Filling the vacuum
At the risk of self-importance (something of which, let me make crystal clear, I most assuredly cannot be accused), the news from Bradford reminds me of some things I have written in the past.
The first goes back years to an article about attempts to reform the Labour Party. This involved me reading a whole slew of pieces on this topic ranging over several years. I noticed that reformers always looked at the problem through the lens of what was best for the Party not what was best for the country. Instead, I argued, the starting point should be the increasingly deleterious impact that the nature and behaviour of parties was having on the overall health of our political system. My conclusion was something like this: ‘the major political parties have a stranglehold over representative politics, but in decline, their withering handhold tightens threatening to throttle the life out of our politics’.
The second extract is more recent, part of an argument about how quickly the political consensus can change. Around fifteen years ago there was an aphorism often quoted by modernisers in the major parties; ‘the right has won the economic argument, the left has won the social argument and the centre has won the electoral argument’.
Now it feels like this argument is neatly reversed. In the face of credit crunch, growing market- generated inequality and the continued irresponsibility of the financial sector the left has the most powerful economic argument, in the face of worries about social cohesion and individual responsibility the right has the most cogent social argument and – increasingly – the extremes are threatening to win the electoral argument.
As the economic slump continues and people start to realise that lower living standards and declining social provision are not a temporary aberration but more likely the new reality, public anger is likely to increase. While the major parties continue transfixed by each other in a bubble of self-interested complacency, outsiders with a strong populist message – whether it’s Galloway in Bradford, Geert Wilders in Holland or Marine Le Pen in France, tap into deep reservoirs of resentment and alienation.
The public at large needs to accept an argument which is intially unpalatable - tougher times are here to stay and we need to adjust our expectations and behaviours – so that they can move to a more positive one – it is better to live now than at any time before and we can find a new path to progress.
But such a message can only be projected from a position of intellectual courage and personal authenticity. How far we seem from this.
As I wrote earlier this week, the failure to reform political funding is entirely explicable in terms of a combination of party self-interest and weak leadership. The fact that Labour had apparently no idea that George Galloway posed a threat until it was far too late underlines how shallow are the roots of the ‘people’s party’ in most working class communities
Just as prosaic trade union general secretaries and Machiavellian fixers among the PLP constrain Ed Miliband, so the Conservative leadership seems too often to be in thrall to a cabal of opinion formers centred around their back benches, the Daily Telegraph and Spectator.
As Nick Robinson says, Bradford West is an untypical constituency with an untypical voting record but Galloway’s success is also part of a bigger pattern. Many historians predicted that severe economic downturn would likely sooner or later to be the midwife to a more volatile and extreme politics.
The main parties combine a continued hold over the Westminster system with a combined popularity lower than at any time in living memory. I can’t say exactly what kind of leadership is needed now, although I believe I would recognise it if I saw it, but politics abhors a vacuum. As Galloway showed last night, if the mainstream doesn’t fill it there are plenty with more radical answers waiting to do so.
Speak out for SMEs
This post covers a couple of ostensibly dull subjects but at the end there’s a challenge and a joke so stick with it…
From time to time I agree to chair external conferences. I make sure the RSA is more than reimbursed for my time so the knowledge I gather, the networks I build and the Fellows I sometimes recruit are all a bonus. More than that, I am slightly obsessive about making conferences work. If well prepared and run they can be genuinely useful in advancing understanding and deepening purposive networks, if sloppy and dull they are a complete waste of time and money.
Small things can make a big difference; I have found the simple device of asking each delegate to spend two minutes asking the person next to them who they are and what they hope to get out of the day (and then picking on two or three people to introduce the person they’ve just met to the room) means the conference starts off feeling more engaging and energetic.
Today I chaired an event with the somewhat daunting title ‘Public Procurement Briefing 2012: Driving a culture of innovation and enterprise with SMEs’. In fact it was fascinating. I may not always be the Coalition’s greatest fan but there is no question the Government takes very seriously its goal of increasing the proportion of central Government procurement going to SMEs. This was evidenced by the Prime Minister and cabinet office minister Francis Maude hosting a Downing Street breakfast for conference speakers and key delegates. In his short speech David Cameron said that two years into office his catch phrase is becoming ‘that’s all very good but what is actually happening?’ (he seems to have got to this point a couple of years earlier in his term than did Tony Blair).
But on procurement there has been real progress, to whit a doubling in a year of the proportion of spending going to SMEs to 13%. If Whitehall achieves another doubling in the next two years it will hit its target of 25% by the end of the Parliament. And so it should. As far as I can see it is accepted by nearly all economists that SMEs will provide most of the job growth we desperately need in the years to come. Also, research suggests SMEs tend to be more innovative, flexible and provide better value for money. Despite this, the tendency over many years has been for Whitehall procurement to be overwhelmingly channelled to a small number of big providers. The progress made since 2010 has been on the back of some significant reforms of the process. These include simplifying pre-qualification and requiring all Government contracts to be placed on the Government’s Contract Finder website.
But further progress will require further reform and Francis Maude announced what seemed – at least to me – to be another pretty substantive list of changes today. These included steps to require ICT contracts to be broken up into smaller chunks of shorter duration, a new tool so that SMEs can rate departments by their performance as procurers and a strong direction to large suppliers that they too use Contract Finder for their sub-contracts (the minister announced that nine had already signed up).
The pressure is also going to increase on local councils, which really ought to be enthusiastic given that tendering to SMEs makes it much more likely that public investment will stay in the locality. The issue of council’s choosing to have full Pre-Qualification Questionnaires for contracts under £100,000 was raised repeatedly.
Helping more SMEs win public contracts isn’t just about demand-side reform. There are also important things SMEs can do to improve their chances. One is to find ways of banding together to identify opportunities and even perhaps develop joint bids. Indeed, it occurred to me this might be a good opportunity to develop a local social enterprise.
It role would be to help the council become better at buying from SMEs and help SMEs be better at winning. The enterprises could have sustainable business model based on consultancy fees plus a small top slice commission from successful SMEs. Perhaps something like this already exists, but if not maybe there’s an opportunity for a member of the burgeoning RSA Social Enterprise Network (the group had a fantastic event this week at the Westminster hub).
And so for the joke: Tomorrow there is a chance to hear my Radio 4 Analysis programme about Germany. As I said in a post last week, one conclusion I drew was that German success is based on a very different value system to our own, one aspect of which is greater restraint in the good economic times and the bad: which reminded me of little Hans.
Hans was a lovely boy, intelligent, content, healthy. All except for one thing; he never spoke. His parents tried everything from hypnosis to speech therapy but to no avail and eventually they gave up.
Then one day at the age of eleven Hans turns to his mother who has served dinner and says (in German of course) ‘this strudel is bitter’. His mother thinks she is hearing things but to her astonishment he repeats ‘this strudel is bitter’. The mother rushes to get the father who is astonished and overjoyed to hear Hans say again ‘this strudel is bitter’. The parents hug each other and cry with delight but then the mother turns to Hans and says ‘But, Hans, we tried everything to help you speak, everything! And now at eleven you do, why did you not speak before my son’. Hans looks evenly at his mother and father and says:
‘Up until now everything was satisfactory’
Selfish, moi?
It is difficult to imagine any headline causing as much delight as this in the Guardian yesterday; ‘Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly studies suggest’ (perhaps if the Sun ran with ‘women with large breasts especially keen on casual sex, researchers prove’, or ‘Brussels bureaucrats admit baby-eating allegations’ in the Telegraph’) .
I was particularly pleased to read the research from psychologists at the University of California in Berkeley as I found myself in class warrior mode on last week’s Moral Maze. The topic was whether children from poorer schools and backgrounds might be offered places in top universities on a preferential basis. My opponents on the programme (Michael Portillo and Claire Fox) accused me of supporting social engineering and in patronising the poor by assuming they couldn’t make it by their own efforts.
It doesn’t happen often, but I thought I made quite a telling point by asking why it was OK for the rich to give their kids a leg up though private education and expensive one-to-one tuition but not OK for universities to help poorer kids by recognising that getting an A and 2 B’s in a tough comprehensive is probably on a par with getting three A’s from Dulwich College. I have quite a few acquaintances who send their kids to private schools, none has so far admitted they are guilty of social engineering. (By the way, in relation to the protestations by Russell Group Universities that they are doing all they can to aid social mobility there is a very good piece here by Jonathan Portes.)
There is only one problem with my indignation about the hypocrisy and selfishness of the rich, but it’s rather substantial. You see, by almost all measures I’m rich too. Surveys and focus groups among the middle class people always find they hopelessly under-estimate how well-off they are. That I sent my own children to non-selective state schools is a fact but how do I know that I am not just as prone to selfishness as other top decile wage earners?
After all, I hang out with other middle class people and the Berekley study suggest selfish behaviour among the well-off tends to be reinforced by the social norms of the privileged. Furthermore, it is now a truism in social psychology that most people are both hypocrites and self-servingly deluded about their virtues (people systematically exaggerate how much money they give to charity, for example).
Instead of reading the Guardian article with righteous glee, it seems I should heed it as a personal warning.
Can anyone help me defend social engineering?
Appearing on Moral Maze (tonight at eight on Radio 4) I have noticed an inverse correlation between how well I perform and the strength of my opinions on the subject under discussion. So I may need to raise my game this evening as I am arguing in favour of making it easier for children from poor background to get into top universities than privileged children.
I support some ‘social engineering’ – as the opponents of such interventions tend to call it – on two grounds. The first goes back to an argument I made recently in my series on entitlement. The vast majority of people sign up to the principle that all children should have the same opportunity to succeed regardless of their background. But for reasons of liberty, practicality and politics we transgress this principle and allow the well off to pass on privilege to the next generation. Unless we are to abandon the principle we must therefore adhere to it as best we can by using various means to enhance the opportunities which then remain to the under-privileged.
Second, given what we know about the importance of peer pressure, parental confidence and aspiration and the quality of teaching there is surely a strong argument that someone who gets, say, three B’s at A Level in a working class comprehensive has achieved a great deal more – and almost certainly has more underlying talent – than someone who gets the same grades at Dulwich College.
Most people accept some of this. The controversy lies in the way we should respond. More or less everyone is happy with the idea of providing disadvantaged children with various ways to top up their learning and socialisation (for example, summer schools) so that they are more able to compete with the well-off. There is some evidence that these interventions can work, although the Coalition’s decision to scrap the Aim Higher programme means there is now less money for this kind of thing.
Support starts to dwindle when it comes to schemes quietly provided by some of the more progressive Russell Group Universities (they keep it quiet apparently because the other Russell Universities would accuse them of diluting excellence). These combine slightly lower entrance offers for disadvantaged kids with structured programmes of top up and engagement to try to make sure these pupils are not too far behind when they start. I commend the universities which are doing this but it is still voluntary and pretty small scale.
But, as we saw from the heated argument about the appointment of Professor Les Ebdon to be head of the Office for Fair Access, the polarisation of opinion comes when it is suggested universities be required to meet quotas for disadvantaged children and be punished if they don’t.
One way such a requirement could be met is used in various US states (including Florida) where every school is guaranteed that their top pupils, whatever their absolute level of attainment, will be offered good university places. (Such schemes can have the perverse outcome of making poor schools more attractive to middle class parents but in view of the benefits of more socially mixed schools this may not be an entirely a bad thing.)
Of course, the design of any quota and fine system is very important, but I have no problem at all with the principle. A clinching argument is research I recall reading which shows that when pupils from poorer backgrounds with slightly less good results are offered places alongside their higher achieving and better off peers they end up doing just as well in their degree courses.
The trouble is, reflecting my general mental frailty right now, I can’t remember who produced the research. I’m on in four hours – can anyone help?
As easy as A,B,C
Michelle who tweets as ms215 has kindly complimented me on my chairing of a session on social enterprise at the National Housing Federation’s Leaders’ Forum earlier today. I guess it’s as true of ‘a list’ performers as of an ‘f list’ hired hand like me that we are sometimes at our best when otherwise rather morose. The platform and microphone offer an opportunity to burst briefly away from introspection and release pent up exuberance.
Not that my chairing was the main reason for the session’s success. In contrast to many conference panel sessions, which tend to be lazily thrown together on the erroneous basis that three badly prepared speakers add up to something more than three badly prepared speakers, the guests on my panel were strong and the conversation both practical and engaging.
The first two contributions came respectively from Vincent Neate who is a Partner at KPMG and a social enterprise enthusiast and Emma Stewart OBE, the co-founder of the highly successful Women Like Us, which is a social enterprise finding flexible work for parents at all different skill levels.
After they had spoken I asked Vincent and Emma if they thought the definition of a social enterprise matters. Both argued for an inclusive definition which would, for example, apply the label to a privately owned firm with an explicit social remit. It was interesting then when the third speaker, Nick O’Donohoe CEO of Big Society Capital, gave a different answer.
Nick is seeking to develop new financing platforms for social enterprises using the £600 million which will be released over the next four years from dormant accounts and donations from the big four banks. He was clear that those seeking investment from the funds BSC will develop must be clear about both the way in which social purpose is embedded in their mission and operation, and about how they treat profit. This feels like an approaching fault line.
Another interesting issue concerns the motivation of social enterprise investors. Nick was confident that many people are willing to accept sub-optimal returns in exchange for the warm feeling of investing in public good, and he had an Ipsos MORI poll to back him up. He believed that the determining factor in whether or not these good intentions turn into practice is the kind of opportunities provided to putative investors.
But, as I suggested, this still leaves some hard questions. It may be that some people accept lower returns but surely not big risks at the same time. Yet many social enterprises will rely on Government contracts. These contracts are increasingly being placed on the basis of Payment By Results, and ministers are insistent that PBR really does involve a transfer of risk. What is more, the advocates of social enterprise argue that their model of governance is better suited to innovation, but innovation again is inherently risky.
In trying to square this circle it is perhaps not surprising that Nick and his colleagues at Big Society Capital are hoping next month’s budget will see some steps to improve the tax treatment of social enterprise investment, and that HMT will have learnt some lessons from the largely unsuccessful community interest tax relief system. Without significant help from the Chancellor I fear the gap between the rhetoric and ambition (and potential) of social enterprise and the reality will only grow larger.
PS kind of on the subject of a lists and f lists, someone at the conference referred to ‘generation Y’ which is said now to have superseded the ‘generation x’ of the eighties and nineties. My questions is this: what comes next; who wants to be in generation z, and after that will we go back to ‘generation a’ just like car registration numbers?
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