autobiographies

A cold mist surrounded the house in the early part of the morning – but, as it slowly lifted, a wondrous sight was beholden. Each tree nearby and far was picked out - as in a touched up photograph - covered with iced snow. It was like a phalanx of phantom warriors. Question – what is the collection noun for a group of government leaders? It was none less than Harold McMillan, a Conservative UK Prime Minister in the early 1960s who gave a great answer to this question – “a lack of principals”! And, as the sun’s rays reached the branches, a rustling around the house as the icicles fell from them.

Paul Theroux is a travel writer who apparently arouses some feeling – his observations apparently offend some people. I find this genre an interesting one but personally prefer Colin Thubron. Theroux has reached the age of 69; started to write his autobiography; got to 500 words; and then realised he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about himself and found justification for closing his notebook on the venture by looking at the reliability of autobiographies over the centuries. I suppose blogs make a lot of us diarists if not autobiographers these days. One of the papers on my website attempts what one might call an intellectual autobiography - Search for the Holy Grail - Lessons from 40 years of fighting bureaucracy.

Simon Jenkins had a good piece on the issues behing the uncovering of an undercover policeman who was playing a prominent if not agent-provocateur role in the ecology movement.
And I've recently come across a blog - Musings of an amateur trader - which, like Boggy's blog - gives useful mini-lectures and country vignettes. This week on banking.

An everyday encounter

Over the weekend I stayed at Ploiesti - some 50 kms north of Bucharest on the main road to Brasov; within sight of the Carpathian foothills; and easy reach of the Dealu Mare vineyards. For most of the 20th Century it was the Romania’s oil base – but the oil has now been bought up by foreigners and apparently put on reserve. As a result the City is now very pleasant – at least in its physical surroundings!
But Romanian petrol has become in the last 6 months the most expensive in Europe – the subject of some intense debate but for reasons for which I am none the wiser. If it interferes with the driving habits of the young Mafia here, I will be well pleased. We encountered one of the high Testerone guys on Monday – his smoked windows black Audi was dumped across the pavement leaving us only a body width to scrape through. We get very angry with this insensitivity – and swung our bags around as we passed – and a screetching dervish duly emerged to hurl insults at D who reciprocated. Testerone Ted (all of 24 years old – how can he own such a car???) came chasing after D – and physically prevented her from continuing her way – paintwork after all is their virility symbol. I returned to lend her moral support – just as a 50 year-old was telling her that if it had been his car he would have knocked her to the ground and trampled on her! Our protestations about illegal parking were brushed aside – even by a couple of cops who were summonsed after the guy grabbed my throat after his floosy objected to my banging my fist on his car. At my age I can (if I control myself) react passively - unlike the TTs. D and I were driven to the police station – with D facing a charge of vandalisation (for a hair scratch) but me prepared to counter-charge TT with assault. I was told that – as a foreigner – I could not enter the police station (!) and one of the PCs stayed with me. He was in his mid 40s – had been fairly hostile to us during the encounter – but now seemed to relax (good training??) and share my concerns about TTs.
When I was eventually allowed in, it was to meet the very impressive station boss – Tiberius no less – who spoke English and adopted a very common-sense approach – apparently threatening TT with both a parking charge and assault. He took D and me into his office and, while D was writing her testimony, told us about his various initiatives. A good guy – although D feels that the treatment had a lot to do with my being a Brit (and of a certain age)!

The next day – despite the overcast sky – I headed north to the mountains and D to Bucharest. The higher I climbed the more the sky cleared but immediately I hit the plain again at Rasnov I was into pea-soup mist again. The village, however, had not only clear sky but no snow! Rare for 1,400 metres in mid-January.
A box of Fassbinder films was waiting for me – as well as the news that one of my neighbours had died (88 year old husband of the small bent woman who chases her chickens and occasionally drops in for a coffee and biscuits. Duly lit the bedroom stove – and discovered that a leak has sprung in one of the bath taps (yes, I do have a bath – if no TV or fridge!). But I took the easy way out; turned off the water again and relied on the traditional water pitcher and bowl I bought recently. Assembled one of the marvellous standard lamps (with additional reading light) which IKEA is selling for only 10 euros – and settled down to read a fascinating book about the 3 Himmler brother written by a granddaughter of the youngest (Heinrich was the middle brother). How Nazism took hold of such a civilised country as Germany is a fascinating question which I have never seen dealt with adequately – it’s usually passed over in a perfunctory manner to get to the more exciting and shocking aspects of Nazism with which (as Peter Watson rightly points out in his recent book) the Brits have an unhealthy fixation. A lengthy, sympathetic but balanced story of the interaction of the stable family circle and unstable social and economic environment in which someone like Himmler grew up is an important aspect of our understanding of that period. Most of us know about the feeling of betrayal when the 1st world war was suddenly lost (The Kaiser had been hiding the truth); the communist putches in the various cities in the immediate aftermath and the recruitment of young soldiers to the Freikorps-type organisations which were created to put down these revolutionaries; the hyperinflation – but it is rarely told from the perspective of the ordinary person. Himmler’s father was a respectable Headmaster – and The Himmler Brothers by Katrin Himmler paints a powerful picture of how such people’s worlds crumbled.
And, finally, a good sample of recent coverage of China.

Chinese administrative reforms in international perspective

Exactly a year ago I was preparing to fly to Beijing – to start a major new project but I was not looking forward to the experience. Alarm bells had rung in the summer when I was first invited to go with the bid – and I told the contractors that neither the scale of the city nor the repressiveness of the regime appealed to me. Nor could I see what my experience could bring to the Chinese. What little I knew of the Chinese context suggested that it was so very different from anything I was used to.
But the temptation of seeing China was too great – and I agreed to go with the bid – not really expecting to win. We did – and the alarm bells started up again when I went to visit the contractors in November and began to realise what a gigantic bureaucracy they (let alone the EU) were! And that they wanted to offload virtually all the financial management to me as Team Leader. I prefer to focus on professional issues and let the contractors deal with finances.
I tried to put my foot down – but was still subjected to a lot of technical briefing about (expert) procurement and payment procedures which frankly bored the pants off me. When, 2 months later, we got to Beijing we were taken to the contractor’s huge offices there and subjected to the same briefing over several days with no Chinese counterpart in sight – at which point I began to realise that what was supposed to be a support system to us was in fact exactly the opposite. We were paying the local contractor’s branch office for services which were at best perfunctory - but expected to pass to them all project papers and information in a complex and time-consuming intranet system!
This was one of three factors which persuaded me to draft my resignation after only one week – the other two issues being the claustrophobia I felt in the dense mass and materialism of Beijing; and the failure of the Chinese to appoint anyone for us to work with. I had faced some difficult challenges in 7 years in central Asia (even a revolution) and a year in politicised Bulgaria - and survived and succeeded. The other key expert resigned a few months later (there were only two of us for a rather ambitious project which was another warning sign I had ignored!)
On my return home in March I took time to try to understand why I had so quickly felt so alienated on this project. Lost in Beijing was the result - in which I identified 17 reasons for my decision!!
I shared it with the contractors and some colleagues – but feel I should now put it in the public domain as a contribution to the gap in literature about this multi-billion industry which I identified recently. The paper has a few comments at the end about what I learned about public services in China – and these are developed in a separate briefing and reading and web references which I’ve also put on the website for anyone who suddenly finds themselves involved in discussions with the Chinese about issues relating to administrative reform! It’s called Chinese administrative reform in perspective - a revisionist briefing (May 1 update)and contains some provocative stuff about so-called western democracy.

Boffy has another good read on present economic issues.

Just Words?

I’ve uploaded two papers in the last couple of days to my website – the first is a note in which I explore why my professional encounter with China last year was so brief. I will talk about this more later this week. The other paper is an updated version of my glossary which is now 20 pages long and entitled Just Words? How language gets in the way. One important addition is the list of 200 plus words which the UK Local Government Association felt it necessary to recommend in 2009 be banned. This was an expansion of an original list of 100 I’m puzzled about the inclusion of some of the words – but I have not lived in the UK for 20 years and have therefore suffered the annoyance of such jargon only from the occasional visiting HRM consultant! There is a phrase I would ban – “human resource management”. Of course, as an economics student, I was taught to consider workers as a basic resource – but I still shudder with the implications of the term. Sometimes I go overboard on this and abuse my position as team Leader – one HRM “expert” (another word I tend to discourage in my projects!) used to talk frequently about “addressing issues” which, for some reason, I found very distasteful. And I explode when I encounter such words as “cohesive” and “governance”.
I find this therefore a quite excellent initiative. It would be interesting to know what impact it had and whether it has survived the aftermath of a General election and massive public cuts. The offensive words included –
Advocate, Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon, Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, Can do culture, Capabilities, Capacity, Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome, Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment, Client, Cohesive communities, Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Community engagement, Compact, Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments, Core Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting, Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue, Double devolution, Downstream, Early Win, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement, Engaging users, Enhance, Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate, Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms, Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality, Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Good practice, Governance, Guidelines, Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvement levers, Incentivising, Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates (a bit unfair!), Interdepartmental surely not?), Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint working, level playing field, Lever (unfair on Kurt Lewin!), Leverage, Localities, Lowlights (??), Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Meaningful consultation (as distinct from meaningless?), Meaningful dialogue (ditto?), Mechanisms, menu of Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities (what’s this about?), Network model, Normalising, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter, Participatory, Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network, Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace, Potentialities, Practitioners (what’s wrong with that?), Preventative services, Prioritization, Priority, Proactive (damn!), Process driven, Procure, Procurement, Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol,
Quick win (damn again), Rationalisation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back, Scoping, Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement (why not?), service users, Shared priority, Signpost, Social contracts ,Social exclusion, spatial, Stakeholder, Step change, Strategic (come off it!), Strategic priorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional, Subsidiarity (hallelujah!); Sustainable (right on!), sustainable communities, Symposium, Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic, Thinking outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down (?), Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional, Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision

The Glossary also now includes a reference to the work of a 2009 UK Parliamentary Committee which actually invited people to submit examples of confusing language which they then reported about in a report entitled Bad Language! Paul Flynn – who is one of the few British MPs who has understood that his basic function is to represent the public and challenge the perversions of authority – gives us a nice example in the Annexes.

Remembering

The current issue of the (British) Prospect magazine carries a fascinating article about the various stresses to which inter-cultural marriages - and divorces - are subject. We all know about the difficulties Swedes or Finns are likely to have with ebullient Latins. Not so well-known are the vagaries of national systems within the EU. The French legal system emerges in a particularly insensitive light – assuming, for example, that wives will always be able to return to the labour market (despite having been absent perhaps for more than a decade) and insisting always on children being shared week-in week-out (even at the age of 3).
It is Saints who are causing some tension between this particular north-south pair. End of last week was the name-day of Ion here (John – also my father’s name). Our friend Olteanu who died in November was a Ion – so we visited his grave on Thursday (or at least D did – I gave up after an hour of trying to find it). And she duly bought and passed on to a stranger some food – as is the habit here in celebrating such anniversaries. I tried to explain that the Church of Scotland (in which I was brought up) doesn’t do Saints – and therefore name-days. And, in any event, I had rebelled against (the minimalist) religion at age 15 and am therefore clueless about the whole set-up. My clumsy attempts to try to try to understand why John the Baptist has 2 days - the first apparently for his death; and the second for his life – caused the usual tensions! And what, anyway, is the English for his status – forerunner, prophet, vanguard??
More positively, D and I had started to talk about the possibility of establishing a modest Foundation which might ensure support and publicity for what Ion valued – as an NGO activist here. Apparently his widow has also had some discussions about this – so hopefully we can come together not only within Romania but with his various friends in Europe.
And that reminded me that I have not resolved the question of how I properly fix my father in community memory in Greenock. About 18 months ago I had some discussions with the curator of the Watt Library and McLean Museum there – of which my father had been Chairman for many years. I had started with the idea of a lecture series in the Greenock Philosophical Society (of which he had also been Chairman) – but felt that this would not have a large enough impact; and was latterly considering a suggestion from the indomitable Kenneth Roy of Scottish Review of an award for Scottish youth with the Institute for Contemporary Scotland. As well as publishing Scottish Review, ICS organises such high-level awards as Scot of the Year. Clearly association with a body will have a larger impact – but it all needs careful consideration. The discussions are caught in a special note I prepared and reproduced as a blog tribute. I have only been involved with one such memorial idea – when the widow of a senior (community) education official struck down in his prime set aside a small fund for a few of his friends and colleagues to administer. We decided to make an annual award to the community group which had succeeded “despite the odds”. This led to visits, meetings and publicity which certainly kept his memory alive.

In my google searches I came across first the website of the church in which my father served as Minister for 50 years; then a nice collection of photos of my hometown (even some shots of the McLean Museum) and the superb landscapes all around it
And finally a nice site on less well-known Scottish painters which included a neighbour of ours in Greenock - James Watt - one of whose paintings the family bought for my father and which has now temporary residence in a Brussels supurb.

In praise of austerity

The art blog I mentioned yesterday reproduces a range of quiet interior paintings by a 19th century Danish artist Hamersoi in which our attention is drawn to the starkness of the décor – wooden floors and minimal wall hangings. D’s response was that this must say something about the poverty of even the middles classes in Scandinavia in those days. I tried to suggest that it had more to do with the influence of Protestant values (Lutheran I think) which have had such a powerful influence on social and political developments in these countries – let alone on notions of interior design. Austerity is getting a bad name these days – when I googled to try to find something about this aspect of Scandinavian societies all I got was articles on the latest European fiscal crisis - one of which acctually bears the title Beyond Austerity . As a child of the war years (who still has his ration book) and raised in a Scottish Presbyterean household, I have great respect and affection for austere ways of living (providing wine is accepted as a basic requirement – from the barrel of course!). Tony Judt used that last painful period of his life to reflect about his life in powerful short pieces in New York Review of Books – and some of them celebrated the immediate post-war period in Britain which is so often viewed in a negative light. My surfing put me onto a recent book Austerity Britain which appears to take a more positive view. /

The eyes have it

Entry to the National Gallery here is free the first Wednesday each month and we had wanted to visit the special exhibition they have of the 1930s school of Belgian (Wallonny actually) painters who used the name NERVIA and were in the business of celebrating the traditions of the area and also to encourage younger painters in that part of the world. They were unknowns for me - but I am a fan of belgian painting. And it proved to be a wonderful exhibition – with the styles variously reminding me of Renaissance; the great Belgian master Constantin Meunier; and more modern Clydeside painters. The new Glasgow boys are only part of the story - my friend Duncan Goldthorp has a relative who painted stunning realist industrial landscapes before the heavy industry disappeared from the West of Scotland.
In the course of searching the internet for some pictures of the members of the school (it’s Louis Besseret’s painting which heads the post) I found a great art blog - It’s about time.
After the exhibition, we dropped (hardly surprisingly) into the Anthony Frost English bookshop and were warmly received by the staff – a cup of coffee no less! I picked up a copy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and a Thomas Hardy novel. Zinn’s is one of the extremely few bits of radical writing one can get in the States and sparked the thought about the methodology of the global freedom indices. Patently the USA authorities place major restrictions on the availability of alternative world views which are allowed not only in schools, universities and libraries but even in bookshops and publishers – let alone the printed and visual media. On that basis it should be scored badly – but such things are difficult to measure and therefore are not part of the methodology used for these league tables. A diagram could usefully developed to identify the different areas of freedom – unfortunately this blog doesn’t allow me to insert diagrams.

And while we’re on the subject of the media Farewell Fourth Estate is a good overview.

Structures, systems and skills - demand and supply again

As I said, I had a dream about deliberative structures - which got me thinking about the various mechanisms which those in think-tanks and consultancies have pushed on unsuspecting governments in the past few decades – both in developed and transition countries. But let me start with the dream - which took me back to two periods in my political life. First – 40 years ago (!!) – when I was operating in a highly charged atmosphere of political conflict with a group of Liberal councillors who had just wrested power from the Labour establishment which had ruled a small shipbuilding town for about 25 years. At the age of 26 years I had been elected (in a bye-election) to represent a poor part of the town – and, facing a re-election within 12 months, had to forge a distinctive identity for myself before I faced again the 4,000 odd voters of the “ward” I had been elected to. (There were 9 such wards – each with 3 councillors - one of whom was subject to election each year. The system was discontinued in 1974 and – with all the current concern about democracy – its restoration might perhaps be considered). It was 1968 and not surprising that the distinguishing feature I developed was a strong participative (and community action) impulse which threatened not only the Liberals but my own political colleagues. But, within three years, I had managed to manoeuvre myself to the Chairmanship of an important new committee (Social Work) which was a joint one with a neighbouring town still within Labour control. The Social Work legislation passed for Scotland by the Wilson Labour Government of 1964-70 invited these new committees to “promote social welfare” and I was therefore able to use that position to develop community conference processes.
That stood me in very good stead a few years later when a giant new Region was formed – and the reputation I had gained propelled me to a central position in the new ruling Labour group.
Section 3.4 of this paper on my website describes how some of us quickly invented an inclusive process of policy deliberation. I was quite hostile to the committee structure which was then the mechanism used for political decision-making. I saw and called it strongly as a front for officer power. Our new system (called “member-officer groups”) embraced members of the opposition parties and junior officials – and the groups were invited to look critically at services which fell between the cracks of departments. Our experience attracted wide interest and was in the vanguard of a wider rethink about the process of decision-making in local government which took place more than a decade later in England – which culminated in legislation encouraging municipalities to set up cabinets and a directly-elected mayoral system. A good picture of this can be found here.

This experience gave me an insight into the role of various stakeholders – ruling party, opposition, senior officers, junior officials, citizens – which few consultants are lucky enough to obtain. It showed me how the structures we use so often pervert the potential insights each of these parties possess (one of the reasons perhaps to explain why I am disposed to the “balance” theory I offered recently). There had to be a better way of making decisions!

When I was a politician, I put the emphasis on new structures – but my more recent experience helps me understand that structures are only part of the picture. A lot of recent technical assistance in which I am involved has required the drafting of (and training in) policy analysis processes and skills - but these are not much use if they are inputed to a political process which does not operate on “rational” lines (I put this word in inverted commas simply because politics at its best has its own rationality from that of the pretensions of administrative rationality!). Effective technical assistance (TA) should to be based on a systems philosophy – bit is trapped in a project management (logframe) ideology. Of course the latter is supposed to be firmly based in the former – but never is! A nod is given in the drafting of Terms of Reference to “General and specific objectives”; but the role of the project in achieving the objective (and the other factors influencing policy outcomes) are never discussed).

A real systems approach to policy analysis in TA would (a) craft a map of the entire system – in this case
• The locus and system (formal and informal) of policy analysis and proposals
• The structure and protocols (formal and informal) of decision-taking
• The interaction between the two

And then (b) demonstrate exactly how the selected mechanism (new or amended structure, process or legal regulation; training etc) could act as a catalyst for positive change.