When will it ever change???

Another long post whose basic argument I can perhaps best summarise thus –

- People were overly optimistic in 1990/91 when they talked of one or two generations being necessary for a democratic culture to take hold in central europe

- most locals in Bulgaria and Romania are fatalistic about the glacial pace of reform

- but know exactly where the blockages are

- few external academic or consultants have even bothered to look at progress in improving state capacity in this part of the world – in the ten years during which billions of euros of European Structural Funds has been under local control...

Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. In it he made the comment that it would take one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently liberated countries of central Europe; maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and 15 to 20 years to create the rule of law. But it would take maybe two generations to create a functioning civil society there. A former adviser to Vaslev Havel, Jiri Pehe, referred a few years ago to that prediction and suggested that 

“what we see now is that we have completed the first two stages, the transformation of the institutions, of the framework of political democracy on the institutional level, there is a functioning market economy, which of course has certain problems, but when you take a look at the third area, the rule of the law, there is still a long way to go, and civil society is still weak and in many ways not very efficient.”

He then went on to make the useful distinction  between “democracy understood as institutions and democracy understood as culture” 

“It’s been much easier to create a democratic regime, a democratic system as a set of institutions and procedures and mechanism, than to create democracy as a kind of culture – that is, an environment in which people are actually democrats”.

These are salutary comments for those with too mechanistic an approach to institution-building.  Notwithstanding the tons of books on organisational cultures and cultural change, political cultures cannot be engineered. Above all, they will not be reformed from a project approach based on using bodyshops, cowboy companies, short-term funding from the EC Structural Funds and the logframe.

The European Commission made a decision in 1997 which shocked me to the core – that EC technical assistance to central European and Balkan countries would no longer be governed by “developmental” objectives but rather by their ability to meet the formal legal requirement of the Acquis Commaunitaire (AC)…….ie of EU membership

In the mid 90s, the Head of the European Delegation to Romania (Karen Fogg 1993-98) used to give every visiting consultant a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy (1993). This suggested that the “amoral familism” of southern Italian Regions (well caught in a 1958 book of Edward Banfield’s) effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions.

Romania, for its part, had some 200 years under the Ottoman and the Phanariot thumbs - but then had 50 years of autonomy during which it developed all the indications of modernity (if plunging latterly into  Fascism). The subsequent experience of Romanian communism, however, created a society in which, paradoxically, deep distrust became the norm – with villagers forcibly moved to urban areas to drive industrialisation; the medical profession enrolled to check that women were not using contraceptives or abortion; and Securitate spies numbering one in every three citizens.

The institutions of the Romanian state collapsed at Xmas 1989 and were subsequently held together simply by the informal pre-existing networks – not least those of the old Communist party and of the Securitate. Tom Gallagher’s “Theft of a Nation” superbly documented the process in 2005.

These were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency” was raising important questions about how free we are to shake off cultural values…. Authors such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; and Richard Lewis (in his When cultures collide were telling us how such values affect our everyday behaviour.  

Sorin Ionitsa’s booklet on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) captured brilliantly the profound influence of the different layers of cultural values on political and administrative behavior in Romania which continue to this day. His focus was on Romania but the explanations he offers for the poor governance in that country has resonance for many other countries and therefore warrant reproduction  

- “The focus of the political parties is on winning and retaining power to the exclusion of any interest in policy – or implementation process”

- “Political figures fail to recognise and build on the programmes of previous regimes – and simply don’t understand the need for “trade-offs” in government. There is a (technocratic/academic) belief that perfect solutions exist; and that failure to achieve them is due to incompetence or bad intent”.

- “Policymaking is centred on the drafting and passing of legislation. “A policy is good or legitimate when it follows the letter of the law − and vice versa. Judgments in terms of social costs and benefits are very rare”.

“This legalistic view leaves little room for feasibility assessments in terms of social outcomes, collecting feedback or making a study of implementation mechanisms. What little memory exists regarding past policy experiences is never made explicit (in the form of books, working papers, public lectures, university courses, etc): it survives as a tacit knowledge of public servants who happened to be involved in the process at some point or other. And as central government agencies are notably numerous and unstable – i.e. appearing, changing their structure and falling into oblivion every few years - institutional memory is not something that can be perpetuated”

His booklet remains one of the few which explores such issues which are so crucial for the development of this part of the world; and he also refers to other “pre-modern” aspects of the civil service – such as unwillingness to share information and experiences across various organisational boundaries. And to the existence of a “dual system” of poorly paid lower and middle level people in frustrating jobs headed by younger, Western-educated elite which "talks the language of reform - but treats its position as a temporary placement on the way to better things".

 “Entrenched bureaucracies have learned from experience that they can always prevail in the long run by paying lip service to reforms while resisting them in a tacit way. They do not like coherent strategies, transparent regulations and written laws – they prefer the status quo, and daily instructions received by phone from above. This was how the communist regime worked; and after its collapse the old chain of command fell apart, though a deep contempt for law and transparency of action remained a ‘constant’ in involved persons’ daily activities.

Such an institutional culture is self-perpetuating in the civil service, the political class and in society at large”. “A change of generations is not going to alter the rules of the game as long as recruitment and socialization follow the same old pattern: graduates from universities with low standards are hired through clientelistic mechanisms; performance when on the job is not measured; tenure and promotion are gained via power struggles.

“In general, the average Romanian minister has little understanding of the difficulty and complexity of the tasks he or she faces, or he/she simply judges them impossible to accomplish. Thus they focus less on getting things done, and more on developing supportive networks, because having collaborators one can trust with absolute loyalty is the obsession of all local politicians - and this is the reason why they avoid formal institutional cooperation or independent expertise. In other words, policymaking is reduced to nothing more than politics by other means. And when politics becomes very personalized or personality-based, fragmented and pre-modern, turf wars becomes the rule all across the public sector.”

Ionitsa’s booklet was, of course, written more than a decade ago but I see nothing to suggest that much has changed in Romania in the intervening period. Since 2007, of course, it has been Romanian experts who have been employed as consultants but they have essentially been singing from the same song-sheet as western consultants

I’ve used the phrase “impervious regimes” to cover the mixture of autocracies, kleptocracies and incipient democracies with which I have become all too familiar in the last 27 years; have faulted the toolkits and Guides which the European Commission offers consultants; and proposed some ideas for a different, more incremental and “learning” approach.

I’m glad to say that just such a new approach began to surface a few years ago – known variously as “doing development differently”, or the iterative or political analysis…….it was presaged almost 10 years ago by the World Bank’s Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the sorts of questions we consultants deal with on a daily basis - one paper in particular (which starts part 2 of the book) weaves a very good theory around 3 words – acceptance, authority and ability. I enthused about the approach in a 2010 post

But there is a strange apartheid in consultancy and scholastic circles between those engaged in “development”, on the one hand, and those in “organisational reform” in the developed world, on the other…..The newer EU member states are now assumed to be fully-fledged systems (apart from a bit of tinkering still needed in their judicial systems – oh…. and Hungary and Poland have gone back on some fundamental elements of liberal democracy…..!). But they all remain sovereign states – subject only to their own laws plus those enshrined in EC Directives…. Structural Funds grant billions of euros to the new member states which are managed by each country’s local consultants who use the “best practice” tools - which anyone with any familiarity with “path dependency” or “cultural” or even anthropological theory would be able to tell them are totally inappropriate to local conditions..…

But the local consultants are working to a highly rationalistic managerial framework imposed on them by the European Commission; are, for the most part, young and trained to western thought. They know that the brief projects on which they work have little sustainability but – heh – look at the hundreds of millions of euros which will continue to roll in as far as the eye can see…..!!!

Someone in central Europe needs to be brave enough to shout out that ”the Emperor has no clothes!!” To challenge the apartheid in scholastic circles….and to realise the relevance of Ionitsa’s 11- year old booklet and Governance Reforms under real world conditions 

Cultural Change - a neglected topic

Two issues have dominated my life – for the first 20 years what we in Scotland initially called (in the early 70s) “multiple deprivation” but which has subsequently become better known as “inequality”. Straddling then the worlds of politics and academia, I helped shape a social strategy which is still at the heart of the Scottish Government’s work 

In the 1990s , however,  I changed both continents and roles – and found myself dealing, as a consultant, with the question of how new public management and governance systems could be built in ex-communist countries which gave ordinary ordinary citizens in ex-communist countries a realistic chance to give vent to their voice and opinions – against the “powers that be”….. who rapidly were revealed to be …….the reinvented apparachtniki…..In a recent pessimistic post about the possibility of the Romanian political culture moving forward, I referred to the theory of “path dependency” which warns that formal institutions are shaped by informal group behavior which is deeply embedded in wider cultural values; and which easily undermines the rhetoric and good intentions of those who lead the institutions…

Until last week I saw these two strands of my life as very separate - but a conversation with a friend has made me realize that there is a profound cultural link between the 2 fields of work. I start by describing the culture of West of Scotland public agencies as I experienced them in the late 1960s and 1970s; then describe the 2 key organisational innovations some of us introduced to one of the UK’s largest public bodies in the mid 70s.
Readers will forgive me for going into some detail since these innovations have been neglected in subsequent social history…..I will take up the second part of the story in my next post 

In the early days people sometimes asked what, as a western consultant, I could bring to the task of crafting state bodies in such countries. They didn’t realise that, in many respects, Scotland was, until the 80s and 90s, culturally and institutionally, more socialist than countries such as Hungary. The scale of municipal power was particularly comprehensive in Scotland where the local  council still owned three quarters of the housing stock, 90% of education and most of the local services - including buses. Only health and social security escaped its control: these were handled by Central Government. Local government simply could not cope with such massive responsibilities (although such a view was rejected at the time).

This was particularly evident in the larger housing estates in the West of Scotland which had been built for low-income "slum" dwellers in the immediate post-war period -

- there were few services in these areas

- employment was insecure

- schools in such areas had poor educational achievement and were not attractive to teachers/headmasters

- local government officials were not trained in management : and treated their staff in a dictatorial way

·         who in turn treated the public with disdain

The contemptuous treatment given by local council services seemed to squash whatever initiative people from such areas had. They learned to accept second-class services. Behind this lay working and other conditions so familiar to people in Central Europe

- the culture was one of waiting for orders from above. There were few small businesses since the Scots - - middle class have tended to go into the professions rather than setting up one's own business

- work was in large industrial plants

- for whose products there was declining demand

- rising or insecure unemployment

- monopolistic provision of local public services

- hence underfunding of services - queues and insensitive provision

- hostility to initiatives, particularly those from outside the official system.

- elements of a "one-party state" (the Labour party has controlled most of local government in Scotland for several decades).

As a young councillor in the late 60s, I made an immediate impact by the way I mobilised tenants about the patronizing way they were being treated by the local municipality, I was lucky because, Labour having lost local power to a group of “liberals”, I had the freedom to flay “the system” with all my energies. In a sense I was giving the national liberals a taste of their own medicine since they were just beginning to invent a new form of “pavement politics”…..The community groups I worked with were very effective in their various projects concerned with adult education and youth, for example and one of the most powerful lessons I learned was how much many professionals in the system disliked such initiative.

But it was still a bit of a shock to realise how suspicious my own Labour colleagues were of the people they were supposed to support! Instead they echoed the reservations and criticisms of the officials. One of the things I was learning was the subtle and often implicit ways those with power made sure they kept control – whether in the formality of language used or in the layout of meetings.

I drew on this experience when, in 1977 I wrote a major article about community development – which was reproduced in a book of Readings about the subject in the early 80s

In 1974 I found myself in a lead role as new structures were set up for Europe’s largest regional authority;  - 

At the end of Strathclyde Region's first year of existence in 1976, a major weekend seminar of all the councillors and the new Directors was held to review the experience of the new systems of decision-making. The exhilarating experience a few of us had had of working together across the boundaries of political and professional roles first to set up the new Departments and second on the deprivation strategy was something we wanted to keep. And other councillors wanted that involvement too.

 Our answer was "member-officer groups" . These were working groups of about 15 people (equal number of officials and councillors) given the responsibility to investigate a service or problem area - and to produce, within 12-18 months, an analysis and recommendations for action. Initially social service topics were selected - youth services, mental handicap, pre-school services and the elderly - since the inspiration, on the officer side, was very much from one of the senior Social Work officials.

The council's organisational structure was also treated in this way in the late 1970s (the extent of external assistance sought was that every member of the group was given a copy of a Peter Drucker book as text!) - and a group on Community Development helped pave the way for the first local authority Committee for Community Development. And eventually, in the mid-1980s, even more traditional departments such as Education succumbed to this spirit of inquiry! 

The member-officer groups broke from the conventions of municipal decision-making in various ways -

- officials and members were treated as equals

- noone was assumed to have a monopoly of truth : by virtue of ideological or professional status

- the officers nominated to the groups were generally not from Headquarters - but from the field

- evidence was invited from staff and the outside world, in many cases from clients themselves

- it represented a political statement that certain issues had been neglected in the past

- the process invited external bodies (eg voluntary organisations) to give evidence

- the reports were written in frank terms : and concerned more with how existing resources were being used than with demands for more money.

- the reports were seen as the start of a process - rather than the end - with monitoring groups established once decisions had been made. 

The achievements of the groups can be measured in such terms as -

- the acceptance, and implementation, of most of the reports : after all, the composition and the openness of the process generates its own momentum of understanding and commitment !

- the subsequent career development of many of their chairmen

- the value given to critical inquiry - instead of traditional party-bickering and over-simplification.- the quality of relations between the councillors : and with the officials 

With this new way of working, we had done two things. First discovered a mechanism for continuing the momentum of innovation which was the feature of the Council's first years. Now more people had the chance to apply their energies and skills in the search for improvement.We had, however, done more - we had stumbled on far more fruitful ways of structuring local government than the traditional one (the Committee system) which focuses on one "Service" - eg Education which defines the world in terms of the client group: of one professional group and is producer-led. And whose deliberations are very sterile - as the various actors play their allotted roles (expert, leader, oppositionist, fool etc).

 As politicians representing people who lived in families and communities, we knew that the agendas of the Committees we spent our time in were not really dealing with the concerns of the public: were too narrowly conceived; and frustrated creative exchange. For this, we needed structures which had an "area-focus" and "problem focus". We were in fact developing them –
-       in the neighbourhood structures which allowed officers, residents and councillors to take a comprehensive view of the needs of their area and the operation of local services:
-       and in the member-officer groups.

 But they were running in parallel with the traditional system.The structures we developed gave those involved (not least the officials) a great deal of satisfaction.
The challenge, however, was to make those with the conventional positions of power (the Chairmen and Directors) feel comfortable with the challenges raised by the new structures. We were aware that our basic messages to professional staff - about (a) the need to work across the boundaries of departments; (b) the need for consultative structures in the designated priority areas; and (c) the capacity of people in these areas - represented a fundamental challenge to everything professional staff stood for.

This was expressed eloquently in an article in the early 1980s - "Insisting on a more co-ordinated approach from local government to the problems of these areas, trying to open up the processes of decision-making and to apply "positive discrimination" in favour of specific (poorer) areas challenge fundamental organising beliefs about urban government - viz the belief that services should be applied uniformly, be organised on a departmental basis; and hierarchically"

 What we were doing was in fact running two separate systems - a traditional one and a more innovative one which defied traditional lines of authority. The latter was more challenging - but, paradoxically, left with the younger officials and politicians to handle.  And, during the Eighties, more "alternative" systems were developed - such as 6 Divisional Deprivation Groups which to whom the Policy sub-Committee passed the responsibility for managing the urban programme budget in their area.

For 20 years – long before “cultural change” became fashionable - I was therefore in the middle of efforts to change organisational cultures. That helped me not only to see the world from other people’s standpoints but also to learn new skills of networking.

It was for this reason that the Head of Europe’s WHO’s Health Prevention Division commissioned me in 1990 to represent her on missions to the Health Ministries of the newly-liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe (inc Russia).

So, when the EC started its programme of Technical Assistance (PHARE), I was one of its earliest and most experienced consultants – indeed, for the paranoic Poles, too experienced (all candidates were faulted for one of 2 reasons – knowing too little about Poland or knowing too much – or rather too many of the wrong people – after my work for WHO I was seen as falling into the second category!).

In my next post I will try to explore why changing the culture of public management and governance has not been taken more seriously in central Europe……

Some Hope in the Balkans for social cooperation?

For some 20 years, a significant part of my life was devoted to the encouragement of community building – first at a neighbourhood level; then at that of a shipbuilding town; then, for more than a decade, at the level of a Region which covered half of Scotland. 
Initially the tool was simple mobilisation – talk and organisation. 
Then it was structural – setting up institutions which enabled hitherto voiceless people to gain the ear of those in power. 
Ultimately the tool was financial – to enable those evicted from the formal economy to create local companies which provided local jobs and services in areas from which commercial activity had been drained. In the mid 1980s I chaired Strathclyde Community Business which channelled millions of pounds into such examples of social enterprise..

When the wall fell in 1989, (wild) west-ern capitalism drove all before it – the few voices advocating an alternative to neoliberalism were soon drowned out. The very mention of “cooperatives” was enough to bring down a torrent of abuse – even so, I wondered every now and then about whether the time might not be ripe for this powerful model to raise its banner one more in this part of the world. After all, tens of millions of people are employed globally in cooperatives and social enterprise – why should Bulgaria and Romania be any different?

One such opportunity came in Sofia’s Ministry of Labour in early 2008 when I was team leader of a training project which selected 5 fields for stronger efforts at harmonisation with EC laws and practices. One of these fields was that of “equal opportunities” and I presented a short case-study of our experience in the West of Scotland (based on a much longer paper Organisational Development and Political Amnesia), hoping that it might encourage some thoughts about social enterprise.

In many ways, conditions in Bulgaria for such ventures seem more propitious than in Romania where so many have sold their soul to the capitalist devil – young graduates in particular mortgaging themselves to the hilt with apartments and new cars. The word I generally use of Bulgarians is “modest” since they have been more subdued in that respect – which seems indeed to fit their greater environmental appreciation. It’s significant that you find so many healthfood and traditional medicine shops in Sofia which I sometimes call Europe’s “retro” city. Both Bulgaria and Romania are orthodox countries but there is a touch of paganism in Bulgaria which you can experience in some New Year events and the Rila mountain in August.

“Resilience” has become a fashionable term – and Bulgaria gives the feel that will be better able to buckle its collective belt and make the necessary adjustments to life as austerity continues to grind us all down….

And yet today, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that a fair number of people have been thinking and writing about the issue in Romania - although only 130,000 employed in the sector.

The Social Economy in Romania - a resource

Policies, practices and tendencies in social economy in Romania and EU (2010) – an excellent introduction to the concept and its practice in EU countries - although very light on the Romanian context. Focuses latterly on its scope for the disabled community.

Social economy – trend or reality (summary of 2012 Suceava conference) A useful note

Trends and challenges for social enterprise in Romania (2012) – a useful, if academic, paper which sketches the legal background and gives a fairly bleak assessment of progress until 2010 or so

Institutionalising social enterprise in Romania (2012) – a slightly better presented version of the same previous paper

A global view from RO (2013) a PhD student’s introductory notes to the subject (with no employment data)

Social Enterprises in Romania (2014) what purports to be a first attempt to put numbers on the sector

The State of Social Entrepreneurship in Romania (NESsT 2014) - the first consultants’ run at the sector

Atlas of Social Economy Romania 2014 (Romanian only)

Surviving the crisis – bibliography on workers’ coops in Romania (2014)

A pilot profile of the social entrepreneur in a constantly changing Romanian economy (2015) a typical academic study

Building the social investment industry – the case of Romania (NESsT 2016) looks to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the sector, focusing very much on different models and the practical steps which can be taken (with case-studies)

From Challenges to Opportunities – advancing social enterprise for Romania’s disadvantaged communities (NESsT 2017) After a brief intro to the current legal situation and support mechanisms, this is a report from one Swiss-funded body of its recent work

A note on the Bulgarian situation https://euroalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Darina-Zaimova-EN-2.pdf

 Press cuttings

http://www.nesst.org/romania-eng/nesst-romania-launches-enhancing-social-entrepreneurship-building-bridges-project/

http://gemorg.bg/bulgaria-putting-the-basis-for-social-entrepreneurship-as-a-vehicle-of-social-change/

Talking Past One Another

A casual conversation about wine on a flight between Bucharest and Vienna turned, sadly, into a cultural stand-off. The young man in the window seat turned out to be a Romanian sommelier working in Salzburg to whom Daniela, in the middle seat, introduced me – knowing how much I appreciate wines ...ever since a cycle trip in my teens to the south of France in 1960!

But what should have been a pleasurable, if not educational, conversation during the flight was soured by….prejudice….I dare say on both sides…..

I don’t pretend to know a great deal about Romanian wines but - after 10 years’ experience of drinking Bulgarian wines (not least at 3 of the massive annual weekend tastings which Sofia organises in November) and a winter of tutelage under a young Bulgarian sommelier – I do know that Bulgarian wines deserve more respect than this young whippersnapper was giving them…I mentioned the little Bulgarian wine Catalogue produced on the eve of the annual Sofia tasting and observed the absence of such a Romanian publication – only to be told that I was wrong. He said there is such a publication – but only for sommeliers. He didn’t seem to understand that ordinary drinkers might like to have access to such a compendium - and indeed that such a restriction effectively means exactly what I said - that no such publication exists.....

On my side I didn’t take kindly to his dismissal of the possibility of getting a useful experience from any bottle priced at 5 euros – “they cost more than 3 euros to produce” he expostulated….I didn't have the heart to tell him that one of my favourite Romanian whites - Jidvei Riesling - retails for exactly 3 euros!

But what did it for me was his mention of a bottle priced at 1000 euros – “Just stupid” I muttered – to which he took high offence. Quick end of our conversation - although Daniela continued to engage him in conversation during which he mentioned that he had started drinking wines only in 2009 (!!) and emphasized the intensity of his training – and, of course, my ignorance.

What lesson do I draw…something to do with the closed mind…sommeliers, by definition, deal with rich people and therefore, despite the world of tastes having being opened to them, develop the arrogance of experts. And young Romanians are notorious for such arrogance - as is well testified by Ronnie Smith on page 80 of my Mapping Romania.....

I’d like to see how Theodor Zeldin might have handled such a conversation to more mutual advantage! 

A Zeldin Resource

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/book-conversation

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263330798_Zeldin_Theodore_1998_Conversation

http://www.oxfordmuse.com/media/muse-brochure[final].pdf

hidden pleasures of life http://www.anilgomes.com/uploads/2/3/9/7/23976281/gomes_tls.pdf

http://delarue.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/OLC-April-2011_DeLaRue_Art-of-Conversation.pdf

A wine resource

This list gives a good indication of some of the Bulgarian wineries who present their wines at the annual fair in Sofia. And this is the list of Romanian wineries for the Bucharest event (which is in May)

The one field in which Romania does seem to score higher (?!) is that of wine blogs eg

http://lucruribune.blogspot.ro/

https://vincarta.com/blog/premium-romanian-wine/

Postscript

I should have done my homework on Austrian wine-bars before hitting Austria…The white wines I could find were all boring variants of their Gruner Weltliners and Rieslings!

Far more interesting were those I found yesterday from a new Romanian vineyard (for me) in the Dobrogea area (near the Black Sea) - Macin vineyard. Superb Aligote, Muscat, Sauvigon Blanc and Feteasca Regeales – all for 2 euros a litre. 

pps this is a good article on the whole issue of wine tastes 

New Hope in Britain – if not Europe?

For a year, many of us had virtually given up hope for Britain. The 2015 election had been bad enough in its granting the Conservatives an outright majority - but the commitment its manifesto had given to holding a referendum on EU membership; the speed with which it was held; and its 52-48 result last June knocked most ex-pats into depression.

The sudden announcement in mid-April by a PM (who still had to prove herself) of a General Election – when she was more than 20% ahead in the polls of an utterly disorganized Labour Party (and after Labour had  just lost more than 300 local authority seats) seemed to doom that party to extinction.

Talk of a 100 seat Conservative majority seemed generous to the Labour party – For once my predictions (like most people’s) were wrong – I had foreseen a Tory majority of 95…..

.

And yet, astonishingly, someone written off not only by the MSM but even by his own parliamentary colleagues proved to be very popular once he was actually given air time by that deeply prejudiced media. As did the policies with which the party ran. The result on 8 June saw the Labour party’s share of the vote hit 40% - its largest percentage increase since 1945.

My fellow blogger Boffy records his reactions here and this article indicates some of the immediate reasons for the astonishing result. As an initial Corbyn enthusiast, journalist Owen Jones is a good bell-weather since he subsequently reneged on his support – his honest reaction and the subsequent discussion thread reflect the current discussion which is now gripping Britain.The New Yorker gives here an amusing and good outsider’s take

But it is this post from one of the 20-odd blogs I had identified a couple of weeks ago which gives one of the most profound and thought-provoking analyses.

The rest of Europe is focusing on the British Government’s discomfort - and the chaos which seems set to ensue from a badly-wounded Leader and government hanging on to power only through a loose alliance with a poisonous partner.

More significant for me is the opportunity this presents at last for a proper discussion about the sort of agenda “progressives”, everywhere, should be pursuing. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Labour party had quite a radical agenda - significant parts of which (such as withdrawal from the EU) I did not support. But I was a strong supporter of what we might call the populist part of the agenda relating to the need for greater dialogue and popular participation – not least in the economic sector.  

I know we cannot return to that period – not least because the right-wing media and scribblers have tarnished it so in the popular imagination but we need to shout from the rooftops that it was a time when important ideas of the 1960s were being consolidated.

The New Spirit of Capitalism; by L Boltanski and E Chiapello (1999) is a critical analysis of managerial texts which tells us so much about the Zeitgeist….. It is a bit turgid and needs to be read in conjunction with Management Gurus – what makes them and how to become one by Andrzej Huczyinski (1996); and The Witchdoctors – making sense of the management gurus (1996).

In the meantime, neoliberalism has come…..and may not yet be gone…..but the tide is ebbing and just needs a strong push from an alternative philosophy….People like Mark Blyth, Elinor Ostrom and Wolfgang Streeck have laid part of the foundations – as I tried to point out in my survey in April of Thinking beyond Capitalism. Not so well known, perhaps, is the shape of the possible organizational alternatives – not merely cooperatives and social enterprises but the sort of structures set out in  Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations
Sadly, Corbyn's Economic Advisory Committee was put in cold storage after the last leadership challenge in 2016.......(with several of its members delivering withering comments on the lack of direction). So the party's much praised 2017 Manifesto does need a rigorous assessment if it is to form the basis of the next manifesto for what could be a victorious General Election!!

And we still don’t have enough people working at a progressive common agenda globally – although I have been encouraged recently by the burgeoning literature on “the commons” – to which the greens have made such a significant (if unrecognized) contribution.

What I would now hope for is for the British Labour party to resist the siren call of tribalism and to reach out to others who have been trying to build a different world from a variety of encouraging initiatives.    

Getting Government Reform taken seriously

We are increasingly angry these days with politicians, bureaucrats and government – and have developed an appetite for accounts and explanations of why our democratic systems seem to be failing. The Blunders of our Governments; and The Triumph of the Political Class are just two examples of books which try to satisfy that appetite.

The trouble is that the academics and journalists who produce this literature are outsiders – so it is difficult for them to give a real sense of what scope for manoeuvre senior policy-makers realistically have. Political Memoirs should help us here but never do since they are either self-congratulatory or defensive – with the Diaries of people such as Chris Mullen, Alan Clark and Tony Benn being exceptional simple because they were outside the magic circle of real power.

Two rare and brave attempts by politicians to pull aside the curtain of power in a systematic and objective way are How to be an MP; by Paul Flynn and How to be a Minister – a 21^st Century Guide; by John Hutton

Various problems make it exceedingly rare for British senior civil servants to publish memoirs.

This leaves the important category of consultants and think-tankers to turn to – with Michael Barber’s How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) and Ed Straw’s Stand and Deliver – a design for successful government (2014) being recent examples. John Seddon’s Systems Thinking in the Public Sector – the failure of the Reform regime and a manifesto for a better way (2008) and Chris Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005) are older examples.

Barber’s should be the most interesting since he has made such a name for himself with his “deliverology” but I find it difficult to take him seriously when he doesn’t include any of the other authors in his index. 
Straw’s is an angry book which fails even to include an index – let alone mention of Seddon’s or Foster’s books. 
The Unspoken Constitution was a short spoof published in 2009 by Democratic Audit which probably tells us as much about the British system of power as anyone….

And, however, entertaining “In the Thick of it”; and the British and American versions of “House of Cards”, they hardly give a rounded account of policy-making in the 2 countries.

Curiously, those wanting to get a real understanding of how the British (and other) system of government might actually be changed for the better are best advised to go to the theories of change which have been developed in the literature on international development eg the World Bank’s 2008 Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice; and its People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (2011) - in particular the fold-out diagram at the very end of the 2008 book

The diagram gives the lessons of New Labour's efforts to reform public services - showing what it identified as the key forces of change. Consultants leached off the process - as you can see here

Twenty good sites for those looking for serious analysis

My last post was a bit too pessimistic in suggesting that those looking for alternative analyses to the rubbish perpetrated on anglo-saxon MSM would find it a difficult task. There are quite a few “alternative news” sites – The Conversation is a non-profit which tries to combine academic insight with journalistic skills; the US Counterpunch has a stronger tone.

And it is analysis – rather than description – we need these days.

Having explored a few weeks ago the question of which (English language) magazines would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

 I decided to run the same criteria on anglo-saxon blogs and, using the "blogrolls" of some of the best, came up with about 20 sites which satisfy most of the criteria - 

Stumbling and mumbling; an economist who is intrigued by dilemmas and attempts to find patterns in social science

http://potlatch.typepad.com; Blog of William Davis who is  Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmith’s, London and also Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. But he hasn't posted for a year!

http://memex.naughtons.org; Naughton is one of the best writers on IT matters

The memory bank; Fascinating site of anthropologist Keith Hart which also contains full text of his book on Money

http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/; The blog of Diane Coyle, a literate economist

http://www.coppolacomment.com/; The blog of Francis Coppola, a highly literate banker

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/; A Marxist economist who makes sense

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.ro/; One of the most thoughtful, referenced and well-written of political blogs - which used to be called “All that is solid”. It's explicitly sympathetic to the Labour Party and the unions but never hesitates to call nonsense out,

http://neweconomics.org/; the site of the New Economics Foundation

PRIME -  Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME) is a network of macroeconomists, political economists and professionals from related disciplines who seek to engage with a diverse audience in order to de-mystify economic theories, policies and ideas

Book Forum; is a site I’ve strangely neglected from including in previous roundups. It’s a daily list of  academic articles selected, however. from too narrow a range of US academia .

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/; site of the soft left think tank.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/; Blog of Richard Murphy – who has advised Jeremy Corbyn.

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/comment/; site of political economy unit at Sheffield University

http://publicpolicypast.blogspot.ro/; academic historian of modern Britain

Sceptical Scot; this site has started to develop - and we need a break from the anglo-saxon focus!

Hard Leftist blogs

http://www.leninology.co.uk/

http://socialisteconomicbulletin.blogspot.ro/

http://classonline.org.uk/

http://labourandcapital.blogspot.ro/

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.ro/

Interesting that Bookforum is the only US site to pop up in this test!! Not sure why… perhaps because most of them are tribal and, paradoxically, too mainstream? Of course, there are exceptions – such as the superb and highly idiosyncratic Brainpickings – which totally avoids any hint of current affairs and gives us timeless excerpts from the classics…..

Passing Thoughts

My partner complains that I now spend all day with my bum in a chair and my face in the laptop and there is no doubt that our minds and body must be affected by our new style of communication……

One of the interesting literary sites to which I’m now subscribed is Brainpickings which turns out to be run by a young Bulgarian now working in New York and who shares her working methods here. I’m not sure if her "wobble board" and other devices quite fit the needs of an old fogey like me but I was sufficiently intrigued with her mention of the “Pocket” app to give it a test run…At the moment, my library facility is simply a “copy and paste” of relevant URLs which I insert in a word file. We’ll see what value this organizer can add……

It was Adam Curtis who made me realize last year that I should be paying more attention to documentaries. Good documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject; experience of filming; appropriate selection and editing of text, images and music; and appreciation of how to fit them together, One of the best websites for challenging documentaries must be Thought Maybe – which I thoroughly recommend.

You might also like this list of the best 50 documentaries of all time - from the excellent Sight and Sound journal. Trouble is, I feel, that they take 30 minutes to say what can be said in 5 at most…

Mainstream media and blog sites are so awful in their slavish repetitions of political conventional wisdom that a search for “alternative sites” seems a suitable response. But where to begin? A few weeks back I reported on my findings about readable journals. 

Yesterday’s post identified (for me) some new UK sites of which Another Angry Voice was most promising – if a bit shrill. And, by definition, “alternative” sites and mags are….well… “tribal” ie closed to the idea of plurality, generosity or cooperation. Google “anarchist”, “revolutionary”, “green” and other epithets and see if I’m wrong.

Which is why I’m currently more disposed to read the stuff which comes from the commons network eg this paper on policy options for the EU which came in today