Turning a Crisis into an Opportunity

The early 1970s saw an intense debate about the very future of Glasgow – the rehousing of people from the city’s slums in the 1960s to New Towns in nearby parts of Scotland had resulted in a significant decline of Glasgow’s population and many felt that it was useless to go on ploughing money into the city. And the shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report identified not just Glasgow but the entire West of Scotland as a UK leader in “multiple deprivation”.

There is always, however, opportunity lying within a crisis; and those of us who seized this one were those who had been most critical of the performance of Labour councils. They may have had a good record of slum clearance and house-building but couldn’t handle the new assertiveness being shown by tenants. The new Region established in 1974 required, in our view, a new approach, based on the new spirit of participation which the Labour Government had recognised with its Skeffington Report on “People and Planning" (1969).

The very legitimacy of the new Region was in question – partly because of its enormous scale, its services used by half of the 5 million Scottish people. This, after all, was still local government and people were beginning to express some discontent with being taken for granted by too many Labour municipalities. The Scottish nationalists had scored some stunning parliamentary victories in the late 1960s and the talk, by the time the Regions came into existence in 1974, was of the prospects of being “over-governed” – with membership of the EC having been confirmed in the 1975 referendum and active talk of a possible “Scottish Assembly” which was eventually put to a referendum in Scotland in 1979, failing only on a “technicality”.

“What sort of Over-government?” was indeed the title I gave to my contribution to Gordon Brown’s famous Red Paper on Scotland which came out in 1975. I readily admit that the Over-government piece was an angry and academically pretentious one But its stress on the complacency and conservatism of Labour municipalities was an important corrective for the times. The headings give a good sense of the drift of the piece -

• Local government and devolution – a confused debate

• what is wrong with local authorities?

• structural weaknesses

• ideological weaknesses

• the challenge of corporate planning

• paternalism

• Labour Groups

T he Devolution of Power was an important little book produced by Labour MP John P Mackintosh in 1968 which helped produce the Kilbrandon Royal Commission, reporting in 1973. The problem with devolution is that what's conceded can readily be withdrawn and generally is - as we saw with the abolition first of the metropolitan bodies like the GLC in the 1980s and the Scottish Regions in the 1990s.

The basic point is that the 1970s saw great turmoil – and the Region needed to give people some hope that it understood their concerns and would be willing to use its resources to ensure fairer public services.

An initial deprivation strategy was set out by 1975/6 but, over the winter of 1981, was further developed at a series of community conferences attended by 1000 activists who reviewed the initial actions taken by the Region and, with the May 1982 elections, ensured that the subsequent report had a fresh legitimacy

It was printed as an attractive (little red) booklet (complete with poems by TS Eliot, Brecht, Adrian Mitchell and quotations from William James and Alice in Wonderland!) and widely distributed, as was a shorter version in the internal staff Bulletin. The Region's free Newspaper distributed to every household - and more selective monthly "Digest" sent to all Community groups - were both intensively used in the years to come to explain the details of the work. Workshops were held in a variety of public and professional settings over the following years to get the key messages across. And these were simple - if challenging -

"The existing inequalities in service allocation did not happen by accident: they are mediated through the administrative machine by generally well-intentioned professionals and administrators practising apparently fair and neutral principles. To tackle these inequalities therefore requires more than a general expression of content handed over, in traditional style, for implementation. It demands the alteration of structures and the working assumptions".

"What we were asking our staff to do in 1976 was to accept that fairly simple things were needed from them in the first instance; not massive spending but just a commitment, firstly to those who lived in the APTs; secondly to attempting new relationships both with their colleagues in other Departments and with residents. We were also asking for imagination and courage in encouraging staff to bring forward proposals for better practice despite the discouragement we knew they would encounter from the rules, traditions and prejudices which seem deeply engrained in certain departments"

"The majority of staff are discouraged from joint work with councillors, other professionals and residents in APTs by the way the traditional departmental system of local government works. Career advance depends on one's work as a professional or manager in a particular department - and not on the collaborative ventures emphasised in this and the 1976 document. That is the crucial issue which must now be faced and resolved. Exhortations and good intentions are no longer enough"

Previous Posts in this series

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/born-to-fail.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/turning-crisis-into-opportunity.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-ever-growing-irrelevance-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/performance-v-results-as-measure-of.html

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!”

 I may have told the story of Strathclyde’s Social Strategy before – but being given the opportunity to reflect in Zoom conversations almost 30 years later does encourage different perspectives. The tale I told in 1999 was one of success - at least as far as the process of change was concerned. The management of change was, even in the mid-1980s, a largely neglected subject in the UK - indeed no one used such a phrase in those days. The first popular book with that phrase was Managing Change - and making it stick by Roger Plant - in 1989/90. It was the 1990s before the “management of change” exploded into fashionability – with, for example, The Expertise of the Change Agent - public performance and backstage activity (1992) by David Buchanan offering some fascinating insights. But it was 2000 before Robert Quinn gave us the deeply impressive “Change the World”- which coincided with the outbreak of unrest from social movements globally.. Just how fashionable the field became you can see from the Annotated bibliography for change agents I wrote in 1999

Although I started the 1999 paper with a list of the developments which had preceded the creation of Strathclyde Region, I realise now I had underestimated their significance. In particular I had – as most people do – underplayed the positive role of the Labour governments of 1964-1970

• The Labour government of 1964-70 spent much of its period in power exploring how the UK could be modernised; it did this largely via Royal Commissions ie a group of the "Great and the Good" who would take a couple of years to hear evidence and make recommendations

• Its perspective had been very much that of "high modernism" viz a commitment to size, democracy and efficiency

• perhaps no more so than in the literal decimation of the Scottish local government system (albeit with strong support from the Heath government of 1970-74) leading to the creation in 1974 of 9 elected Regions and 53 District Councils

I remember visiting the House of Commons in those years and having a discussion with Willie Ross, the Secretary of State for Scotland, to impress on him the benefits which could accrue the creation of Strathclyde Region – to which, of course, the old Scottish local authorities were utterly opposed. Hansard subsequently recorded Willie Ross's reference to the meeting. In the meantime, the world moved on

• "Born to Fail?" was a 1973 report which exposed the scandal of the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland ("social disadvantge" was the actual term used but amended in the media to "deprivation"))

• to which SRC responded strongly 2 years later with its deprivation strategy – which it elevated to its top priority

• The Region was seen as a bit of a monster - but some of us saw the "Born to Fail?" Report as an opportunity to demonstrate the difference a well-resourced government body could make to people's lives

• I remember traipsing around the departments of what were then 2 city Universities to try to find knowledgable people – there were none

• this was not only the first municipal strategy against deprivation – it was the first time any UK government body had attempted such a bold step

• It was a remarkably open process – almost certainly because we accepted that, as Labour councils had been responsible for housing and most services for several decades, we had to take our share of responsibility for the results

And we were lucky – a lot of wise people had been developing structures for reform in the previous deacde, expressing itself in at least 4 waves of change

• between 1971-74 a group of individuals led by Ken Alexander produced in 1974 the West Central Scotland plan which contained the basic analysis and recommendations to allow the Region to make the decision to

• one of the Royal Commissions (Wheatley) produced between 1966 and 1968 a radical set of recommendations for Scottish local government

• recognition of urban needs – in the urban programme and CDPs set up in 1968 in partial response to the US War on Poverty

• Special committees of experts were set up by central government in 1971 (Bains: Paterson) to produce - as guidance for new local authorities then being created in England and Scotland - organisational guidelines for better management and policy-making. The main criticism in the reports they produced was the way that local government decision-making focussed (a) on the past (ie continuing to do what it had done before); (b) on itself (making no attempt to explore what those receiving its services thought or wanted) and (c) on single services - rather than the impact on the community.

The new local authorities were therefore advised to -

• appoint a Chief Executive

• set up a Policy Committee (Cabinet)

• establish strategy processes (to ensure a focus on policy issues and on the future)

• have inter-departmental groups (to help that strategic work)

All this reflected what was considered best practice in business and was concerned to concentrate administrative and political power in new structures and posts which were to be used to stamp a strategic purpose on the "ad-hocery" which passed for management. Corporate management and planning structures became fashionable - despite some critiques from those working at a neighbourhood level and a few academics such as John Dearlove.

Born to Fail?

50 years ago, in 1973, a small report was published which was to shape my life for the next 16 years. It was ”Born to Fail?” and exposed the intensity and scale of poverty affecting children – particularly in the West of Scotland.

I had spent the previous 5 years as a councillor in a shipbuilding town - working with tenants to help improve their housing and educational conditions. And had just been elected to one of the leadership positions of a Regional Council covering half of Scotland.

The main political leadership was, unusually, shared between its “Convener” (the public face) who was a community Minister, Geoff Shaw and, briefly, the Leader of Glasgow Corporation and the leader of the Labour group which formed the majority of councillors – Dick Stewart, previously a coal miner. The dual leadership may have been unusual, certainly led to the occasional tension (and was discontinued after Geoff’s tragically early death 4 years later), but offered the possibility for one man to focus on developing policy priorities and the other on the mechanics of implementation and discipline. Geoff shared my outrage at the conditions of marginalised people – so we were half of what jocularly became known as the “Gang of Four” who led the Region and therefore able to shape the Region’s priorities – not least because we had a year’s breathing space before assuming full and final responsibility in May 1975 for its public services (which employed 100,000 staff such as teachers, social workers, engineers and police)

I’ve written before about the strategy we developed in response to the “Born to Fail?” report (the full story is here – and a short version here) but focusing, understandably, on a description of the steps taken and an exploration of some of the dilemmas we faced. What I want to do here is instead to look in more detail at how exactly we framed the issue – and at what seemed to be the choices and constraints on offer.

We’ve only recently learned about the Overton Window – a strange term used to describe how perceptions of what is politically acceptable suddenly shift and can be exploited by reformers. I’m fascinated by this concept of “turning points” or “critical junctures” brilliantly dissected in Anthony Barnett’s extended essay Out of the Belly of Hell (2020)

What, by 1982, had become the “Social Strategy for the Eighties” was quite unique at the time – no other government body had dared contemplate anything so bold. It was to be another 2 decades before New Labour made a similar attempt – this time with the discourse about “inner cities” and “social exclusion” rather than "deprivation". Jules Feiffer nailed it perfectly when he had his little cartoon character say

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.

 Basically we suggested four principles of action which had not been attempted before

• Positive Discrimination : the scope for allocating welfare State resources on a more equitable basis had been part of the "New Left" critique since the late 1950s (Townsend). Being a new organisation meant that it was to no-one's shame to admit that they did not know how exactly the money was being allocated. Studies were carried out which confirmed our suspicions that it was the richer areas which, arguably, needed certain services least (eg "pre-school" services for children) which, in fact, had the most of them! And, once discovered, this was certainly an area we considered we had a duty to engage in redistribution of resources - notwithstanding those who considered this was not for local government to attempt.

• Community Development : one of the major beliefs shared by some of us driving the new Council (borne of our own experience) was that the energies and ideas of residents and local officials in these "marginalised" areas were being frustrated by the hierarchical structures of departments whose professionals were too often prejudiced against local initiatives. Our desire was to find more creative organisational forms which would release these ideas and energies - of residents and professionals alike. This approach meant experimentation

• Inter-Agency Cooperation : there needed to be a focussed priority of all departments and agencies on these areas. Educational performance and health were affected more by housing and income than by teachers and doctors! One agency - even as large as Strathclyde - could not do much on its own. An intensive round of dialogues was therefore held in 1976/77 with District Councils, Central Government, Health Boards, Universities and Voluntary Organisations: from which 8 experimental area initiatives emerged, followed in the 1980s with larger ones in Glasgow eventually with central government and private sector support.

• Information and Income-Maximisation : the Region could certainly use its muscle to ensure that people were getting their entitlements : ie the information and advice to receive the welfare benefits many were missing out on. The campaigns mounted in the late 1970s were soon pulling millions of pounds into these areas: and served as a national model which attracted the active interest of the Conservative Minister at the time.

Now strategies are now ten a penny – and we have become cynical of those who attempt them. One of our many current besetting sins! There is actually nothing better for a man’s soul than coming together with others in a spirit of fellowship to explore how the lot of one’s fellows might be improved.

I was so pleased, some 18 months ago, to find a small book (from a Canadian) celebrating the need for “strategies for governing” For 40 years we have been regaled with the ideology of the small state and the time for a new conception of the State is long overdue.

This series of posts will set the Strathclyde strategy in the wider context of the modernisation efforts set in train by the Labour government of 1964-70 – which rarely gets the credit it is due for what it both did and what it attempted. Because the story is told in more detail elsewhere, I will try to compress the basic story in bullet points…..

The 2022 Posts

Readers have a variety of riches awaiting them on this blog. Too many of you, I fear, look only for the latest post and don’t appreciate that the site contains other treasures ie

• Ebooks

• blogroll

• hyperlinks – one the blog’s distinctive features

• search facility

Let me say a world about each -

List of E-books; It took me some time to realise that the blog contained an amazing resource for English-speakers….the top-right corner has the list of E-books which have resulted from a careful selection and editing of the posts. They are, effectively, annotated guides to such subjects as -

• change – in all its aspects

• culture in the broadest sense

• patterns of decline

• The critical writing of the past half century about our economic system

• The literature on administrative reform

• The debate about Scottish independence over the past decade

• Cultural aspects of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Germany

I can safely say that no such guides exist elsewhere in the English language. But I’m not able to crack the question of their wider dissemination. They’re not much use if noone knows of their existence!! This is an issue I have to address. Ironically, however, the “resource” offered by the reading lists which have become such a feature of the blog is not something I seem to avail myself of too frequently! I tend all too often to “skim and save” – and generally fail to return to the link and read it properly.

“Insights into other worlds – good writing and painting” – aka Blogroll; This is a list of my favourite blogs which I do my best to keep updated. Inevitably, some blogs will stop posting and these I will remove. And some new delights appear – a few weeks ago, for example, Accidental Gods. And two which I look forward to are first a superb German blog on constitutional matters (!!) written predominantly in English and The weekly Alternative journal

The blog’s Search Facility; This is an amazing facility which I find very helpful in finding material I know is in there somewhere. If you punch a key phrase into the blog’s search facility, chances are it will instantly give you something interesting. Try it.

Hyperlinks; This is one of the blog’s most distinctive features – surpassed only by Chris Grey’s weekly post-Brexit blog I cannot guarantee that all the hyperlinks will work – mainly because of one library link I was using turned out to be a pirate site which has now been taken down by US authorities!

So here is is This too will pass – the 2022 posts

A short note on Howard Gardner

Last month I confessed that, for some reason, I had consistently forgotten to include psychology in the various tables about the social sciences I had developed in recent years.

Howard Gardner is perhaps the most “distinguished” of US psychologists – by which I mean not that he is the “best known” (that is probably Stephen Pinker) but that he is recognised as the one who has made the biggest contribution to the field in the past 40 years (he is my age).

Starting with his 1983 “Frames of Mind”, which developed his idea of multiple intelligences, he has not rest content with clinical trials but has rolled up his sleeves and got involved in the practical field of education. The Unschooled Mind (1995) dealt with how how children saw the world in their early years and The Disciplined Mind (1999) is a brave attempt to rise above contentious and faddish discussions and establish a more fundamental philosophy of learning. 

I was intrigued with his recent memoir A Synthesising Mind – a memoir (2020)

A Gardner Resource

blogs; his site offers the reader 3 separate blogs – all up-to-date!

https://www.multipleintelligencesoasis.org/blog

https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing/richard-hofstadter-a-model-for-synthesizing

https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing/wilson-all

https://vision4learning.wordpress.com/current-reading/howard-gardner-five-minds-for-the-future/

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/howard-gardner-interview-multiple-intelligences

Critiques – just a sample

https://dana.org/article/a-debate-on-multiple-intelligences/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201311/the-illusory-theory-multiple-intelligences

https://www.giftedguru.com/stop-using-multiple-intelligence-theory/

Good Work – theory and practice Howard Garner et al (2001) book which is fully accessible by clicking the link in the title. Here is an interview with HG about the book

233813920_Good_Work_An_Interview_with_Howard_Gardner/link/0c960537d1b05b09a4000000/download

https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/g/Gardner_08.pdf 2008

https://howardgardner01.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/477-daedalus.pdf

Other Material

https://www.sloww.co/synthesis-integration/

https://www.sloww.co/synthesizers/

https://www.sloww.co/combinatorial-creativity/

Synthesising Minds

Regular readers will have noticed that I have this strange inclination for long lists of books - often structured in tables. In Howard Gardner’s terms I have a synthesising mind which he contrasts, in his Five Minds for the Future, with the “disciplined”; “creative”; “respectful”; and “ethical”. This video has him explaining the term

This morning I came across a kindred spirit – Belgian Paul Otlet who died in 1944 and whose remarkable story was told in a 2014 book Cataloguing the World

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.

In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world’s first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and museums, connecting his native Belgium to the world by means of a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published. Forty years before the first personal computer and fifty years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of “electric telescopes” that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a réseau mondial–essentially, a worldwide web.

Otlet’s life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum–a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum–what some have called a “Steampunk version of hypertext”–was the embodiment of Otlet’s ambitions. It was also short-lived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet’s collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944.

Wright’s engaging intellectual history gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Jobs. Wright shows that in the years since Otlet’s death the world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has proved him right about the possibilities–and the perils–of networked information, and his legacy persists in our digital world today, captured for all time.

There have been two reviews of the book I know about -

• https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/09/paul-otlet-alex-wright/

• https://commonreader.substack.com/p/let-there-be-more-biographies-of

with the second darwing out some important lessons for us all -

So what are the lessons we can learn? It doesn’t always help to be right. Ideas aren’t easy to implement without the right combination of technology, attitudes, and luck. The work is what’s important, not the result. Maybe the cranks who fill their houses with cart loads of ephemera aren’t so crazy. Don’t make political trouble. Get a PR department. Have a partner who can do these things if you can’t. Be in the right place at the right time. Don’t get cynical, or as Churchill said, don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep working. Philosophical and ethical beliefs matter a lot to what work you do and how you do it. Don’t be so pragmatic you end up being a conformist. Conventional schooling isn’t always the best approach for your children. Worry less about imaginative young people becoming lawyers. Being bored might give them the opportunity they need to have their big idea.

Closed Minds?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose The Righteous Mind I both thoroughly enjoyed - and learned from a few years ago. This is a rarer combination than you might imagine! All too often I am left wondering what additional value a particular reading actually gave me. This morning’s post brought me a fascinating video from Haidt about the role social media is playing in the polarisation of societies – particularly Anglo-Saxon.

And demonstrated the additional value which such visual presentations offer – with good visual summaries of the differences between the Open and Closed Mindset – or what Haidt calls “Discover versus Defend”. And I’m indebted to The Atlantic journal for Haidt’s article earlier this year on “After Babel” which is as balanced a piece as you can expect these days about the different phases social media have been through in the past few decades – initially optimistic but now deeply pessimistic.

Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

I do understand that a huge industry has arisen around the social, psychological and political effects of social media – but Haidt’s short video and article are a very helpful summary

Coincidentally the current edition of the New Statesman has just published this great essay by Jeremy Cliffe which suggests that the traditional coffee house could contain a model for a transformed social media (probable paywall)

Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which defined the öffentlichkeit (the public sphere) as “society engaged in critical public debate”. He argued that the history of the public sphere in the West is deeply rooted in one particular tradition: that of the European coffeehouse. The coffeehouse of old was also a space for news, discussion and encounter. It was in many ways the original social network. And its history points a way forward for a global social media industry now at a crossroads.

Debates rage over the role of social media networks, just as they once did over that of the coffeehouse. They stand accused of stoking precisely the same social ills. Consider “The Character of Coffee and Coffeehouses”, written by an Anabaptist bookseller, John Starkey, in London in 1661. His pamphlet can be read today as both an account of its time and as an uncannily apt commentary on Twitter and the like today.

Starkey complained of “diverse monstrous opinions and absurdities” and “strange and wild conceits” in a setting where there were “neither moderators, nor rules” and where “infinite are the contests, irreconcilable the differences”. Even high-brow participants were cheapened by association with this new institution, he wrote: “The divinest truths, become as common… as stones.” And yet, many coffeehouse regulars of the time responded forcefully to these complaints – just as social media users today are willing to credit their chosen platforms with the democratisation of wits, exchange, information and debate.