Tom Lehrer said that political satire became obsolete the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Ten days ago the Conservatives published a comprehensive, radical and progressive environmental policy while Gordon Brown entertained Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street.

Was this the day Party ideology became obsolete?

In discussing his book ‘The triumph of the political class’ at last week’s RSA Thursday Peter Oborne deplored the convergence of Labour and Conservative values and programmes. Oborne sees this as an aspect of the sinister rise of a self serving political elite.

But convergence is not new. It was there in the Butskellite politics of the late 1950s.

The role of ideology in party politics and policy development is complex and changeable. Politicians and commentators from the right tend to emphasise the importance of freedom and be sceptical of the state. The left agonises over definitions of equality and sees a strong state as vital to its pursuit.

But these accounts of the good society are rarely prominent in day to day politics. More often ideological disputes, especially within parties, are about policy means not political ends.

Party conference season will see Labour delegates criticising private sector involvement in public services while Tories will bemoan the retreat from grammar schools.

The interplay of social context and political tactics create the shifting foundations of political discourse.

In the nineties the widespread view that the welfare state and public services were failing meant Labour had to combine a commitment to renew those services with a strong message of reform. Labour’s modernising zeal and the disillusionment of public service workers in the face of waves of market-oriented reform have led the Conservatives to champion producer interests. Their argument that power should be devolved and the professionals trusted marks a sharp reversal of the new right nostrums of Thatcherism.

Through a similar process, the widespread public and establishment unease at high levels of inequality combined with the need for a Party re-brand provide the context for Cameron’s commitment to social justice. The result is a politics in which both visions and policy instruments have become detached from any recognisable ideological well-spring.

The rise and rise of opinion polling and the increasingly technocratic nature of policy making mean the major Parties camp on the same ground and offer similar programmes. One attempt to encapsulate modern politics suggested that the right had won the economic argument, the left the social argument and the centre the electoral argument.

With David Cameron now saying ‘it’s society stupid’ this formula may be breaking down, but this too is a pragmatic response to public concerns and opponents’ vulnerabilities. If politics right now is not a contest about ideology or policy differences what is it about? Or rather, what should it be about?

One key requirement in this pragmatic age is that our leaders convince us they will do the right thing. We vote for them less on the policies they espouse and more as a judgement on whether we trust them to do the right thing.

On the one hand, this is about proving ability and strength – which is where Brown is currently outdoing Cameron. On the other hand it means dealing with any sense that some other factor may obstruct you for acting pragmatically in the nation’s interests.

This is why all politicians must aggressively prove that they only listen to their Party activists when they happen to agree with public opinion. It is why allegations of corruption (even when the misdemeanours are obscure or irrelevant to policy making) can be so damaging; they imply that our leaders have their own, not our, motives at heart.

No leader can be elected if perceived to be weak or beholden to interests other than those of the electorate. But what of the positive side of politics as a force for good?

Regular readers may recall me describing a ’social aspiration gap’ between the future most people aspire to and the future we are likely to create if we persist with current modes of thought and behaviour. From this perspective a vital quality of political leadership is the ability to reframe issues by giving us difficult messages about the choices we face.

Here I take as my text a remarkable speech made by President Kennedy in 1963. In the speech, weeks after the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy laid the ground for the test ban treaty by boldly reframing the cold war. Instead of a Manichean battle between Western good and communist evil that could only end in the ultimate confrontation, Kennedy portrayed the arms race as a process of mutual fear and suspicion that could be stopped and reversed if only people chose to:

“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament  – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them to do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitude – as individuals and as a Nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward – by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet union, towards the course of the Cold War and towards freedom and peace here at home.”

Jeffrey Sachs repeatedly quoted this speech in his recent Reith lectures. Sachs argues passionately that we know how to end extreme poverty in Africa and that it is easily affordable to the rich world.

The problem now, just as Kennedy saw it in 1963, is that the pubic see as inevitable something that we have the power to stop if only our leaders would lead.

Politicians as a whole are ahead of the general public in understanding the realities of climate change, the impacts of globalisation, the need for people to take more responsibility for our own health, education and lifetime financial well-being.

The current turmoil in the financial sector can in part be traced to politicians’ unwillingness to share with us their growing misgivings about the flow of easy credit to sate the rapacious appetite of US and UK consumers.

Even when politicians do try to confront us they too often lack the authority, imagination or courage to achieve a fundamental shift in public attitudes. Political reframing has become a hot topic in the US with bestselling books like Drew Weston’s ‘The Political Brain’ and George Lakoff’s ‘Don’t think of an Elephant’. These books explore the emotional basis of political messaging.

The US debate focuses on why the Republicans are so much better at communication than the Democrats, but the work of Weston, Lakoff and their colleagues also helps us think about the broader challenge of political leadership.

Politics has its own cycles. With the evidence growing that globalisation is bad news for the less privileged in the richer world, we may see a return to political polarisation driven by conflicting economic interests.

But when the important gap is not between the parties but between what we want and what we do, is it the time to support the political leaders most able to tell us the truths we need to hear?

Thank you all for your comments. I read them all but don’t always manage to reply unfortunately.

Fenton, good idea and volunteering like this is very useful but we need our Fellows to decide what their own priorities will be.

Tessy, the Design 21 Social Design Network sounds great. I will ask our design team here if they have links.

Stephen, you are right that this issue is not just about the state-private divide but about middle class parents monopolising good school places.

Christine, your project sounds really interesting. Do you think there might be a role for our Fellows as you think about rolling out?

In my speech about pro-social behaviour (all reasonable speaker’s fees accepted) I suggest we can group under three headings the ways we need to develop as people if we are to create the better future we say we want.

We need to be more positively engaged in collective decision making, we need to live in ways that are more self-sufficient and sustainable and we need to be find new ways of being ‘other regarding’.

Under the second of these headings I mention the growing importance of our behaviour as consumers. The rise of Fairtrade shows that many of us (surveys suggest about two thirds) want to be ethical consumers and that this can make a real difference.

But if we want the overall impact of our consumption to be benign, we need to ask more questions. For example, what about our role as the consumers of financial products?

The RSA is intending to undertake a consultation and deliberative conference to explore whether small and medium sized investors know how their money is invested, if they care about it and are they interested in having more say over it.

I wonder whether we will find we are simultaneously investing in companies with a strong commitment to social and environmental responsibility and, indirectly, in aggressive investment funds which see overly generous corporations as good targets for takeover and asset stripping?

Some of us may be buying more ethically but nearly all of us are buying more. Yet, do we ever stop to ask whether we actually want or need the next gadget or luxury product?

The other day I was in PC World buying an accessory for my son’s computer. I was fifth in line at the checkout and was intrigued that three out of four customers in front of me were buying variants of the same product.

The item in question was a digital picture frame. Based on this small sample I confidently predict this will be a chart topper in next Christmas’ most bought present list.

Before getting to the meat of my argument I have to admit to an aesthetic (some might say ’snobbish’) bias.

I can’t imagine anything less appealing than an unattractive constantly flickering picture frame in my front room featuring an ever changing catalogue of family snaps taken from the picture files on my computer.

Imagine being at the house of someone with one of these. When they are speaking to you is the polite thing to look at them or to gaze admiringly at the slide show of family snaps scrolling by on their mantelpiece?
If an amusing photo of the kids in fancy dress pops up does one show appreciation by grinning inanely even though the conversation is about the situation in Darfur or the new outbreak of foot and mouth?

But behind this bias is something more serious.

As I understand the technology, a digital photo frame is designed to be always on (after all we don’t turn ordinary picture frames on their face when we leave the room). The frames work by receiving a signal from a wireless router which we also tend to leave on full time. I’m not sure if the system also requires the computer to be on but it might encourage us to leave our PC always in stand-by mode.

If I am right about the spread of these new gadgets – that they will soon be seen as must-have objects – why not have one in every room?

So a new gadget, another thing moving around and flickering in our homes, another thing to make ordinary conversation more difficult, and most of all another way to use electricity and increase our already bloated consumption of carbon.

I am not saying we should ban digital picture frames, nor that we can, or should stop the endless pursuit of new consumer gizmos. But if ethical consumerism is to move beyond the top layer of our crowded supermarket trolleys, part of the process might be encouraging a more critical debate about whether every new consumer good is, well, good.

We are really enthused by the response of Fellows to the email I sent out last week regarding the future of the Fellowship. So for we have received some 500 replies of which all but a tiny handful have been very positive.

Thank you!

Over the coming days and weeks we will be getting back in touch with people but I am using my blog to respond to the most frequently asked questions.

So to start off…

i)    What do you mean by civic innovation?

In essence I mean innovation with a civic (pro-social) purpose in which the voluntary efforts of citizens (Fellows) play a crucial role in both the development and application of new thinking.

ii)    Will this initiative be nationwide (not just restricted to those who can come regularly to John Adam Street)?

Absolutely.

Indeed of the early ideas for Fellows’ initiatives and networks we are exploring all are outside London.

Some of the most positive responses we received to the email came from Fellows outside the UK who see online networks in particular as a great way of getting involved from distance.

iii)    When is the event here at John Adam Street and what will happen?

November 22, when we be inviting a small number of Fellows (around 260) to join us in the RSA house in London for a day to begin working through the implications and applications of this idea.

However we are already coming to the conclusion that we will need at least one more event and that this should perhaps be outside London.

We will keep you updated as we go forward through our website and this blog.

iv)    How do Fellows go about setting up a network?

We will be providing Fellows with new online and offline support to get these off the ground. But the steps to setting up networks will be -

Finding other Fellows interested in your idea, and developing a clear plan of what the network is setting out to do.

Ultimately, the first should be very simple. We are improving the Fellowship database and developing online toolkits to make it as easy as possible for Fellows to contact others in their locality or those who share their experience, enthusiasm or concern.

In the early days it will be a more labour intensive process of us spotting themes and connecting people and using the November 22 event to develop networks.

The bigger challenge, I suspect, is enabling networks to become sites for civic innovation. I have written in past posts about this and about working with Fellows to develop concrete examples of what networks might be about, and what they might seek to achieve is now our top priority.

v)    How do we differentiate ourselves from other organisations?

Another big question. Three, different answers.

First, answering the question ‘what is the specific value that the RSA network can add?’ is an important issue to be addressed as networks evolve.

Second, networks should be enthusiastic about working in partnership with other people and organisations who share our aims.

Third, some networks will end up developing ideas that float away from the RSA as free standing initiatives, as has been the case in the past with, for example, Tomorrows Company and the Campaign for Learning.

vi)    How can we make sure our networks are effective?

See above.

From the outset we need to say this is about more than enthusiasm. We have had some good ideas from individual fellows but – without seeming rude or churlish – our response has to be that any idea has to pass two tests.

First, it must be something that captures the interest and commitment of other Fellows.

Second, when there is a critical mass of support, ideas must be subject to robust development, asking questions like: what are we trying to achieve, why are we equipped to do this, who else should we be working with, how would we know if we were succeeding, what would we do if we failed, what we do if we succeeded, etc.

As part of the support I mentioned earlier on, we are developing a team here to help Fellows work through these questions and it is vital that the culture of the Fellowship is one that welcomes a challenging and robust examination of all our ideas and initiatives.

vii)    How can we maintain the rigour and authority of the RSA while opening it up in this way?

Again, see above.

We have some important resources to bring to the table: our multi-disciplinary make-up, our fierce political independence, our history and reputation.

But these resources will only be fully utilised if the ideas we develop are high quality and the interventions appropriate and effective.

This is not a free for all. It needs to be an action-learning process in which the Fellowship and the RSA are in a continual process of developing, refining and applying high quality ideas.

Thanks again for the amazing response and I hope this discussion will continue, not just with John Adam Street, but increasingly, as you develop ideas and debate challenges, between yourselves.

I found the responses to the last post really interesting. Peter’s argument as I understand it is that the real gap is not between the state and private sector but between parents who provide the right background for their children and those who don’t. I agree with this but it underlines why I worry.

My personal view is that the state-private divide doesn’t just separate children; it can also mean that some schools take for granted the engagement of parents (after all they haven’t paid all that money only to be passive consumers), while for others it is hard to get any more than a tiny minority of parents involved.

Caring, involved parents aren’t just an asset for their children; they are more likely to be part of the broader life of the school. So here again private schools have an embarrassment of riches while state schools in poor areas have unviable parent schools associations and unfilled parent governor vacancies.

Beth’s question about how to scale up local initiative and commitment is a huge one. Time and again promising local projects fail to replicate when they are scaled up because they lack the commitment and vision of those who began the initiative or because public funding comes with the wrong strings attached. In the end this is one of the strongest arguments for decentralisation.

I am interested in seeing if the RSA can do anything around strengthening relationships between parents and between parents and schools. Maybe we can learn something from Book Start Plus.

Suzanne, I agree that getting the very best teachers to go into and stay in the state sector is really important and I think Teach First is great.

There are loads of issues I wish I had time to write about.

For example, is it true – as a company advisor told me the other day – that large retail companies now face a squeeze between customers demanding ever greater levels of corporate responsibility and aggressive but largely anonymous investors and corporate raiders seeking to take advantage of any company that deviates from an exclusive focus on the bottom line (one of the issues we want to look at in a planned project called Tomorrow’s Investor)?

But I should really focus on the big change programme in the RSA. We heard yesterday that we had got some really helpful funding from NESTA to enable us as we seek to turn the RSA Fellowship into a network for civic innovation.

The funding means we can put a team in place to work on the substance, the people and the offline and online support for an early set of RSA Fellows networks.

The hard work starts here but as I go round the Fellowship – the weekend before last I was in Scotland – I am still getting really positive feedback about the idea of putting the Fellows and their commitment to change at the heart of the RSA.

So a bitty blog I’m afraid. This will only go to confirm the prejudices of Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur – How today’s internet is killing our culture. He is speaking here tonight in the first of our impressive autumn series of lectures. It promises to be a lively debate (check out his spat with Emily Bell from the Guardian). If you want me to ask any questions on your behalf please send them in.