Time to celebrate integration in Northern Ireland?
I enjoyed my trip to Belfast as a guest of the Northern Ireland Chartered Institute of Housing and RSA Ireland. Belfast city centre felt lively and interesting with its mix of modern shops, historic buildings, atmospheric bars plus an international market and big wheel. As an inner Londoner I envy people who live in cities – like Belfast, Edinburgh or Brighton – close to striking countryside.
My analysis of social segregation in Northern Ireland seemed to go down OK. It certainly spurred an interesting conversation in an audience made up of Fellows and other people working in various ways to tackle the problem.
There was general agreement that integration is best advanced though an incremental and multi-faceted strategy. This should involve exploring how religiously affiliated groups could be supported to be champions of change, how to encourage not just more mixed housing but also other integrated public, social and commercial spaces and how to back the pro-integration message of SDLP Minister for Social Development Margaret Ritchie as she tries to garner support among Executive colleagues in other parties.
An incremental model requires steady pressure to make a difference over time. Lots of good practice has already emerged in Northern Ireland. The question is how to knit this together into a strategy and campaign that can achieve irreversible change. With this in mind, two related ideas emerged in our discussions.
First, the integrationist cause could be aided by a high profile annual review of progress towards community cohesion. This ‘one community’ report would be jointly authored and supported by a range of organisations. It would collate and examine key statistics on levels of segregation. It would provide case studies of successful integration and celebrate those who had taken a lead. And, of course, the report would also identify areas of concern and priorities for state and civic action.
Then, linked to the report, a number of existing, relatively low profile awards for good practice on community cohesion could be brought together in a single annual gala dinner. This star-studded event would give out ‘one community Oscars’ to politicians, community leaders, employers, sporting and cultural figures who had gone the extra mile to promote understanding and integration. Imagine, for example, the Celtic and Rangers football captains jointly giving out the award for the best use of sport to promote community relations. As well as being a huge annual celebration of progress towards integration (after all, why should the sectarians have the best tunes?) the dinner would aim to generate money to provide seed corn funding for new initiatives.
Of course, the RSA cannot itself do either of these things, but with the backing of RSA Trustee Lord Richard Best (who is chairing the CIH inquiry into housing in Northern Ireland), I said on Friday that if a group of Fellows commit to bringing together various organisations to develop these ideas then we will see how RSA HQ might provide some small scale funding or admin support in the development stage. To start the ball rolling I will earmark the CIH fee for my speech for this project.
To overcome segregation will take a generation, after all 98% of social housing tenants in Belfast now live in neighbourhoods dominated by people of one religious tradition. As people in Northern Ireland who have been working heroically on this issue for years know, there is no easy answer. Indeed – as I argued on Friday – to push too hard on one lever could even be counter-productive.
It may be the annual report and gala dinner are already happening or that they aren’t great ideas, but one way or another I hope we will be able to support our Fellows in contributing to the vital goal of greater social integration.
As well as posting any views here, RSA Fellows in Ireland have also been having a discussion on segregation and other issues – again readers are very welcome to join in.
My demon diary
I used to take great pride in posting a blog every day. But now I seem to fail at least once a week. It isn’t a loss of enthusiasm; merely that my diary has become a voracious beast from which I can neither run nor hide. I’ve also been tardy in responding to comments even though I am always rather touched that people take the time to respond to my ramblings.
In a desperate attempt to fight back I have written a piece for today’s Times which should relieve at least some of the pressure by discouraging any speaking invite for a public sector conference.
I am writing this at Heathrow on my way to give a lecture in Northern Ireland.
My long term reader (sorry mum, we really must book up a drink after work soon) may remember my enthusiasm for cultural theory and its four paradigms of social change; the egalitarian, the individualistic, the hierarchical and fatalist.
A few months ago, after a conversation with RSA Trustee Lord Richard Best, I foolishly asserted that I could use cultural theory as a useful way of thinking about the continuing problem of social segregation in Northern Ireland.
Actually, I might even have been right. The theory can be applied; seeing segregation driven primarily by egalitarian solidarity within the different religiously affiliated based communities, suggesting that individualism might be the most powerful force driving against segregation (if, for example, the only new build homes are in integrated neighbourhoods), and recognising that there is little hierarchical drive behind greater integration.
The problem is that the whole thesis can be summed up in five minutes and I’ve got thirty to fill. At this point my lack of detailed (OK, ‘any’) knowledge about the nature of segregation, or of past attempts to solve it, come into play. ‘Ah’ I say to myself ‘looks like I’m going to have to do some research’. At which point, with a malicious sparkle in its eye, my diary (which has by now become an imaginary demon with gap teeth, red eyes and bad breath) replies ‘jolly good, you’ve got a window in June 2010’.
Fortunately for me I fastened like a barnacle on to a patient and wise advisor at the Northern Ireland office of the Chartered Institute of Housing. When I first explained my predicament she recommended books, then, as my appeals became more pathetic it was articles, and then finally she started to send me selected quotations (not long complicated ones, mind you).
I have no idea how it will go. I could ask you to remind me to tell you next week. But my diary tells me that by Monday I will have to have become an expert on parenting policy (thankfully, my sons don’t read my blog) and how the civil service should manage the transition between administrations.
I don’t even have time to develop my new idea for a film; (working title ‘Appointment book with the devil’, about a man who despite his external show of self confidence and control has become demonically possessed by his own diary.
Zizek, Hayek – and Cowell
‘Zizek is untwitterable’ was a pithy tweet on last night’s RSA lecture by one of the world’s foremost philosophers. The great man’s lecture was dense, edgy and erudite. Like a good wine its after taste is more affecting than the first impression.
One passage came back to me last night running home (for fitness purposes not because I was being pursued by lust-crazed fans). Zizek was discussing the idea that a viable and orderly social democracy could be based on a deal whereby we give total power and status to a super rich knowledge elite in exchange for all citizens – regardless of merit or effort – being guaranteed a basic income. He dismissed this, in part because he said it took no account of envy. Zizek quoted Frederich Von Hayek who argued – against advocates of social justice – that the poor find it easier to accept the wealthy if they think their fortune is unmerited. For the masses to accept that those at the top deserve their success means the majority have to accept not only that they are poorer but they are less virtuous.
This echoes the point made by Michael Young in his 1956 satire ‘the rise of the meritocracy’ and again in one of his final articles in 2001:
“The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.
They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side”.
All this made me think of our attitude to celebrity. We want to think two things about celebrities. Either that they are simply blessed with a talent we don’t have (which is bearable for us as it’s not our fault that we are not gifted), or that they are deranged and damaged (which is bearable because we choose not to live their crazy sad lives). If it is possible to think both things at once all the better.
Much less attractive to us is the idea of people whose specialness comes from simply working hard and sticking at it. We might say simply that this is boring but maybe ours is a defensive reaction to not wanting to be made to feel that it is our own fault that we have not excelled.
So on X Factor we like Leona Lewis for her talent or Jedward for their deranged desire to be famous even while losing their dignity. As for the rest – hard working, not bad but not special singers – well, they leave us cold. And as that’s all that’s left to fight it out, I won’t be watching any more.
Enterprise for a better world
New Labour politicians used to say their core belief was that economic dynamism and social justice go forward hand in hand. It is simplistic but a good corrective to the Thatcherite view that all social spending was a drag on economic prosperity. But perhaps the future holds a more ambitious version of New Labour’s sound bite; a major driver of future economic dynamism will be meeting social need.
We already accept this idea in one area: sustainability. Today’s newspapers report the European Commission’s decision to pledge £162 million towards a proposed carbon capture and storage plant in South Yorkshire. In the FT Tom Riordan, Chief Executive of Yorkshire Forward, the RDA, is quoted:
‘Securing the first project is a vital step in developing a region wide CCS cluster…Nowhere in Europe has such a large number of industrial carbon emitters so close to safe carbon storage in depleted gas fields…and the region has access to proven technology and engineering skills’.
This reminded me of a conversation we are having in the North East about the region piloting a new, ICT-enabled, form of remote medicine. The idea is not only that this new technique could improve the productivity of the region’s NHS (which would be a big advance given both the reliance of the region on public spending and its poor existing heath outcomes), but could also help develop the North East as a global hub in the fast growing health-based economy.
At a more local level a different dimension of this approach is provided by a cluster of ideas around total place analysis (exploring the relationship between all local spending and social outcomes), smart data capture and sharing, and personal budgets. On the one hand, there is the continuing scope for clever commissioning to enhance public sector productivity and performance (for example, the use of citizen payment cards as we discussed in a 2020 Public Services Trust seminar here yesterday).
On the other hand, there is the opportunity to pay people to meet their own needs and in doing so to enable them to develop social enterprises with and for other service users. I have spoken to one entrepreneur who is exploring giving prisoners social enterprise skills so that they can access funds available for their rehabilitation, training and employment and then use this money to develop a service for other prisoners.
In our recent event on technology in a cold climate we began to explore the notion of ‘purposive innovation’. The idea here is that instead of seeing innovation as a pure process of creativity which is then encumbered by environmental or social concerns it is the wider sense of social purpose that provides the rich context for innovation. This idea is particularly powerful with talented and in-demand young people who seem ever more insistent that their jobs should have some wider sense of purpose.
Personal budgets – an update
I have written before in this blog about personal budgets for social care. This afternoon, at a 2020 Public Services Trust event here at the RSA, we had an interesting presentation on this issue from Richard Humphries, Senior Fellow at the King’s Fund.
He made four points:
• The role played in the emergence of personal budgets by campaigning organisations of disabled people. A council chief executive at the meeting said that he believes councils have a role in setting up social movements of this kind to help challenge inertia and professional resistance to change.
• The very slow spread of personal budgets. Still, thirteen years after they were first made possible by legislation (and despite support from Government and opposition parties), only about 5% of social care spending is delivered through personal budgets.
• The importance to making budgets work of the infrastructure of information, advice and support to budget holders. (However, this point was put in question by Peter Gilroy, Chief Executive of Kent CC, who said more and more of his county’s clients prefer to simply receive their entitlement on a payment card and be left free to decide for themselves how to spend it).
• The need for personal budgets to be implemented in the context of a wider consideration of the relationship between citizen and state. Personal budgets raise issues about rights, responsibilities and reputations. The evidence seems to suggest that the councils that have made the most progress (such as Oldham, which channels over 50% of its social care spend through budgets) have done so because they have seen the policy as part of a wider strategy of personalisation and empowerment.
Although the evidence is still limited, Richard also confirmed that personal budgets appear to be popular with clients and a better way of getting money spent on the things that people care about rather than bureaucracy.
Personal budgets may in time prove to be the most radical shift in public service delivery of recent years, with major implications for other services. Over the next twenty years I expect more and more public services to be delivered through budgets directly or indirectly devolved to service users.
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