difficult group was the staff of the public sector whose loyalties were to their particular profession rather than to a local authority, a neighbourhood or policy group! And many staff had deeply-held prejudices about the capacity of people in these areas - and the desirability of working participatively with them - let alone other professional or local politicians.
How we devised a policy response - and its focus - had to be sensitive to these attitudes. The search for policy was also made immediately more difficult by the absence of any "experts" in the field. We knew there were none within the Council: and appeals to the local Universities produced no responses in those days.

We could, however, vaguely see four paths which had not been attempted -
· Positive Discrimination : the scope for allocating welfare State resources on a more equitable basis had been part of the "New Left" critique since the late 1950s (Townsend). Being a new organisation meant that it was to no-one's shame to admit that they did not know how exactly the money was being allocated. Studies were carried out which confirmed our suspicions that it was the richer areas which, arguably, needed certain services least (eg "pre-school" services for children) which, in fact, had the most of them! And, once discovered, this was certainly an area we considered we had a duty to engage in redistribution of resources - notwithstanding those who considered this was not for local government to attempt.
· Community Development : one of the major beliefs shared by some of us driving the new Council (borne of our own experience) was that the energies and ideas of residents and local officials in these "marginalised" areas were being frustrated by the hierarchical structures of departments whose professionals were too often prejudiced against local initiatives. Our desire was to find more creative organisational forms which would release these ideas and energies - of residents and professionals alike. This approach meant experimentation (Barr; Henderson; McConnell).
· Inter-Agency Cooperation : there needed to be a focussed priority of all departments and agencies on these areas. Educational performance and health were affected more by housing and income than by teachers and doctors! One agency - even as large as Strathclyde - could not do much on its own. An intensive round of dialogues were therefore held in 1976/77 with District Councils, Central Government, Health Boards, Universities and Voluntary Organisations: it must be said that considerable time elapsed before there were material results from this eg it was 1984 before the Joint Area Initiatives in the larger Glasgow Housing Schemes were up and running.
· Information and Income-Maximisation : the Region could certainly use its muscle to ensure that people were getting their entitlements : ie the information and advice to receive the welfare benefits many were missing out on. The campaigns mounted in the late 1970s were soon pulling millions of pounds into these areas: and served as a national model which attracted the active interest of the Minister at the time.

THE EMERGENT STRATEGY
45 areas were designated as "Areas of Priority Treatment" (APTs); to try to work differently in these areas; and to learn from that.
Basically the approach was that local residents should be encouraged to become active in the following ways -
· have their own local forums - where, with the local politicians and officials, they could monitor services and develop new projects.
· have access to a special local initiative fund - The national "Urban Programme" Fund. It was not a lot of money - 10 million dollars a year from a total development budget of 300 million and had problems referred to in section 11.1 below. But without it, there would have been little stomach for the innovative (and risky) projects. At the best of times, senior management of most departments would have been a bit ambivalent about locally designed and managed projects: and these were not the best of times!
· have their own expert advisers (more than 300 community workers and more specialist advisers (in such fields as housing, welfare benefits, credit unions, community business) in what were initially 45 designated priority areas of, on average, 10,000 people with unemployment rates of about 20%)

Such an approach allowed "a hundred flowers to bloom" - and the development in 1982, after an intensive and inclusive review of the experience of the first five years, of the principles and framework of the Social Strategy for the Eighties.

seminal reading and experiences

Honore Daumier

Smuggler
Watch him when he opens
his bulging words – justice
Fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
Peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visas, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light

Nobody with such luggage
has nothing to declare
Norman MacCaig (1966)

So continues the account of my life and lessons - a modern Candide

The 1960s presented – through books, articles and official investigations - a tremendous critique of British society. The most famous book of that era was one by Michael Shanks called “The Stagnant Society” (1961). The title said it all – but it was also official Government Commissions in the late 1960s which concluded that our civil service, local government and industrial relations systems, for example, were not “fit for purpose”[1]. My university degree in political economy, sociology and politics had given me the arrogance of the iconoclast – although reading of people such as Tony Crosland[2] and Karl Popper[3] had made me an incrementalist rather than a hard leftist which was in fashion. I was, however, an avid reader of the New Left Review[4] and active in the Young Socialist movement.

After University, I worked briefly and unhappily in both the private, central and local government and consultancy sectors until I was appointed Lecturer in social studies at a polytechnic in 1968 – the same year I became a Labour councillor – on a town council which the Liberals had recently taken over. The rump Labour group was somewhat demoralised and - as an energetic middle class graduate - I immediately became its Secretary – thereby skipping the normal “apprenticeship” which new boys normally serve.
The student riots of 1968 may have passed – but the literature which was coming from the anti-poverty programmes[5] on both sides of the Atlantic painted an ugly picture of how systems of public administration treated the poor and marginalised. Books such as Future Shock[6], Beyond the Stable State[7]; Dilemmas of Social Reform[8] and Deschooling Society[9] were grist to my mill – sketching out, as they did, the impossibility of the bureaucratic model of organisation continuing. Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” and Saul Alinsky’s work also made a lot of sense to me! The first – written from Austrian experience at the beginning of the 20 century - showed how power corrupts trade unionists and social democrats; the second – from a mid century Chicago base – showed how the powerless could change things.

Management theory was beginning to percolate through to us – but in a rather simplistic way. These were the days when Drucker had it all his own way in the bookshops[10]. Better management – in both the public and private sector - was seen as necessary although initially this was seen to come more from coordinating structures rather than new skills or perspectives.
I was in the system – but not part of it – more a fly on the wall. The title of an early paper I wrote – “From corporate planning to community action”[11] reflected the attempt I was making to ride the 2 horses of internal reform and pressure group politics (always uncomfortable!).

I was beginning to understand how we all play the roles we are given – how the roles are masks we put on (and can take off). A cartoon I had on my wall during university years from the left-wing New Statesman said it very well – it depicted various stern figures of power (judges, generals, headmasters, clergymen etc) and then revealed the very angry and anguished faces beneath.[12].

1970/71 was a seminal year for me. I took on my first serious public responsibilities – becoming chairman of the Social Work Committee for a poor shipbuilding conurbation of 100,000 people. Scottish legislation had just given social work authorities an invitation to “promote social welfare” – and to do so by engaging the public in more strategic work to deal with the conditions which marginalised low-status and stigmatised groups. And the area I had represented since 1968 on the town council certainly had more than its fair share of such people. An early step I took with my new authority was to institute an annual workshop of community groups to identify and help deal with key problems of the town. I find it sad that this approach is still being discovered in Britain as “cutting edge” stuff!

The community groups I worked with were very effective in their various projects concerned with adult education and youth, for example, but one of the most powerful lessons I learned was how much many professionals in the system disliked such community initiatives[13]. It was also quite a shock to realise how suspicious my own Labour colleagues were of the people they were supposed to represent and support - working class people like themselves! Instead they echoed the reservations and criticisms of the officials. One of the things I was learning was the subtle and often implicit ways those with power made sure they kept control – whether in the formality of language used or in the layout of meetings. A national programme set up by the Labour Government (the Community development Programme) was beginning to produce radical critiques which chimed with my experience - although labour politicians (national and local) found this work threatening.

One of the most interesting individuals in the UK trying to help community groups was Tony Gibson[14] - who developed simple planning kits to level the playing field. Suspicious even of the community development work we were doing as part of Social Work, I negotiated Rowntree Foundation support for an independent community action project in one of the areas I represented. At that stage I forged a curious alliance with the Leader of the national Liberal party (Jo Grimond) who was also a Rowntree Trustee and who would faithfully attend the project's Steering Committee meetings in a desolate council flat! At one and the same time I was the Leader of the local social welfare system and also part of a system which was challenging such systems. I immersed myself in the literature on community development and was seen as a bit of a maverick by my labour colleagues.

[1] The Royal Commissions set up by the 1964 Labour Government played an important role -looking at such problematic areas as Civil Service (known as Fulton after the Lord who chaired it – ditto for other Commissions); Local Government (Redcliffe-Maud in England and Wales; Wheatley in Scotland); Broadcasting (Annan); Industrial Relations (Donovan); Local Government Finance (Layfield); Devolution (Kilbrandon) etc[2] The Future of Socialism (1956) and The Conservative Enemy (1962)[3] Although first issued in 1941, it was not until the 1960s that “The Open Society and its enemies” became well known in the UK  [4] www.newleftreview.org
[5]  In UK the more sedate language of “community development” was used.[6] Alvin and Heideh Toffler (1970)[7] Donald Schon (1973). This was the book which followed from the 1970 Reith lecture he delivered on BBC. Along with Gaitskell’s defiant Labour Conference speech (of 1961), this was the most riveting piece of media broadcasting I have ever heard.[8] Marris and Rein (1973)[9] Ivan Illich[10] Now, its a real challenge to recommend best buys for (a) understanding organisations and/or (b) challenging and changing them. But I do attempt this in one of the key papers on my website.[11] In the series of ruminations from my local government work I published under the aegis of the Local Government Research Unit which I established at Paisley College of Technology. The most important of these was a small book in 1977 "The Search for Democracy – a guide to Scottish local government". This was aimed at the general public and written around 43 questions I found people asking about local government.[12] Georg Grosz gave these figures (in Weimar Germany) an even more savage treatment – see http://www.austinkleon.com/2007/12/09/the-drawings-of-george-grosz/
[13] Education, police and leisure were the worst offenders – as is clear from the small book about work in one of the communities - View from the Hill by Sheila McKay and Larry Herman (Local Government Research Unit 1970) See David Korton’s example...page 11 The Great Reckoning (Kumarian Press 2006)[14] People Power