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
Doubter’s Companion – a Dictionary of aggressive common-sense; John Ralston
Saul (1994)
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.
