Why are the Brits schizophrenic?

The British public remains proud of its National Health Service – although electors have shown little apparent concern at the non-stop organisational upheavals to which it has been subject over the past 30 or so years. The latest survey showed that 89% of adults in Great Britain support a national health system that is tax-funded, free at the point of use and provides comprehensive care for all citizens.

Oddly, however, 43% of those polled didn’t seem to care whether the service was provided by the NHS or another provider (e.g. private company or not-for-profit body such as a charity or social enterprise). 39% expressed an active preference for this care to be delivered by the NHS.

Although I’ve been out of the country for 25 years I understand this apparent schizophrenia.

I was heavily influenced by the anti-institutionalism of the post ‘68 period – seeing with my own eyes the complacency and protectionism of local bureaucracies. I avidly devoured the critiques of The Local State and the works of Ivan Illich (of Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis fame)

I belonged to that small wing of the Labour Party which regretted that the party had, in the 1940s, turned its back on its “voluntarist” tradition and opted for the centralisation model (Egalitarian thought and labour politics – retreating visions; Nicolas Ellison (1994) nicely sets out the three strands (or “visions”) of Labour thought) 

Presented, however, with a choice between professional or managerial power, I opted for the latter - consoling myself that the “new managers” being promoted in the 1970s in the wave of enthusiasm for corporate management would challenge the complacency I saw. 

I never imagined that the managers would take over – and pave the way for the privatisation and commodification of everything!

At a personal level, I have always been wary of the “health system” – seeing its overworked doctors as too much as the prey of the pharmaceutical industry; and the fashion for monstrous new “factory” hospitals as horrific expressions of gigantism. Hence my activity in the World Health Organisation’s Healthy Cities Network – with its emphasis on health promotion and prevention.

And, from a distance, I have followed with distaste the various scandals which have erupted whether about medical malpractice or hospital mismanagement….

And yet I have never supported the neo-liberal project of privatising health care.

My partner challenged me yesterday on this apparent contradiction – how could I still support “the British model” given the views I have expressed over the years (let alone my own rejection of the idea of ever being hospitalised)?

I knew that the French health system represented one of the world’s best – and the US one of the worst but had been getting conflicting signals recently from the various international league tables with which we are now assailed. One table (in 2007) told me that the NHS was only 17^th globally for healthcare systems. Another (just a few months ago) focused on health and wellbeing (ie outcomes) and put Britain in 27^th place. But a survey conducted by The Commonwealth Fund last year ranked the UK first overall, scoring it highly for its quality of care, efficiency and low cost at the point of service, with Switzerland coming an overall second.

What are mere mortals to make of such contradictory reports? Fortunately there is help to hand – for example from something called “The Health Foundation” which published earlier in the year this short pamphlet which shines light on both the strengths and weaknesses of the British system. Knowing the scale of money from dubious sources behind Think Tanks, I checked out their website which gives reassuring answers to the obvious questions. Of course there are other, even better-known places where such analysis is conducted (such as the King’s Fund)…..  

But perhaps the most interesting find was this survey commissioned by the Health Care Commission

Views of the NHS and Healthcare have to be viewed at three levels.
Views of the NHS as a whole are often very different from, and influenced by different issues, than public perceptions of local health services, and different again from patient perceptions.

- The NHS as a whole, and in particular the principles it embodies, remains a huge source of latent pride. It is still perceived by the British general public to be one of the best of its kind in the world. People also see the NHS as critical to society, and despite concerns about its management, they feel it needs to be protected and maintained rather than re-invented.

- Despite this, the NHS regularly features as one of the biggest issues facing Britain today for the public. In early 2006, levels of optimism about the future prospects of the NHS reached their lowest recorded levels since 2002.

- However, public satisfaction with the NHS at a national level, and patient satisfaction, have remained relatively stable since 2000 and have recently shown signs of improvement. Patient ratings of their treatment are always far higher than ratings of the NHS as a whole.
 Our analysis highlights the impact of media coverage and politics on the NHS at a national level, where people rely on media coverage to form judgement.

Not surprising that the barrage of hostile comment about health care from those in the pay of corporate power (waiting to pick up rich pickings) has been having an affect.

I remain an unrepentant “mutualist” – believing that healthcare is too important to be left to commercial, managerial, political or medical interests on their own. It needs to be locally owned – with citizen interests balancing the others…..

I appreciate that this is a minority position which may indeed be seen as positively "cavalier" (Don Quixote) these days - so will try in future posts to explore what might be involved.....

Praising - not Burying

People writing books on social affairs will usually spend at least a couple of years on their book – only to see it dealt with in a 1,000 word review (if they are lucky) – even in professional journals. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Crooked Timber book seminars which produce at least 50 page overviews of selected books – made up of 6-7 contributions. The last (on Red Plenty) had 135 pages!

I am currently reading Will Hutton’s new book How Good We Can Be (not to be confused with As Good as it Gets!) – an update of the series of books Hutton has been writing on the DNA of Anglo-American capitalism since “The State We’re In” (1995) 

Hutton is that rare character – a British journalist who cares about ideas and shares his wide and deep reading in his books; someone who can and does try to build bridges between the worlds of academia and action which I have been blogging about recently.

But, as I’ve said before here, the trouble with bridges is that, in peacetime, horses shit on them and, in wartime, they are blown up!

A lot of people therefore “have it in” for Hutton - Frederic Mount is a good example. Someone who was at one time Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit but reengineered himself a few years ago to write a devastating critique of the new British oligarchy. His review of Hutton’s latest book has a fairly typical tone

If a book’s worth writing once, it’s worth writing several times. This homely maxim has often proved a recipe for success. Will Hutton is a case in point. Twenty years ago, he had a runaway hit with The State We’re In. He followed that up with "The State to Come" (1997), then came "TheWorld We’re In "(2002). As Hutton moved from the editor’s chair at the Observer to the Work Foundation and now to the Principal’s lodge at Hertford College, Oxford, he has stayed heroically on his own message. The title’s tweaked, but the melody lingers on.

The continentals are enlightened, the Anglo-Saxons are deluded. Europe is the future and we would be crazy to stay out of the euro. John Maynard Keynes is good, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are no good. The state is the solution, not the problem. It already showers blessings on us and would shower many more if only we could overcome our misguided suspicions. Government regulation and high taxes are the way to make us happy.For painting in black and white there are few like Hutton. There is no hesitation or deviation, although there is quite a bit of repetition, …….. 

Yet, oddly enough, many of Hutton’s proposals will appeal to a wider audience than social liberals and socialists. In fact, they are pretty much the new consensus: the separation between high street banks and the casino banks; a stiffer stewardship code to deter looting in the boardroom; Treasury guarantees for big construction projects; restoring the insurance base of the welfare state; a return to the old sliding scale for capital gains tax, in order to encourage long-term holding of shares; an end to the tax advantages of debt over equity; reforming council tax and giving local authorities back their financial independence.

I warm to all this, and I also like Hutton’s proposals to reinvent the trade unions as co-partners with business, particularly the idea that they might set up mutually-owned service companies to sell their services to employers.

These days we are all in favour of diversifying patterns of ownership beyond the standard plc model, to include more co-operatives and also “public benefit companies,” which guarantee under charter to deliver certain public benefits and enjoy tax advantages in return. Free enterprise used to be more diverse and could be so again.

The awkward truth is, though, that these alluring alternatives are no more risk-free than the old limited company. It is an awkward thought that the best-known alternative corporations of this sort over the past few years have been the Co-op, Railtrack/Network Rail and the BBC—none of them exactly without problems of governance.

But it’s Hutton’s grand narrative that seems the more rickety. We are constantly told that the past 20 or 30 years have been a disaster for the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time we are also told that “Britain has more world-class universities per head of population than any other country,” that “The triangle bounded by the M3 in the south M40 to the north and with Heathrow at its centre boasts the highest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside California and Massachusetts,” that the BBC remains the finest broadcasting service in the world, that the National Health Service is “the cheapest system in the world producing the best health results across a range of key indicators” and “on measures of effectiveness, safety, patient-centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one.”

I must confess that my eyes did begin to glaze over after the fifth or sixth of the series of injunctions Hutton gets started on later in the book. I longed for a lighter touch - and was therefore quite fascinated to discover this issue touched on in this detailed and very serious treatment of the sort calculated to warm the cockles of all writers - it's called Calling Capitalism to account by Steve New

Writers who want to engage seriously with economic and political reality face a problem. How to pitch the tone of what they say? Every simple story needs goodies and baddies; more complex stories need some sort of moral trajectory. But how explicitly should you tell the story? The vast bulk of serious academic work avoids offence by talking in the abstract, layering oblique evasion upon tactful qualification. Academics settle for the low temperature, formal modality of the learned journals; passion is excluded. Much is made of broad generalisations; no-one is criticised directly. ‘Firms’ and ‘Markets’ feature, as do ‘agents’, but mostly they don’t have names: authors can be pretty sure they’re not going to be sued by anyone, even in the rare event that a normative judgement is explicitly made.

Even academic work which reflects some kind of moral or political purpose (not all does) tends to be scrupulously anodyne, and keen not to offend. You’d really struggle to find explicit criticisms of particular firms or managers in the Academy of Management Review or the Journal of Finance or the Harvard Business Review2.

Politicians and activists can be more specific – we don’t like Shell, we don’t like Nike – but, often deliberately, tend to prioritize effect over accuracy or content3.

Journalists can be more direct, but mostly without the tedious necessity of consistency or depth. Will Hutton – over a prolific career operating in the relatively unpopulated overlap between journalist, academic and (perhaps) politician – has mastered a kind of middle ground. He writes about general ideas, but he also names names; he treads a line between rounded argument and polemical assertion; he tries to be critical

Writing about companies and business people and their ethics is tricky because it is easy to blunder into two equally stupid traps: you can declare them all horrible, beyond sympathy and empathy, or you can end up fawning and cooing in line with corporate propaganda. Nuanced and balanced treatment is hard: that’s part of why academics often stick to the abstract or typical case. If you get specific, you risk being a bombastic Spart or a corporate patsy.

Hutton navigates this carefully; he talks about particular firms, but from one particular angle at a time. So, in HGWCB, Apple is hailed as an example of innovation, with its ‘handsome, well-designed devices’ (26). But the working conditions in the supply chain are not discussed.
On the other hand, INEOS and Sports Direct are bad because of their employment practices; ARM is good because it’s successful and hasn’t been bought up by foreigners. Unilever has a declared purpose (of which more, later) and doesn’t do quarterly reporting (good). Virgin uses tax havens (bad). News International is beyond the pale because of its ‘purpose-free amoral culture’ (87).

Hutton uses specific examples of firms to point out particular virtues and vices, praising for X, damning for Y.

You have nothing to lose but your Chain.....-link Fences

The last few posts may have appeared to have had different themes but, I realise, were linked to the basic difficulty we seem these days in establishing common ground about the state of our societies/systems – or agreeing actionable programmes of change. 

I mentioned the failure of Ed Straw's book to mention – let alone begin to analyse – the important contributions which have come from other consultants/academics about the sad state of the machinery of British government. Everyone – left/right; Ministers/civil servants; Think Tanks/consultants/ economists/ sociologists/ political scientists – has their own narrative – and all talk past one another.....and the citizen…

Almost no one tries to establish a common denominator about this – let alone alliances. 

I appreciate that this is perhaps more of an Anglo-American thing than European – where there is broader acceptance of the need for negotiation and coalition.

But the academic specialisation which Scialabba was talking about – plus the niche marketing which the various experts (their institutions and publishers) are compelled to take part in in order to make any impact in the modern Tower of Babel we all now inhabit - has also affected the “consensual” aspect of European society….We are confused and cynical…..

A couple of books which were delivered just a few hours ago make the point - Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister  was published in 2013 by a well-known British academic (Patrick Diamond) and is the detailed story of how New Labour tried to modernise the machinery of government over its 13 years. Who Governs Britain? is a short book published this year by one of the doyens of British political science (Anthony King) and explores the question whether “our system of government is fit for purpose”.

Both books have copious indexes and bibliographies which I immediately checked for mention of the books of practical men such as Ed Straw or John Seddon. What do I find?
- No mention of these two – although Chris Foster (with an academic background) does rate 2 entries in Diamond’s book. 
- Michael Barber (Tony Blair’s Education guru and the inventor of “deliverology”) is the only significant change-agent to get real space in Diamond’s book. 
- The important Power Inquiry of 2005-2010 oddly gets no mention in King’s book and only 2 references in Diamond’s index.

- Democratic Audit’s satirical The Unspoken Constitution (2009) which gives us a very pointed critique of the concentration of irresponsible power of the British system is, of course, totally ignored.

The conclusion I draw from this is simple, Academics reference only one another (within their own narrow discipline) – and disdain to mention the outputs of mere practitioners (if they even bother to read them). And practitioners (civil servants/politicians) don’t have the temperament or patience to read and distill what the academics write. 

Consultants, journalists and Think-Tankers, however, are the sort of intermediaries who should be capable of selection and summary - but have their own interests, disdain most writing (Think-Tankers being an exception) and bring instead their particular brand of snake oil…….

One of the (few) heartening sections of Naughton’s book about the Internet is his chapter on the “media eco-system” in which he produces several case-studies of the upstaging of the mainstream media by bloggers who had more specialized knowledge than the journalists. 

There are an increasing number of (older) bloggers who have the time and inclination to challenge what the power elites are doing – but they have to network more – and sharpen their message.    

Perhaps my contribution is to try to identify those who are working in my field(s)….and try to get more of them working together and developing a higher profile???

Coincidentally, another book in the packet which arrived this afternoon offers an approach which might help pull ourselves out of our confusion – Ben Ramalingham’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos which applies systems theory to  a range of complex problems faced in most parts of the world.

Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government??

A week ago I mentioned Ed Straw's “Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government”.

In this – and a future post – I want to examine its analysis and claims.

It is an angry book - which reflects the public’s loss of trust in the political system….. but has attracted surprisingly few reviews - so let me start with the BBC coverage which, as you would expect, is simply a summary of the book’s blurb they were given -

The thrust of Ed Straw's book is that the current system of government is too adversarial, fails to include any feedback on whether policies have succeeded, gives little choice to voters and suffers from a civil service which hampers politicians' attempts to get things done."Between elections, the places where power resides are the news media running their various agendas, good and bad, political and business - large companies and industries with expert preferential lobbyists and party funders, dealing with a political and civil service class mostly ignorant of their business," he says.

He says governments "limp on with a mixture of muddle, error, howlers and the occasional success" and politicians "rarely work out before getting power that it's bust". He says he has come to the conclusion that the civil service cannot be reformed on its own, because reform would involve transferring more power to the government, which would "make it worse because they have too much power already". 

So his solution is a revamp of the whole system of government. The better-known reforms that he wants to see include proportional representation and state funding of political parties - with a ban on large donations - to promote competition among parties and make sure that individuals or interests cannot buy influence.Swiss-style referendums would be held on a more regular basis, while governments would be limited to four-year terms and prime ministers not allowed to serve more than eight years (to stop the "autocracy cap" where a leader with pretty much unchecked power becomes autocratic and "wants to stay for ever because you can't imagine life without that power"). 

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. 

The civil service would be radically revamped with it retaining a smaller administrative role, but in other areas there would no longer be a permanent civil service. Instead specialists with knowledge of, say, the railways, would be brought in to contract, manage and regulate that industry. 

Ed Straw says that his application of organisational theory onto how the UK government works is unique. He has also strong views on the Labour Party's structure. He says a lot of Labour's problems could have been avoided if they had a better process for challenging or replacing a leader, saying the Conservative system is much more efficient. It would have allowed Mr Blair to be removed before the 2005 election, for Gordon Brown to have gone within a year of taking office and John Smith to have led Labour in 1992 rather than Neil Kinnock, he says.But whatever the changes within parties, he says that successive governments have shown that nothing much will change without the wider reforms he is suggesting.

Most Brits will find all of this very acceptable….although I personally am a bit disappointed that his book doesn’t make any reference to the voluminous “What’s Wrong with British Government” literature.

- Chris Foster (academic, government adviser and fellow PWC consultant) wrote in 2005 an important paper Why we are so badly governed? – an enlarged version of which can be found in his book of the same year British Government in Crisis 

- Kate Jenkins was an active participant in the changes of the 1990s and wrote an important book in 2007 about her work Politicians and Public Services which is admittedly more descriptive.

- But others – such as John Seddon – have offered a more systemic approach
- and most British Think Tanks at one time or another have written critiques containing fairly radical proposals for change in the government system.

So it would have been useful if Straw had given some indication of exactly how his approach differs from others. But all we get is a short sentence saying his approach is “unique”!

 Apparently this is because his is an “an organizational perspective” (page 10) But what exactly does he mean by this? 

He seems to mean the “contestability” brought by competition between commercial companies (when it is allowed to exist) thereby raising a couple of critical questions - the first being the hoary question which occupied some of us in the 1980s – the extent to which it was possible to apply the same management principles in  public and commercial organisations. One the Professors on my MSc programme wrote one of the classic articles on this – with a strong warning about the scale of the difference between the two contexts and their measures (“profit” and “public interest”)

The second question is - Has the contestability factor not been at the heart of New Public Management (NPM) which the UK has had for the past 20-odd years?  
Ed Straw has been a senior partner in the Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) Management Consultancy for many years – and gave evidence to the British Parliament’s Select Committee on Public Administration in 2005 which included strong support,for example, for the privatization of the Prison Service…and talked loosely about the need for further “politicization” of the Civil Service. In the name of “accountability”…..

His Demos pamphlet of the same year – The Dead Generalist – spelled out in more detail what he meant. Apparently he wants more contestability…..but his book is not happy with NPM – on page 36 he says simply that 

“the developers of NPM omitted some essential components of the original conception”. On the same page he refers to the “countless diagrams attempting to represent the unified field theory of public sector reform developed in central units like the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Delivery Unit from international management consultancies…..some are worth reading and some so limited as to be aberrant”. 

And that’s it! He divulges no more – except to tell us to read Norman Dixon’s “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence” (1976), Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Michael Porter, Peter Senge and 3 others I have only vaguely heard of….

So what are the "essential components" of the NPM model which the British designers missed? We’re not told….

footnote; the subtlety of the book's  main title may be lost on some of my foreign readers - it is the demand that came from the highway robbermen of the past when stopping stage-coaches - "deliver your valuables......" But "delivery" (implementation) is also the bit of policy-making which governments (let alone consultants) have been identifying for decades as the key weakness of the government process

The Internet - part III

I’m always about three years behind – be it films, fashions or books. And I’m not all that interested in the latest “technological breakthroughs” (such as the driverless car). My blog records do, however, tell me that I did, last October, read Morozov’s critical To Save Everything, Click Here (2013) and, some years’ earlier, Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? (2010)

The last couple of days I’ve been reading John Naughton’s What you really need to know about the internet (2012) which I found an excellent overview – using the structure of the 9 assertions of this 2010 article of his which contained this useful statement -

As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what's happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.

Since the web went mainstream in 1993, our media "ecosystem", if you like, has become immeasurably more complex. The old, industrialised, mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining rates of growth; relatively small numbers of powerful, profitable, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters; mass audiences consisting mainly of passive consumers of centrally produced content; relatively few communication channels, and a slow pace of change. The new ecosystem is expanding rapidly: it has millions of publishers; billions of active, web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change.

Despite my “old-fogey” image, I’m apparently fairly typical of the modern age – Internet and PC savvy; blogger (1000 posts) which contain a lot of quotes and hyperlinks; owner of 2 websites; user of Flickr; and publisher of about a dozen E-books

In Naughton’s terms I am an interactive, “Read-Write” citizen – as distinct from the passive “Read-only” consumer of monopoly suppliers.

The question, however, is how this will all play out? Naughton quotes the “long-tail” statistics which show that in 2011 73.5% of internet users used the services of just one company – Google and its subsidiary Youtube. And also Tim Wu’s analysis of the history of other communications systems which demonstrate that, after the initial flush of freedom, they descend to monopoly control….

Just last month Naughton delivered this lecture - You can’t always get what you want which suggests that he has hardened his analysis.

Those wanting to read the views of others in this field could usefully have a look at Naughton’s top internet books of 2012 which gives us access to two free books The Wealth of Networks; and The Future of the Internet

One subject which gets only passing reference in Naughton’s book is that of “net neutrality” which got reaffirmed support from America’s Supreme Court very recently. Tim Wu had a piece on it 

In Praise of the Free Spirit

Institutions are conservative (Donald Schon coined in 1970 the lovely phrase “dynamic conservatism”) and, despite the rhetoric in recent decades about “innovation”, don’t tend to favour original thoughts or ideas – so those seeking support for their ideas from university promotion boards or from lending agencies are  generally disappointed and learn to dumb down. I grant you that the Web came out of the state scientific system but most significant innovations these days have come from youngsters pottering in garages and using their own cash….

And a remarkable number of the books which have made an impact in the last 100 years were not written by those with university sinecures…..

George Scialabba is not exactly a name to conjure with – but he is probably one of the greatest of our contemporary polymaths/public intellectuals. I apparently downloaded a short book of his - The Divided Mind – a year or so ago but did not appreciate then the other collections of his essays which have been available since 2006 and which point to a very rare writer who has at least 5 crucial qualities –

- Breadth of reading

- Humanist perspective

- Generosity of analysis

- Elegance and clarity of writing

- Significant chunks of quotations to allow the reader to make his/her own judgement

He may be known to an increasing number of American readers as a critic and essayist but is – as this review points out –  

 a building manager at Harvard, the school from which he graduated in 1969. The facts of his vocational life are quite relevant, in a very homely, obvious way, to the splendid work that he does.There are almost no professors who do Scialabba’s kind of work, nor any journalists. It is not the case today, nor has it ever really been the case, that one got tenure by knowing the collected works of thinkers like Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, Leszek Kolakowski, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, both Trillings, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Academia is simply too segmented by disciplines, and besides, many of these writers matter not for any scholarship they wrote but because of how their writing influenced a broader audience. No, the only people who read public intellectuals current and past are professional journalists or book critics, and obsessive, usually left-wing amateurs. The book critics stop at a certain level of difficulty. "Times" critics might review the English political philosopher John Gray, but would their readers be interested in Kolakowski?

So it’s largely left to the obsessive amateurs.What most amateurs lack, however, are the skills. George Scialabba has the time, the freedom, and the passion of the amateur—and he also has the perspicacity, and the pen, of the Harvard alumnus. It’s a wicked combination. 

What does Scialabba want, besides that you read good, important books? Just turn to the book’s dedication, which reads: “For Chomsky, Rorty, Lasch—three answers.” I can’t imagine there are too many people who would be willing to spend their lives sitting on that three-legged stool. First, as noted, there are very few people alive who know the works of all three writers well. What’s more, while I am attracted to both Rorty and Lasch, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s allying with both Rorty and Chomsky—the former with his affirming, and ultimately patriotic, pragmatism and the latter with his curdled, bitter skepticism.

A review of one of his earliest collections of essays (2007) pinpoints his writing style -

He writes in what William Hazlitt -- the patron saint of generalist essayists -- called "the familiar style" and he is sometimes disarmingly explicit about the difficulties, even the pain, he experiences in trying to resolve cultural contradictions. He challenges the aura of mystery and mastery which seems to be sought by those who aspire to intellectual authority.

But it is the scope of his reading that has impressed the American cognoscenti and led to one of the best of the academic blogs (“Crooked Timber”) dedicating one of their famous seminars to his 2009 book What are Intellectuals Good For?

But before you pursue that link, I want to present an excellent review which epitomises the fairness with which Scialabba apparently conducts his work -

Scialabba belongs to a tradition of generalist essay-writers and “citizen-critics” (his term) of the democratic left whose forebears include Albert Camus, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Ignazio Silone—to mention those Scialabba refers to most often. In the book’s title essay, Scialabba describes this species of intellectual. They “wrote in the vernacular, with vigor and clarity, for the general, educated reader. Their topics were large, their interests wide; however small their actual, engaged audience, their writings opened out, and so helped sustain at least the idea and the hope of a public culture.”
He quotes Irving Howe’s description of one group of such writers: “The kind of essay they wrote was likely to be wide-ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to ‘go beyond’ its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation.”

 Reading several of Scialabba’s essays together, one can sense his particular intellectual vocation. It is what Matthew Arnold, writing about Edmund Burke, called a “return . . . upon himself.” Scialabba writes:“To perceive as readily and pursue as energetically the difficulties of one’s own position as those of one’s opponents; to take pains to discover, and present fully, the genuine problems that one’s opponent is, however futilely, addressing—this is disinterestedness as Arnold understood it”.

Scialabba is forever returning upon his own arguments, subjecting them to the most serious critiques he can find or invent. Again and again, he comes back to the cases against his own democratic, modernist, and socialist convictions: the nagging questions raised by elitist critiques of democracy, the conundrums of the liberal-communitarian debate, the new griefs that arrive with modernization, the unarguable successes of the parties of social inequality and war and imperial power...... 

We are saturated with words and images produced by “anti-public intellectuals” of the public relations industry; corporations and the wealthy have accumulated overwhelming political power; the “decline of print literacy” saps what sources of public thought might remain. Thus our most evident intellectual need is for writers who can research, expose, debunk. It might seem obvious, for example, that Reaganomics was bad for ordinary Americans—this, if nothing else, a contemporary left-wing intellectual ought to be able to affirm with confidence. Unfortunately, some undeniably honest and intelligent people affirm the contrary. One who is determined to see ‘all sides of every question’ must then learn how to distinguish among ways of measuring median family income, job creation and job loss, unemployment, and several other economic indicators, along with the basics of monetary theory.

For a literary intellectual, this is quite a chore.The chore becomes a Herculean labor when we consider not just the specialized vocabulary and research methodologies of economics but also those of ecology, public health, nuclear physics, chemical engineering—and so forth.

“To be, or at any rate to seem, an expert on everything,” Scialabba writes, “is now not a challenge but an invitation to vertigo.” None of us today can “‘put together’ all of culture.” The scope and complexity of our problems and the quantity of information necessary to the serious investigation of our situation are so great that generalist intellectuals cannot hope to “make social relations transparent,” as Merleau-Ponty called on them to do. Literary intellectuals cannot be the legislators of our world because they are simply “ordinary citizens without politically relevant expertise.” And without relevant expertise, how is one to make a useful contribution to a public world in which rulers rule by obfuscating and in which questions of justice must be formulated and answered in technical vocabularies? 

Scialabba argues, against his own example, that the only useful thing to do is to abandon the ideal of the humanist intellectual and become an expert in some area of public debate. Social criticism has necessarily “grown far more empirical, more specialized,” than it was in the day of writers like Macdonald and Orwell. The newer kind of intellectual this situation calls for does not display the “pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle” (Howe’s words, from a passage Scialabba quotes more than once) of the older literary intellectuals but simply aims to teach citizens “how to read the newspaper.” These empirical intellectuals are not artful in their composition of ideas; the most we can ask is that their writing be “[l]ucid, penetrating, austere, unaffected.” 

The contributions of the seminar can be read here

His website is here

A model for People Power??

I know that some of my (many) global readers who share my critical/sceptical stance on power structures have had their hopes raised recently by my homeland and will have been hugely encouraged by the electoral landslide in Scotland which wiped out the representatives of the British political system on May 7^th – with all but 3 of the 59 Scottish parliamentary seats in Westminster being taken by the Scottish Nationalists.

For 60 years Labour has been the establishment party in Scotland – on 6^th May they had 40 seats – reduced overnight to one. In many cases, rock-solid Labour majorities of more than 10,000 votes were transformed into Nationalist strongholds with majorities of equivalent size.

If ever there was an example of “people power”, is this not it?

I have been out of Scottish politics for 25 years; was never a “mainstream” labour activist (to put it mildly); and was never disturbed personally or politically by the upsurge of Scottish Nationalism which started in the 1960s with the discovery of North Sea Oil (establishment Labour figures clearly had a better "nous" than me - since they treated them viciously - I treated them as a bit of a joke) . Readers can therefore assume that what follows is as objective an assessment of that question as they are likely to obtain elsewhere…….. The basic facts are –

- Just 8 months ago, a massive 85% of the Scottish electorate voted by a 10% margin to remain in the United Kingdom

- What reputation the Nationalist government which has ruled since 2007 enjoys for “social democracy” it actually owes to the Lab/Lib Coalition which ruled Scotland from 1999

- It was during this time that all the distinctive social democratic policies were developed and implemented such as community land ownership; free care for the elderly; free University tuition fees; and continued public water and health systems

- All supported by the block UK tax transfer which is made to Scotland.

- The Nationalist Government which has ruled Scotland since 2007 (initially a minority one) has never used the powers for marginal tax increases

- And refused to take part in the broad Scottish coalition which pushed (successfully) for the significant devolved powers enjoyed by the Scottish government and Parliament
- Far from articulating a social democratic position, their leaders until recently had policies for marginal taxation for multi-national companies and “entrepreneurs” such as Donald Trump
- The Scottish Nationalist Party (despite its soft leftist image) has never articulated a coherent statement of its political philosophy (the 600 page manifesto for the 2014 referendum published by the Scottish Government was pasted together by civil servants)

- The upsurge in Nationalist support came in the 12 months preceding the September 2014 Independence Referendum and seems to have been due in large measure to a an amazing outburst of independent leftist organisations in Scotland such as  Common Weal  and National Collective 
- the SNP candidates attracted 1.5 million votes on 7 May - compared with Labour's 700,000 - and took 50% of the overall vote  
- this compares with the SNP vote in the 2010 General Election of 491,300; and Labour's 1,035.000
- in 5 years, that is, the SNP vote increased by 300% (1 million); and the Labour vote declined by 300,000   

Let my English friend Boffy spell it out for you -

The SNP argument was that they would be able to blackmail a Labour government -but, the Tories were able to use that threat of blackmail to rally a large enough block of nationalistic sentiment, in England, behind them to win a majority. 

The SNP believed that they could blackmail a Labour government, and instead led their ctiizens into another Tory government, the SNP now have to try to delude them into a belief that this Tory government “must” listen to them.

But, of course, the Tory government has no reason to listen to the SNP at all. In fact, what the one-party SNP regime in Scotland has now created, ironically, is a situation where a Scottish voice in government is pretty much excluded. In conditions where there are a large number of Scottish MP's from Labour or the Tories, there is always a good chance that some of those Scottish MP's will themselves be Ministers. In fact, in the last Labour Government, it was Scottish MP's who occupied the position of Prime Minister, Chancellor and other top jobs.

Because, today there are virtually no Scottish Labour or Tory MP's, the chances of any of them being in government, is thereby automatically excluded! In more ways than one, the delusions of the SNP have led the Scottish people into a dead end that has also excluded them from any voice in government. SNP MP's in Parliament will just be onlookers.  If they really had the courage of their convictions, they would follow the example of Sinn Fein, and refuse to take their seats. 

The fact, that the SNP currently purport to be pro-European, whilst wanting separation from the rest of Britain, simply exposes the illogicality and contradiction of their arguments and position even more. If, as the SNP claim, their problems arise not from capitalism, but from the fact that decisions are made in Westminster rather than Holyrood, how much greater would their problems be if decisions were made in Brussels rather than Holyrood, and under conditions where Scottish representation in the corridors of power would be even smaller than they are now, in Westminster? 

The Tories understood these economic and political realities, which is why Cameron is already rushing to offer the SNP "fiscal autonomy".  Jeremy Hunt let that cat out of the bag on Newsnight, whilst Cameron and other Tories have tried to make out that they do not propose to give Scotland fiscal autonomy.  They intend to make the SNP demand it, so as to give it to them as an apparent concession, so the SNP will have to take the blame.  If the SNP have to raise the finance required to cover Scottish spending, particularly in conditions where North Sea oil revenues are declining, and the ability to use them to bolster state finances are likely to disappear completely, the SNP will have little more scope to actually change anything in Scotland than a sizeable metropolitan council in England. It will have less ability to do so than does London. 

I don't like to be the bearer of bad news - but be prepared for all now to go downhill in Scotland.....unless a serious strategy can be created by those outside the Nationalist ranks who have worked so hard in the last two years.....

Expect nothing from the nationalist MPs................they are an undisciplined rag-bag of troublemakers who simply have naivety in common......The E-book I published last autumn - The Independence Argument – home thoughts from abroad has a detailed list of  the most significant books, websites and blogs on the issue. Only one of the 8 books which might be said to be in the "pro" camp conducts a serious analysis of the issue - and that is "Arguing for Independence - evidence, risk and the wicked issues" by Stephen Maxwell whose voice is sadly no more,,,,,,,

Gerry Hassan is an independent Scottish commentator and reflects here on the possible reasons for Scotland now being a one-party state

The repro is from my copy of Frans Masereel's superb "The City - a vision in woodcuts" (1925)

Must Labour Lose?

I had no sooner remarked on the absence of serious analysis of the results of the British General election of 7 May than I was almost overwhelmed by numerous analyses – but none of it, significantly, from newspaper sources. 

Ross McKibbin is an Oxford University political scientist whose well-informed pieces in the London Review of Books are always a joy to read – with hard analysis combining with good writing. The lead piece in the current LRB, his Labour Dies Again achieves the standard we expect from him

Henning Meyer is editor of the leftist Think Tank “Social Europe” which has produced some booklets on social democracy’s contemporary travails and his brief commentary on the lessons will reflect thinking in that quarter.

Mike Rustin is a London Sociology Professor and a well-kent face in the old-left crowd – so this critical piece of his (from the hard left stable of Lawrence and Wishart) contains few surprises….

Brendan O’Neill is Editor of Spiked – a libertarian journal whose provocative pieces always entertain and his Social Democracy is Dead, Don’t Mourn piece appeared while the final votes were still being counted in some places – hence perhaps the elements of triumphalism it contains…..The “Twitterati” he contemptuously refers to will certainly include Mike Rustin and the Soundings Kilburn Manifesto crowd whose language I also confess to finding a bit distasteful….

But the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute is a bit more hardnosed and less easy to dismiss and this analysis is a sound dissection of Miliband’s attempt to supply a convincing “story” during the past 5 years

None of Miliband’s attempts at creating an underpinning narrative for his agenda focused on empowering people through collective action.  Instead, Labour’s message was marred by a confusing mix of well-meaning managerialism and romanticised communitarianism.

Miliband’s only public critique of New Labour statecraft arose from his flirtation with Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour campaign.  Central to Blue Labour is the notion that the state, as well as the market economy, has dispossessed local communities of autonomy.  In 2011, Glasman described New Labour’s ‘embrace of the state’ as ‘manic’ and ‘almost Maoist’.  But the question of how communities can defend themselves against market forces is left bafflingly unaddressed.  Blue Labour has little to say about how the retrenchment of the state, through austerity, is the biggest threat to strong communities in Britain.

 Miliband adopted ‘responsible capitalism‘ in 2011.  By suggesting capitalism can be reformed, the concept sounded a bit lefty – New Labour suggested capitalism could be harnessed, but never tamed.  Yet it offered no substantive role for citizens in taking back control over a rampant economy. Rather, we look to capitalists themselves to lead the change.

 In 2012 Miliband introduced the odd ‘predistribution’ concept.  It presented government as both limited in its interventions – eschewing the politics of redistribution – and overtly technocratic, in that it suggested state managers know best how to create good citizens.

 Finally, Miliband gave us ‘One Nation Labour‘, the most blue of all his rhetorical ploys.  ‘One-nation’ is a traditionally conservative concept, associated with Benjamin Disraeli.  Indeed, David Cameron reclaimed the term in his first public remarks after his election victory had become clear.  It suggests a version of society in which our common humanity matters as much as social order (or more precisely, that achieving the latter is dependent on recognising the former).  It is, in a social democratic context, almost entirely meaningless.
‘One-nation’ presents the nation as an association, not a polity, and offered people looking to Miliband for hope nothing that they would not have already expected to hear from the Labour Party, even under Tony Blair.  The prominence given to the concept in subsequent Labour communications tells us that, essentially, Ed Miliband did not know what kind of government he wanted to lead.  It left him defenceless against the primitive appeal of austerity rhetoric. Labour lost this election to the Conservatives.  Conservatism has little ideological appeal in a post-crisis environment, as there is no order left to defend, but the Conservatives were extremely successful in perpetrating a politics of fear, against vaguely lefty otherness and incompetence, in order to acquire a vote share just about high enough (36.8%) to deliver a majority under our flawed electoral system. 

Yet the election was lost to the SNP too.  The SNP offered Scottish voters something that Labour did not: re-empowerment through transformed statehood.  One does not really have to take a view on the plausibility of the SNP’s approach (I made my views clear at the time of the independence referendum) to recognise its appeal.  Labour should be thankful the SNP’s nationalism restricts it to standing in Scotland alone – because it could well have demolished Labour candidates further south as well.

Ed Miliband should have done more to change the conversation.  But crippled as he was by an ambivalence towards the state, he failed to convince himself what he wanted to do with power – so it is little wonder he failed to convince the electorate.

The title I have given this post is actually the title of a Penguin Special produced in 1960 by Mark Abrams. The surprise of this election is not Labour losing (the polls never had good news for Labour) but the Tories winning an overall majority (even if a very small one). The Labour Party has been in decline for more than a decade….it certainly lost my affections in 2000 when I realised (largely through George Monbiot’s expose in The Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain) the scale of the concessions New Labour had made to Big Business   

Part 6 of Boffy’s series of posts puts it all in an even longer historical context -

The idea that Miliband lost the election because he was too left-wing is risible. Not only was Miliband's political stance to the right of successful Labour leaders such as Wilson or Attlee, but it was even to the right of Tory leaders like Heath, or even Home, and Macmillan before him, who in the post-war period governed within the social democratic consensus of Buttskellism. Even those Tory leaders saw no reason not to follow a Keynesian policy of deficit spending, even when Britain's debt to GDP ratio was 250%, rather than the 70% it is today. Heath even nationalised industries like Rolls Royce when they ran into trouble, a measure that would have been anathema to Miliband's outlook, let alone that of the Blairites.

So is it too late to take the Labour Party back? Certainly those contending for its leadership inspire no confidence. The implication of John Harris’ latest post seems to be that a grass-roots revolution is possible…