Roll out the rotten barrel
In these hard times a free meal is always welcome so I hope it won’t be considered churlish of me to describe a recent dinner – one of the regular gatherings of a somewhat secretive members’ club – at which I was kindly hosted by some corporate friends of the RSA. As well as food, wine and good company, I overcame my aversion to black tie dress code because David Miliband was the keynote speaker.
David’s speech focused on foreign affairs and was a powerful combination of insight, experience and conviction. Whilst avoiding political knockabout, the former Foreign Secretary didn’t hide his concerns that the UK seems virtually alone in thinking that it is possible to operate effectively on the international stage without cultivating strong relationships with our neighbours.
With so much content in the speech I was looking forward to the question and answer session. A couple of hands shot up straight away. The first question was along these lines: ‘given that you are so impressive and your brother less so, do you think the Labour Party will simply accept defeat in the next election or be brave enough to commit regicide?’. I was about to remark to the person next to me how completely inappropriate this was when the second questioner chirped up with; ‘how do you respond to the news that voters apparently think you’re better looking than your brother, and when are you going to come back and seize the leadership of your Party?’.
With most people in the room squirming, it was not a time to hesitate. Even though I was only a guest, up shot my hand for the third question. Picking up one small reference in the speech I asked him about my favourite subject; how can politicians help close the social aspiration gap by persuading people to think and act in ways which help to build a better future out of our current difficulties.
If I had been David I don’t know how I would have handled the situation. He simply said ‘That’s why it’s always good to take questions in threes’ and ignored the first two (just one reason he’s a politician and I’m not). His response to me went straight to the biggest flaw with my argument: it sounds both judgemental and unrealistic.
As David said, most people have no choice but to rise to the challenge created by economic stagnation and public sector austerity. They are working as hard as they can to keep their head above water and, through individual caring and contributing to their community, doing their best to make up for the withdrawal of state support. Just now they probably don’t need pious lectures from politicians.
Of course, this is right. It must be some flaw in my character (one of many) which tends me towards making the case in judgemental terms. The reasons for a lack of engagement, resourcefulness and social responsibility in the general population lie much less in the individual failings of people than the nature of politics and political discourse, the design of policy and the organisation and culture of public services.
Our tendency to blame people when things go wrong rather than deeper structure and culture is an understandable but impeding cognitive frailty. Thus we express our ire towards bankers not the financial system, expense-fiddling MPs not our flawed democratic system, even journalists rather the puerile obsessions of celebrity culture. Sometimes the initial blame fest gives way to a more reflective approach, such as we may see emerge from the Leveson inquiry, but other times we pluck out the rotten apples but ignore the rotten barrel.
So I won’t blame the two rather over-excited gentlemen for the embarrassing questions the other night. Instead I surmise it may be something about wearing slightly silly clothes and breathing an atmosphere of intense mutual appreciation that beings out the worst in people.
School oversight and getting to the point at last
Predictably, the Government is having to face the question of what to place in the yawning managerial gap between thousands of Academies and the Department for Education. Recent examples of Academies getting into financial trouble, or the school in Haringey refusing to ‘Academise’, highlight the vacuum left by the effective abolition of local education authorities.
There is talk of setting sub-regional schools commissioners as the new middle tier. But as someone who was the sole critical governor of a failing school for two years, I know only too well that under-performing schools often have strong support from pupils, parents and the wider community. In the face of such an alliance a Whitehall appointed civil servant would face major problems of legitimacy.
This is why there has also been talk of elected schools commissioners. This idea has its own problems. We will see what happens in the autumn with elected police commissioners, but given that the commissioners would be mere regulators not actual policy makers there is an obvious danger of weak candidates and low turnouts. More fundamentally, while the police protect us all, isn’t it rather odd having a vote among all electors for a post which is focussed on the concerns of that minority of adults with children in school?
Which brings us back to the council: Michael Gove is apparently dead set against local government having a role in school management, believing that councils failed when they did have this power. But what can the Secretary of State do about the legitimacy deficit?
As the number of Academies that require intervention rises, as it undoubtedly will, the pressure will grow for a departmental answer to this problem. As is often the case when logic meets ideology I predict a compromise. How about school commissioners appointed by Whitehall (so Mr Gove isn’t seen to give control ‘back’ to local authorities) but answerable for ensuring effective oversight of school management both to Whitehall and to local councillors (thus providing local legitimacy).
To some – particularly those who bemoan the abolition of LEAs – such a compromise will seem messy and opaque. Others – and I think I include myself – might come see it as a reasonable way of balancing national strategy, school freedom, and local democratic accountability.
There we are, only 380 words. I have rediscovered the blogger’s greatest virtue; brevity.
Every few weeks on this page I wallow in doubt and self-pity: just enough to elicit some kind words of encouragement from a loyal old friend, a random on-line altruist or my solicitous mother adopting an internet nom de plume. It’s another one of those days
Yesterday I posted the last in a series of pieces on entitlement and obligation. I am a blogger not a scholar, an amateur commentator not a proper intellectual, but roaming across the history of the welfare state, issues in political philosophy and current policy challenges, I thought perhaps I would break new ground.
By yesterday evening the concluding post had received less feedback than any others in the series. Seen now through the piercing eyes of rejection, it seems neither compelling nor original. My intellectual journey was meant to emerge into a newly discovered clearing in a remote jungle, instead I found myself in the local park having walked in contorted circles round a small copse next to the toddlers’ paddling pool.
So – for the time being at least – no more long, involved, multiple post discussions. People are busy, if I can’t get to the point in 500 words I should think of another subject.
An end to the paradox?
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Public policy, The RSA
Much to the relief of my PA Barbara (‘Matthew, I’m almost missing your jokes’), this is the final post in a series of seven exploring the paradox of entitlement. Along the way I have received many useful comments, some positive, other less so. A number of people have questioned the clarity and consistency of my use of the term entitlement. The criticisms are well founded. I am deliberately stretching the idea to try to develop a narrative which links all sections of society and offers a vision of solidarity and purpose instead of the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism and resentment. After reading today’s effort – come on folks just 750 words to go – you can tell me whether I have at all succeeded:
1. In the context of rising needs and limited resources (a squeeze which is highlighted by, but goes beyond, the current fiscal deficit) we face a social aspiration gap. The hopes and expectations we have for our collective future are not matched by the ways in aggregate we think and behave right now. There will be many forces which shape the future – some of them beyond our control – but the society we want is unlikely to emerge unless citizens as a whole are more engaged, more resourceful and more pro-social.
2. One aspect of the social aspiration gap is the paradox of entitlement. For reasons of equity, solidarity, well-being, freedom and efficiency we should aspire to an affluent country such as ours providing a range of entitlements to its citizens. However, unless they are matched with citizenship obligations and expectations these entitlements will fail to deliver the social outcomes we want and will increasingly prove to be financially unsustainable. (Beyond the deficit there is population ageing, the pressures of global completion and the constantly rising comparative costs of ‘high touch’ care based services. As Lawrence Summers wrote in yesterday’s FT, there has over the last generation been a fifty fold change in the relative price of a television and a day in hospital.)
3. There are many types of social entitlement but they could be divided into three: the entitlement to decent subsistence provided to those who are unable to meet their own needs, the entitlement to public services and protections made available to all citizens, and the entitlement afforded to the well off in society to use their privileges to the future advantage of themselves and their children. Whilst the third of these entitlements is of a different nature to the others it can nevertheless be seen as such in that the capacity of the well off to exact future advantage from today’s success offends meritocratic principles to which a majority of people strongly subscribe.
4. There are principled and pragmatic arguments for each type of entitlement. For example, a failure to meet basic subsistence needs could be seen not only as inhumane but also to be likely to lead to widespread social disorder; the withdrawal of public services could be seen to undermine social solidarity but also to lead to a chaotic and inefficient patchwork of rules and provision; seeking to ban the well-off from using their privileges to seek future advantages would be seen not only as an intrusion into basic liberty but administratively impossible and economically counter-productive.
5. But each entitlement also brings with it moral hazard. The guarantee of subsistence could lead people to accept dependency instead of seeking independence; the provision of public services and protections could lead to people maximising their own gains from the system at the expense of the community as a whole; and the freedom to use economic advantage could lead not only to unjust outcomes but also inefficiency as the most talented lose out to the most privileged.
6. We need a new approach to politics and policy which has these characteristics: tough minded and honest in explaining that citizens have to step up to the plate; optimistic in arguing that we can raise our game and, if we do, we can improve quality of life despite rising needs and limited resources; even handed in raising expectations of responsibility across society.
7. From this starting point we can explore a range of strategies for balancing entitlement with obligations and expectations. As I have described in earlier posts, this could include a tough but supportive regime of conditionality; the development of the principles and practice of a new contributory principle; reconceptualising and re-organising public services as collaborative relationships between service providers, service recipients and the wider community; and building a social consensus about the need for action to ensure that inequality of outcome does not inherently lead to systematic inequality of opportunity.
8. The story told by this series of posts is partial, incomplete and probably inconsistent (not to mention pompous and pious). But however much it can be improved, the core point remains: we urgently need our political leaders to articulate a powerful, and inclusive narrative that assigns us all a role in finding purpose, solidarity and hope for difficult times ahead.
Entitlement, privilege and freedom
Like the Harry Potter film makers I have decided to divide the final instalment of my series of posts on ‘the paradox of entitlement’ in two. Sadly, despite the many helpful comments I have received to the earlier posts, I don’t expect millions to be waiting with bated breath for my finale.
Just like when you buy a new car and suddenly notice how many of them there are on the road, so I’ve been noticing the issue of entitlement cropping up in other places. In America, former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has been saying that the looming fiscal crisis requires cutting back on social security entitlements. Meanwhile Labour’s Liam Byrne called for a return in welfare policy to the ‘something for something’ expectations of the Beveridge report.
But most interesting to me was David Cameron’s commitment on last Friday’s Today programme to tackle excessive pay and Nick Robinson’s interpretation of the PM’s stance. The BBC’s chief political correspondent suggested that politicians have to respond to a hurting and angry ‘squeezed middle’ electorate which feels intolerant of what it sees as fat cats at the top and benefit cheats at the bottom.
The danger is clear: ugly economic circumstances can lead to an ugly politics of rage and resentment. Politicians have to respond to public anger but also offer more unifying and hopeful ways of thinking about the world. Although my musings today stray into well-trodden intellectual debates, my aim is not so much philosophical clarity as developing a credible political narrative about entitlement which spans the responsibilities of all sections of society.
When, in the first and second of these posts, I described some problems with state backed entitlements one critical response urged me to explore the entitlements of the rich, not just those dependent on state benefits and services. I agree.
However, when considering the responsibilities which might come with entitlements, it is important to recognise that people tend to see a difference between the right to receive something such as a benefit or service and the right to keep income or wealth which has been legitimately accumulated through work, saving or investment. Most people view the case for conditionality or reciprocity as stronger in the former case than the latter.
In John Rawls’ famous thought experiment we are asked to imagine what kind of society we would favour if we had no way of knowing where in that society’s hierarchy or distribution of talent we might find ourselves. Surely we would want a society in which everyone was guaranteed dignity and where inequality was only tolerated to the extent that it was necessary for the effective functioning of the economy?
In fact, in what may be a reflection of our tendency to be too optimistic about our own prospects, it seems most people favour a society in which it is possible for a fortunate few to achieve very high rewards, as long as they are deemed to have come into them legitimately through talent, hard work or even good luck. Not only is the public quite relaxed about unequal rewards but, to the chagrin of egalitarians, there is a suspicion of the motives of those who want to constrain the privileges of society’s winners.
But while it is not clear that we see being financially successful as itself creating social obligations (beyond obeying the law and paying reasonable taxes), I want to suggest that there are two privileges which do. The first is the entitlement to gain future advantage from current success; the second is the entitlement to pass on such privilege.
Think of it as a race. Regardless of how good or bad we are at running, it seems we are happy to accept the winner of a race receiving a much bigger prize than the runners up. We don’t think the winners incur any particular obligations even if they are handsomely rewarded. However, what if we said that the winner of today’s race could use their winnings to get a major head start in tomorrow’s race? Or if we agreed that the winner of today’s race could buy a life-changing hard start for his daughter running her first race? Both these consequences of inequality offend deeply held common sense ideas of fairness.
But in reality, and for various reasons, we do allow people to use today’s success to buy advantages for tomorrow, and to pass on their advantages to their offspring, even though this necessarily means a relative disadvantage for everyone else. Arguably, the level of intervention and redistribution which would be necessary to stop advantages being exploited and inherited would have damaging side effects. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it is the freedom to exploit and bequeath advantage which provides the basis for arguing that the well-off in society have greater obligations than less fortunate citizens.
To recap, I have argued in earlier posts in this series that to survive in terms of financial sustainability and public legitimacy, entitlements to welfare and public services need to be accompanied by rules and expectations of obligation and reciprocity. Similarly, if society is not to be unfair and seen to be so, the freedom we provide to the well off to exploit and pass on privilege should also be tempered by rules and expectations.
In my final post in this series, by connecting the RSA’s mission of enhancing human capability to my thoughts about entitlement and obligation, I will try to weave a story about the social values we need to deal with decades of austerity.
Can we get engaged?
Undeterred by the gradual drying up of comments, this is – for the time being – the penultimate of a series of posts on ‘the paradox of entitlement’. The most recent have explored two ways of reinforcing the reciprocal dimension of welfare and public service entitlements: conditionality and the contributory principle. Today I return to one of my recurrent themes over the years; how can public services be reimagined and redesigned to accentuate their reciprocal and relational core?
This is hardly novel and should be an easy argument to make. We know parental engagement is vital to the success of pupils and schools; lifestyles, attitudes and observance of treatment regimes are crucial to the prognosis of NHS patients, and the police find their job almost impossible if communities don’t exercise at least some level of responsibility and self- policing.
Public service outcomes are demonstrably the result of the collective efforts of service providers, service users and the wider community. Whether a basic public service entitlement turns into a life enhancing experience depends to a large degree on us and the ways we relate to those services. Yet still this truism remains marginal to the narrative, culture and day to day practice of public service management. So rather than making the case for relational public services again, I want to explore through concrete examples some reasons why the insight seems so hard to act upon.
The first is simply that change takes time and effort and can go wrong. The RSA itself offers an illustration. Following strategic guidance from Trustees, the RSA has over the last four years made a concerted effort to engage its Fellows more fully as partners in the delivery of the Society’s charitable mission. This has involved many changes including; the replacement of the former appointed, consultative Council with a new representative and more hands-on Fellowship Council; the creation of a team of dedicated network facilitators developing and supporting Fellows’ activities; encouraging Fellows to form networks at whatever geographical level and around whatever shared interest works best for them; supporting a wide variety of ways for Fellows to engage with each other on-line; the creation of the Catalyst Fund which regularly gives small grants to back Fellow’s initiatives; and a much greater emphasis on engaging Fellows in the Society’s research and development projects.
It is clear now that the faith of Trustees and the hard work of RSA staff is paying off: There are four or five times as many active Fellows’ groups as a few years ago (and that’s just the ones we know about), we have a good flow of bids to the Catalyst Fund and the quality of those bids continues to improve, RSA Fellows are playing a prominent part in key research projects (and this is being increasingly seen by our partners as part of the attraction of working with the Society), and the current Fellowship survey is showing both high levels of satisfaction and a growing enthusiasm for engagement.
Quite apart from all the good things generated by this engagement (many of which I have highlighted in blog posts), it has provided authenticity and distinctiveness to the Society’s mission; in arguing that the 21st century need a new more ambitious model of citizenship we are increasingly able to show how the Society’s Fellows are exemplifying that ideal.
Our pride at what has been achieved is exceeded only by our ambition for what could lie ahead. But, and here’s the rub, at times the process of engagement has been exhausting, dispiriting and even sometimes felt like it might all be a massive error. Among the mistakes we have made have been a lack of realism about how quickly culture can change, raising expectations without having the infrastructure to meet them and under-estimating the fierce resistance to change among those in the Fellowship who prefer a more traditional, hierarchical, model of engagement. Most of all, the process of working out how best – with limited resources – to support a group of busy volunteers to develop good ideas and act on them involves continuous trial and error, learning and self-criticism. If the Trustees and Executive had not seen Fellowship engagement as an essential part of the RSA strategy we may well have lost heart and momentum.
So it is with the welfaer state. Indeed with growing needs, shrinking resources and the requirement of public accountability, the challenges are much greater. In attempts at the engagement of service users and citizens by public service managers and professionals there are invariably times when the whole process feels like more trouble than it’s worth. That’s when engagement is abandoned or more often scaled down to something less ambitious and more manageable. But it is almost better not to try than to enter into a process with a lack of conviction or realism.
Because engagement can be so difficult the public sector is prone to a self-fulfilling prophesy: a half-hearted commitment leads to a failed process which confirms the initial scepticism.
An important reason for that scepticism lies in the bureaucratic/professional culture of public services. To make this point simply (this post is already too long) I go back to an example I gave a few weeks ago: research by Anne Hook and Bernice Andrews found that a significant variable in the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment for depression was whether patients disclosed their true feelings to therapists. Those who hid their feelings – generally because of shame – were much less likely to get a good outcome.
The first lesson is that patients have to use the service responsibly (respecting the therapist’s need for openness) for it to succeed. But – and this is crucial – this lesson can only be learned alongside a second. Over to Dryden Badenoch, who wrote the blog post in which I read of the research:
By illustrating the effect of individual client decisions on therapeutic outcome, Hook and Andrews have furthered the argument for routinely considering the client’s contribution to the effectiveness of psychological therapies, rather than treating the client as a passive recipient of the ‘miracle therapy’ or the attentions of the ‘super-shrink’.
It is not easy for professionals and managers to accept that their success depends not just on their own methods and skills but on the engagement of services users and citizens, and also to accept that this engagement is only likely to work if they give up some of their own authority and power. The combination of professional resistance and the sheer difficulty and effort involved provides a high barrier to reconceiving public services as reciprocal and collaborative. Which is why people like me have been banging on about this for so long but making so little progress.
It is my great privilege and good fortune to have been able to test the theory out on the RSA and to see our amazing Fellows generating such exciting results. What organisations do is a more powerful influence than what they say. Hopefully, by sticking the course and showing how genuine engagement pays off, we can inspire others in the third and public sector to follow our lead.
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