So today’s my big day
This evening I’ll be delivering my annual RSA lecture. As you might expect, I am very nervous and haven’t yet decided whether to read the speech or take the risk of delivering it in a more discursive manner. I am however reassured that David Willetts will give an interesting response. He and I were on the Today programme this morning discussing some of the ideas in the speech, and he was, as always, a thoughtful, challenging but friendly critic.
Hopefully we will have a full house but anyone else who wants to watch can do so on our website – hopefully as early as tomorrow (our wonderful Multimedia Manager, Sarah Staar, has offered to work during the night to turn it around before she goes on holiday). I guess if I had to pick out one passage in the speech that I am really keen to explore it would be the distinction between difference and separation:
One of the great confusions of modern selfhood is to mistake difference for separation. We are all a unique combination of our genetic inheritance our conditioning past and our present context, but our thoughts and behaviours are the result not so much of the ways we are separate but of the ways we are connected, to the world and to other people. Fifty years ago Galbraith talked about private affluence and public squalor. Reflecting on opinion poll data that shows we are over confident about our own prospects and over-pessimistic about the state of society, I recently suggested the phrase ‘private optimism public despair’. But when we compare the illusion of individual autonomy with the reality of the deep connections between our minds and the social world they inhabit we should perhaps speak of private myth and public blindness.
The nation state – where to?
David’s conclusion is that Brown needs to make the United States the rhetorical fall guy for the public’s discontent. I’m not sure, with a new President only five months away, this seems an odd time to turn away from the old ally. But I do agree that politicians need to find a way of describing the power they have, its potential and its limitations. I’m sure this isn’t the first time I’ve quoted Daniel Bell’s epigram that in the future the nation state will be ‘too small for the big things in life and too big for the small things’. We know that big issues like climate change, financial regulation, migration and security need global solutions. At the same time the nation state is too remote for a public that wants local accountability and personalised services. Yet rather than reduce its responsibilities the national Government seems to add every day to the list of its priorities; from obesity to climate change, from play to Britishness. Thus to misuse another famous American insight the nation state is in danger of ‘building an empire while losing a role’.
Nation states are, of course, vital not just in themselves but as the key actor in global decision making and as the body that sets the framework for local devolution. But without a compelling account of the new political economy of the central state, national leaders will be seen to be meddling in everything but solving nothing.
Social care sector leads the way?
I’ve just returned from speaking to the final annual conference of the Commission for Social Care. My speech had to be cut right down, which, given the fee the CSCI was paying to the RSA, meant I achieved a pounds per minute rate rivalling Jonathan Ross! But it was worth cutting back to hear a splendid speech by Ivan Lewis.
It can’t be much fun being a Government minister at the moment, but Ivan’s speech was passionate, honest and full of ideas. But the other thing that really hit me about the conference was the number of social care users (clients and carers) playing a full role. As I’ve said in previous blogs, social care has gone from being deeply unfashionable to being the most innovative public service, in large part due to the commitment across the sector to user engagement. I was struck by the contrast between the many users I saw today and the fact that one rarely sees students or parents playing an active role in education conferences. At a recent RSA Opening Minds conference, it was the student who stole the show, but I have spoken at many other gatherings of head teachers, officials and educationalists and the user voice has been almost entirely absent.
10 years ago, anyone would have been surprised to be told that the social care sector would become innovative than education. I wonder how much of the explanation lies in listening to the voice of the user.
Oops I forgot . . .
In my earlier blog, the point I was intending to make about risk links to a broader argument I heard made by Melanie Phillips (not someone I often find myself quoting!). Phillips’ contention is that middle class people adopt social norms e.g. recreational drug-taking, family break-up, which have considerable downsides but which they have the resources to deal with. The problem is that those norms filter down to less advantaged communities for whom the flipsides can be catastrophic. This is the argument I was thinking of – that we have a dominant culture that extols risk but the costs of risk are much easier to handle if you are well off.
Lessons learned . . .
Firstly, as regular readers will know, I am currently working on my Chief Executive’s Lecture for next Monday. One aspect of the speech is a review of the research around the idiosyncracies of human decision making. Having just watched two speakers, with at least one more to come, talking extensively on this subject, I have realised that this area, which is a popularisation of behavioural economics and social psychology, is becoming more than a little clichéd. So, I’ll be speaking less about that next week.
The second point comes from an entertaining presentation by Casper Berry and concerns risk – we live in a society that encourages risk but we are risk averse. However, in reality, the way risk is taken reflects inequality. Well-off people can take short term losses and wait for risk to pay off in the long term, and others, particularly those in the financial sector, can rig the system so they are almost certain to succeed. However, for those with fewer resources, risk is not such a good strategy. That is why, in the current credit crunch, people with big houses can afford to wait for another property boom, while those in smaller houses can find themselves out on the street.
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