is British journalism dead?

My first draft for this post went as follows – “If ever people needed proof that British journalism and newspapers are no longer capable of serious analysis and comment, they got it in the days immediately after the General Election earlier this month…..with prominence being given to the disgusting “spin” we were given by the Bliarites of the Labour Party that its electoral failure was due to its rejection of “New Labourism” and its overly “leftist” stance”  

This was then to point to the best analysis I have so far read of the results – being not in a newspaper but in one of Britain’s most sustained (and left) blogwriters – Boffyblog which is currently running a series of posts to help us interpret the results. Part 3 gives us the basic facts - 

in England, Labour gained exactly as many additional seats as did the Tories – 24. In addition, Labour's vote share, across the UK, rose by twice as much as did the Tories, 1.5% points for Labour as opposed to 0.8% points for the Tories, despite the huge fall in Labour's vote in Scotland.Labour's failure to gain a majority, therefore, most certainly cannot be placed at the door of the party having moved too far to the Left. It gained seats in England, on the basis of its mildly left stance, just not enough to compensate for the seats it lost in Scotland.

The loss of seats in Scotland, most certainly could not be put down to standing on too left a programme, given that the SNP swept the board on the basis of a much more left-wing populist stance.

Other parts of his series do something which almost no journalist bothers these days to do - put the results in the context of how the Labour leadership since 1979 has tried to find a plausible strategy (or "narrative" as the post-modernists would put it) for the country’s economic difficulties which had evicted them from power

I will return to that important argument shortly – but I have first to make a detour since I realised that I was not on solid ground in simply asserting that British journalists are no longer capable of independent analysis. I only read one newspaper - the liberal-leaning Guardian  and am beginning to realise that I have been taking its integrity and fairness too much for granted. 
I simply don’t read other British newspapers – so have no basis for saying there are no independents left. 
Of course I know the corporate structure of these newspapers gives little hope of finding unbiased coverage – but I can’t just assume that. 
Who knows – perhaps I would be surprised if I actually took the time and trouble to do a proper analysis?? 
An idea for a quick bit of research and future post???

As long as I can remember I have been a Guardian reader. I know that the Financial Times is supposed to have better European coverage but my left-wing sympathies made me assume I would get fairer coverage in The Guardian. And, certainly, the way it has in recent years dealt with first the scandal of phone-tapping by the Murdoch press; and then the Wikipedia leaks has demonstrated great courage….

But I became increasingly uneasy when I saw how the paper dealt with Craig Murray’s allegations of American-British collusion in torture in Uzbekistan (duly vindicated by Wikileaks) and the outright propaganda of journalists such as Polly Toynbee…and (in Scotland) Severin Carroll. The speed, therefore, with which Guardian journalists moved to feed us the new Labourist spin has shocked me……Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised – the Guardian has always supported the “Liberal way” – the only journalist apparently allowed to tell it from an open and radical stance has been John Harris

So where to go for honest, unbiased analysis??? 

Before I go, let me give you another bit of Boffy’s independent analysis – dealing first with the “myth” that, under Michael Foot, the Labour party was unelectable – he reminds us that it was the breakaway of the (new labour) SDP which caused a drop in electoral support which was however restored; and that the 1983 election was lost because of the upsurge of nationalist sentiment which came from the Falklands War…..

Apart from a very short spike in support for the SDP at the end of 1981, coinciding with the Crosby By-Election, Labour remained above both the Tories and the Liberal/SDP, with an average poll rating of about 40%. Labour suffered a temporary reduction in support due to the betrayal of the SDP, but the main reason it lost in 1983, was not Michael Foot, nor the SDP, nor its programme being the longest suicide note in history, as Golding described it, but the willingness of Thatcher to see the loss of thousands of lives in the Falklands War, and the Tories ability to whip up nationalist hysteria on the basis of it.  

Cameron has won today, for similar reasons. The SNP declared a political war on England on nationalistic grounds, and the Tories responded in like manner, by unleashing English nationalism in response. Nicola Sturgeon, simply fulfilled the same role for Cameron that Galtieri performed for Thatcher.

What is more, this nationalistic sentiment played into the existing nationalistic sentiment that existed, in places, and was manifest in support for UKIP, a nationalism whose focus was not necessarily directed against Scotland, but against the EU, and migrants. 

A Call to Arms!

I have been reading these past 2 days an important tract which appeared last year and which pillories the state of British government - Stand and Deliver. It suggests that the performance of the British government system is so poor as to require a total overhaul and indeed formal “Treaty”. The BBC gives good coverage to the author in this piece

His more radical ideas are based around bringing in new feedback systems into the working of governments.He likens government at present to a gardener planting seeds, telling people what the garden will look like but then never actually checking whether or not they have grown as planned (instead spending lots of time checking on the sharpness of a spade or the water efficiency of a hose). That is in contrast to the private sector, which checks on the outcomes of spending continually.

A similar discipline needs to come into government, he says. There has been progress with the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics and select committees, he says, but he wants them all brought under the umbrella of the second chamber (the House of Lords at the moment) becoming a "Resulture" able to score policies and kill off those ones which are not working.

I call this a “tract” since it is not the normal “run of the mill” academic, political or technocratic treatise. Its author is thoroughly familiar with the political and technocratic worlds (less so the academic) and is very angry with what he has experienced……

So it is a very individual take on the British system of government – despite his consultancy experience in other countries and his emphasis on the need for “benchmarking”, only the Swiss system really seems to rate for him.

My first reaction as I read the opening pages was to try to remember when I had last read such an onslaught…… Simon Jenkins’ “Accountable to None – the Tory Nationalisation of Britain” (1996) and Thatcher and Sons (2006) were both powerful exposes of the excesses of the 1979-2006 governments; Christopher Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005) was more measured and brought his particular rich blend of academia and consultancy. It took a search of the latter’s book to remind me of the title and author of the famous expose of civil service waste which had first attracted Margaret Thatcher’s attention - Leslie Chapman’s Your Disobedient Servant (1979). And 2005 saw the launching of the Power Inquiry into the discontents about British government……

Oddly, however, none of these books appear in Straw’s three page and rather idiosyncratic bibliography.

The book itself promises to give an “organisational” rather than political take on the subject – which suited me perfectly as this has been my perspective since I first went into “government” (local) in 1968 – absorbing the more radical challenge to hierarchies and power…..Faced in turn with the challenge in 1975 of becoming one of the senior figures on the new Strathclyde Region, I used my position to develop more open and inclusive policy-making processes – extending to junior officials and councillors, community activists. With a huge Labour majority we could afford to be generous to any opposition! And, even under Thatcher, the Scottish Office Ministers were conciliatory – “partnership” was the name of the game we helped develop and was most evident in the success of the “Glasgow” revival. Straddling the worlds of academia and politics, I was able to initiate some important networks to try to effect social change

It was this experience of cooperating with a variety of actors in different agencies I took with me when I opted in 1990 to go into consultancy work in central Europe – to help develop the different sort of government capacity they needed there……then, for 8 years in Central Asia. I was lucky in being allowed to operate there to take advantage of “windows of opportunity” and not be hogbound with the stupid procurement rules…but I became highly critical of the EC development programme as you will see in this 2011 paper The Long Game – not the Logframe

Throughout this entire 45 year-period, I have been keeping up with the literature on change and public management – so am intrigued by this book of Ed Straw’s which promises to bring an organisational perspective to the frustrations we all have with government systems…….  

It was published more than a year ago; has a dedicated website but, from my google search, seems to have gone down like a lead balloon. Tomorrow I hope to present his arguments and explore how well the book fares on the following tests -
-  “resonating” with the times?
-  a “convincing” argument?
-  demonstrated “feasibility”?  
-  opposition identified?
- sources of support?

Organisational Health - time to change the medicine if not the doctor......

I’ve been “doing development” for so long that I’ve just begun to realise how odd if not questionable an activity it is……preying on people’s dissatisfactions and hopes…..and, yet, more and more consultants, academics and development workers get paid good money to churn out reports and books which identify organisational deficiencies….and then develop programmes which order people what they should be doing – rather than helping the organisation’s staff to flourish……

Such change programmes have been scything through the private and public sectors in similar fashion for the past couple of decades – they are all controlled by the same type of person in the Corporate Consultancy or national/international Funding Body…… they make the same sorts of assumptions….use the same sort of models…..and generally fail…  

The private sector has generally been in the van - with the public sector taking another few years to pick up the same fads....We noticed this more than 10 years ago - when there were several books indeed about the phenomenon of the "management guru" and the emptiness of what they preached....
But it ll seemed out of everyone's control.....

I’m at last beginning to pick up a deeper sense that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we have "parsed" management and development in the post-war period….although there are huge political and financial interests in keeping a state of amnesia; a sense of bafflement amongst so called experts about the health of our organisations….
- The Emperor has no clothes post referred to some recent critical assessments in both the field of public management and development to which I should add Toward a new world – some inconvenient truths for anglo-saxons 2014 lecture by Chris Pollitt (which, rather belatedly, recognises that a significant part of Europe - as well as the world) - has never bought the neo-liberal/Benthamite thinking of "New Public Management"); and A government that works better – and cost less?? By Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon .
-  And this book on Reinventing Organisations also seems to be making waves in the private sector – taking us back to management books of the 1980s and echoing the work of maverick Richard Semmler….

Is it too much to suggest that there is a link here with the “slow food” and the “limits to growth” movements? All signalling a wider revolt against the way advertising, marketing and the corporate media has so insidiously, in the post-war period, developed a collective sense of dissatisfaction??

For the first part of my working life I was an “insider” working to improve a very large (public) organisation - with a strategy and structures which tried to use the energies of a range of people which the organisation’s “logic” had trained it to ignore….These were its lower-level officials, its more junior politicians and, above all, citizen activists we brought into new structures we established in the early 80s. I’m glad to say that this sort of work was so strongly accepted and “embedded” (to use an important concept in the change literature) that it has continued to this day in the structures and strategies of the Scottish Government….

But my role fundamentally changed after 1990 to that of an “Outsider” – the European Commission (and the small private “consultancies” it sub-contracts) funded me to appear in capitals and to “effect change”… using increasingly detailed prescriptions and tools which I wrote about with increasing frustration……What I enjoyed was identifying and working flexibly with people who wanted to change their institutions for the better – but the rigidity with which EC programmes are designed made that increasingly impossible….

It was a decade ago I first came across the notion of “good enough governance” which challenged the push global bodies such as The World Bank were making (at the start of the new millennium) for “good governance” - including the development of indices to measure the extent of progress “developing countries” were making in reaching the standards of public management apparently possessed by “developed” countries.

We need to explore this “good enough” concept in all our thinking but, above all, we need to have an outright ban on externally-imposed organisational change…..and a requirement that anybody proposing change should have to justify it to a panel of self-professed sceptics….

Candide's Journey - an expose of journalism

I’m always intrigued by confessional-type books which sketch how the scales fell from a writer’s eyes and how (s)he began to “connect the dots” in their various worlds ie produce a coherent account of the exercise of power.

Voltaire’s Candide was, of course, a satire – I prefer less manipulative and anguished portrayals of “intellectual journeys”…..which seem to be quite rare….millions of autobiographies or memoirs which show what an interesting life the author had or interesting times they lived in – but few hints of the sorts of deep questions they might have been exploring…..let alone attempts to set out their “world views”, the assumptions which sustained them and how and why experience was forcing adjustments….

Almost before they start writing a book – be it political, financial, economic – authors have taken decisions about how they will “frame” and tell the story - and are writing the book to convince you of its rectitude. Don’t expect them to share their uncertainties with you….

Patrick Chalmers is a fellow Scot born in 1966 – the generation after mine – and, after graduating first in engineering then journalism, had several years of contract work before landing a job with Reuters in 1994. Happy to have such a job – initially on finance then EU affairs in Brussels – he was slow to recognise the interests he was serving although it was in Brussels he developed his Euroscepticism as he began to understand the extent of the “behind-the-doors” dealing and the power of the big business lobby…..a spell as a foreign correspondent in the Far East completed his disillusionment with the rhetoric of democracy and he resigned in order to seek a more honourable channel for his energies….Fraudcast News – how bad journalism supports bogus democracies is his (self-published) book which tells the story – with the final chapters updating his story and giving a quietly upbeat message about “alternative journalism”…..

We need more books like this….for the life of me I can’t at the moment remember others I’ve read of this genre – although I know they exist. Coincidentally, I’ve spent the past few days drafting possible text for a new introduction to the little E-book Crafting Effective Public Management which I uploaded a week or so ago. This latest effort of mine had collected my musings of the last decade about efforts to improve systems of government. This post earlier this month reflects my rather belated realisation of how few people seem to have had my experience of straddling “reform efforts” in so many countries and from a “practitioner” standpoint……Writers on this topic are academics – or employed by global institutions…..paid to  put walls around pretty gardens of increasingly specialized “knowledge”. Practitioners rarely have the time or temerity to challenge such gatekeepers…

It was some 15 years ago I started to pose serious questions about the conventional wisdom on the sort of “institutional change” which people in post-communist countries were being urged to make and the legitimacy of the bodies funding programmes of institutional reform….
I delivered a major paper Missionaries or mercenaries? on the topic to the 2007 Annual Conference of the NISPAcee network of schools of public administration; an update Play the Long Game – not the log frame! at the 2011 Conference; and have mused intermittently about public management reform, training and the use of structural funds in new member states – but realized only this week that I needed to pick out more explicitly the “theories of change” which have been implicit in the programmes of the past 4 decades…..

The great Romanian Realist school

 An “Art Safari” is taking place this week on Bucharest’s central thoroughfare, Magheru Boulevard, in what was, until recently, an art-deco garage which I used a few years back for my car’s annual test.

The jewels in the display are the regional collections – from Constanta, Arad, Galati but Baia Mare in particular which was, at the turn of the 20^th century, a real magnet for painters… the link gives a good history – as well as excellent sections on some of the key local painters….

The Constanta Curator – Doina Pauleanu - is clearly one of the country’s key art historian - having written at least three magnificent looking books on the painters of the period (unfortunately only in Romanian) - but shared the problem she has finding someone with the necessary qualifications and dedication willing to take the administrative burdens involved for about 300 euros a month..She’s active in cross-border work, for example, with the Bulgarian curators of Dobrich Gallery (whom we know) and Russe – and has run trips to the traditional art colony of Balcik…

   

Last year, the safari was located in a large tent in the central square in front of the National Gallery and was rather small and stifling. This is a much better location – giving the conditions to allow the slow savouring of the amazing treasures the curators have brought forth.

And the organisers are to be congratulated on the creativity they let loose on the old building…

The display encourages us to make the trip to the various regions – particularly Constanta – and to resume the editing of more than 500 pages of text and reproductions I had accumulated for some 75 of the better known Romanian realists of a century ago. I took me quite a few years to appreciate the power of the Romanian tradition – their works are not so easily seen in the smaller galleries and one of my posts referred to the number of private collections which apparatchiks have squirrelled away. The Masters were  

- the classicist Theodor Aman (1831-91);
- the impressionist Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907); and his friend, the tragically short-lived 
- Ion Andreescu (1850-82)

and it is quite astonishing how many great artists were born within 15 years or so of one another in the country. Here’s the top ten for me -
- Nicolae Vermont (1866-1932) had great landscapes; 

- Stefan Luchian (1868-1917) is better known for his still-lives.

- Artachino Constantin (1870-1954) he and the trio who follow are the great colourists  

- Strambu Ipolit (1871-1934)

- Stefan Popescu (1872-1948) my favourite - who has many North African landscapes;
- Biju Leon 1880-1970

- Camil Ressu (1880-1962) with wonderful peasant scenes; and 

- Bunescu Marius 1881-1971

- Jean Alexandru Steriadi(1881-1956) with a lot of inspiration from the Black Sea.

- Iosif Iser (1881-1958) was a very colourful artist - who gave us great figurative work ...of racetracks and Ottoman figures.

- Bednarik Ignat (1882-1963)

- Darescu Nicolae 1883-1959 – another great colourist

- Nicolae Tonitsa (1886-1940) is well-known for his portraits - and the curious dark eyes of many of his figures.

- Samuel Muntzner (1884-1959) is also a favourite - with river or sea generally present in his paintings.

You'll find a series of my posts on the Romanian realists here

Spare a thought......

The world will have noticed that the British Conservative won a surprisingly clear-cut victory in last week’s General Elections; and that Scottish nationalists (less surprisingly) swept the board there, leaving only 3 of the 59 Westminster seats for the other three British parties to split equally between them.

But far fewer will have appreciated the speed, scale and significance of the utter and total collapse in the Labour vote in Scotland which was, for most of the post-war period, a stronghold of Labourism…

I grew up in its heartland and actually contested a political election in May 1964 on the eve of my University Finals in Politics at the University of Glasgow - just as 20 year-old Scottish Nationalist Mhairi did last week. The difference is that I was running for a municipal seat I had little chance of winning – and that she was running for a winnable seat – and not only won but (as did most Nationalists on the night) did so by a massive majority. It was 4 years later before I made it to local political office – and another 6 to a senior position in regional government…..    

Today I want to spare some thoughts for the individuals involved in the sea-change which is underway in Scotland – both the winners and losers.

I know that good advice generally drops on deaf ears – as Oscar Wilde put it “I always pass on good advice – it’s the only thing to do with it….” But I really hope someone takes Mhairi aside and has the clout to warn her against the seductions of office….I hope that politics students at my alma mater are still given Robert Michels to read……… and that someone gives her a good reading list of “alternative” stuff to read…..

I can’t say I’m a fan of the trend there’s been of appointing younger and younger people top high office – I had a poster in my own political office in Glasgow which read “I wish I had been born earlier, I would have made the same mistakes….but faster…..”

I feel real pity for her losing opponent – a real heavy-weight who punched well above his age…Douglas Alexander. I knew his father in the early 1960s in Greenock – a Church of Scotland Minister – who subsequently became Leader of the highly-respected Iona Community….Douglas – despite being a lawyer and colleague (if not acolyte) of Gordon Brown – was decidedly not one of the many machine Labourists of whom there were, bluntly, far too many in the West of Scotland. Glasgow Labour MPs in particular were a disaster and gave the Labour Party a dreadful name from which it has never been able to recover. 

And I include in that criticism a colleague of mine from Strathclyde Region in the 1980s – Ian Davidson – whose tongue became well known for its infamous forked calumny even then and became more so the older he got and the higher he climbed (a vicious Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Scottish Affairs for the past few years). 

He was one of many who deserved to go – although less so was Iain McKenzie who was Leader of the Labour group of Inverclyde Council in my hometown until he successfully sought election to Parliament only a few years ago on the (premature) death of the incumbent MP. His victor – by a massive 15,000 vote margin, is an unknown Scottish nationalist whose sole claim to fame is to be the grandson of the town’s most famous goalkeeper!! 

I don’t pretend to be a polling pundit - so can’t offer any convincing theory about why the conservatives pulled off this surprising victory – but my gut tells me that the Nationalist campaign of backing Labour was the strongest factor persuading wavering voters in England to go with the Tories.

The Conservatives pay big money to ensure they are plugging the right messages – David Cameron took a lot of stick for sticking with the lines given him by his highly successful (Australian) campaign pollster. But I suspect that their huge posters showing the long arm of one of the Nationalist leaders reaching for the wallet in the back pocket of the English voter will propve to have been the most effective poster in decades. Another blog has expressed it well -

Not only have the SNP destroyed the Left in Scotland they have pretty much destroyed it in England too. The SNP campaign of promising to rule both England and Scotland and propping up a Labour government has spectacularly backfired. English voters faced with this campaign preferred to vote Conservative rather than have Alex Salmond pulling the strings. 

The sculpture "Sadness" is by one of Bulgaria's early 20th century masters - Lazerov - and I snapped at the Svetlin Roussev gallery in PLeven

Unwelcoming Pleven

Pleven is a city in the northern part of Bulgaria which looks rather forbidding from the heights of the main Russe-Sofia road above which skirt it – densely-packed fingers of white high-rise blocks pointing to the sky. You can imagine the Russian troops in 1877 surveying the settlements as they struggled to break the Turkish siege…..

It has two famous artistic sons – the caricaturist Ilyia Beshkov (  ) and the grand old man of Bulgarian art, Svetlin Roussev, who was Chairman of the Bulgarian Union of Artists from 1973-85 and whose amazing collection in the Sofia Atelier which bears his name (just down from the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral) I had discovered only in December. But is actually one of a pair – the other being in Pleven – to which I made a slight detour on Friday on my way to Bucharest….

The city is approached by strange, empty dual carriageways which suddenly disgorge you into bustling traffic buzzing around a series of hills. It is a couple or so years since I last visited its Ilyia Beshkov gallery – to whose concrete carbuncle I was guided by intuition…..The same happened yesterday… I swung right up a hill and soon caught sight of the old low-slung building on the left which is the National History Museum, with a park on the right which turned out to contain the Svetlin Roussev Gallery….Fortunately there is still uncontrolled parking in the quiet area just under the Beshkov Gallery.

Svetlin Roussev had apparently acquired thousands of artefacts during his time at the heart of Bulgarian painting – passed on presumably by his colleagues. In the last half of the 80s he fell out of favour with the authorities for the stand he took on various issues – and I was shown with some glee in the Sofia library a copy of the one of the Encyclopedias of Bulgarian art from which most of his entry had been airbrushed from history….

His Pleven collection has found an appropriate location in an old Ottoman Hamam – which has one of the most beautiful interiors I have seen. Beshkov cartoons start the tour and my camera was just about to spring into action when I was checked by one of the younger attendants – the first time this had happened in all my tours of regional Bulgarian galleries. Fortunately I was able to use my link with the Sofia gallery which I phoned to have things sorted out. 

But the same happened when I popped in to renew my acquaintance with the Beshkov gallery – and this time no friends in high places to help!

What, I wonder, is the thinking here? I use no flash; the gallery offers no books whose sales might suffer from art enthusiasts with cameras? In any event I was informed that if I sent a written request in advance, I would be allowed…..It was so cold on my last (winter’s) visit that I had been left alone – the attendants. wrapped in their furcoats had been huddled in a side-room in front of an electric heater!   
        

So bad marks to an unwelcoming Pleven…..I will not forget the woman whose spiteful hand is trying to block a Boris Denev painting I really wanted to have join the small file I have on one of my favourite Bulgarian painters.......(so many fall into that category!!)

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Just seen one of the pithiest epithets for the generation I belonged to in the middle of the 20^th Century –

 “We were poor, but we didn’t know it.” In fact, however, in the breadth and depth of the social support we enjoyed, all my classmates (whom I have contacted recently) described our youth in strikingly similar terms – “we were rich, but we didn’t know it”.

It’s from a short piece - Crumbling American dreams - penned a couple of years ago by Robert Putnam (of “Bowling Alone” fame) about his home town into which he was born in 1941. 

He’s now expanded his thoughts into a book - Unhappy Days for America. The link is to a NYRB review which is less than enthusiastic in its assessment……