13 Comments on If not now, when?

Jenny Edwards on Thu, 24th Nov 2011 5:08 pm


You’re sharing a very widely held view Matthew. If politicians are more than lobby fodder it is at times like this that they have to show leadership. That would expose them to risk as the whole media circus is based round the same very limited perspective.

However, its usually the case that real leadership grows elsewhere. Politicians tend to come to the argument late, when the early majority already supports it.

Its important that we keep our eyes and ears open for what Lao Tzu described as invisible leadership. The social media age is a good ground for distributed leadership, the rapid passing of ideas, solutions & information. Its important that the potential in this model is strengthened by institutions taking down boundarie and sharing information, ideas, credit and resources.

I hope the RSA will play its part in this very well through growing link through its membership and well beyond.

David Hickey on Thu, 24th Nov 2011 6:44 pm


Reminds me of the Microcosmographia Academia (long name, but very short book). It has The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent: “you should not do the right action for fear that you, or you equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case… Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”

Really good blog, enjoyed your separate post on the good work done by MPs.

Robert Burns on Fri, 25th Nov 2011 1:48 pm


Yawn………

Been over this ground so many times before.

Want to reduce unemployment? Stop importing it.

Want to get the ‘lazy’ unemployed off that £64 per week ‘gravy train’?

Tell employers who depend on contracts with publicly funded bodies that continuing to do business with the controllers of public funds involves providing evidence that they are filling vacancies from the UK unemployment register.

And not following recruitment and employment practices that transfer foreign unemployment onto members of the UK electoral franchise in whose name public funds are being spent.

Livy on Fri, 25th Nov 2011 6:40 pm


Right, but wondering why political leaders don’t change is a bit like wondering why you’ve never met a bookie with a part-time job.

It’s always been striking how good comedians are exceptionally rare, and moreover, how strange that is. It wasn’t until recently that the low proportion of funny people in society has seemed so hilariously correlated with rare leadership ability.

we might eventually reach the same depressing conclusion as the Greeks and Italians and seek to replace politicians with technocrats.

Without necessarily implying this would be a good thing… it is at least an idea worth entertaining for a second, if only to realise how stark a difference exists between the two. The same qualities in an individual that attracts them to a career as a politician are those that breed their problematic work culture and prevent Right Action from taking place. So many of the endemic problems we have with economic policy, the financial sector, public sector pensions, health and education are, at heart, political.

To those of us who are ignorant and outside the bubble, a politician resembles a dysfunctional person with a great character flaw and some low impulses; the tendency to seek an inordinate amount of attention from people may be the most obvious manifestation of whatever hang-ups that individual carries around. This isn’t inevitably a bad thing. Stand-up comics also feel the need to earn a living by being the only person in a huge room packed full of people where they are the only ones talking. Because these are both crafts that require such an immense amount of human input they also require a greater honesty and sense of integrity than most professions. That’s where most fail. It’s what can make you good, in both lines of work.

The politician and the comedian hold a mirror up to society. Politics is screwed because we are screwed. People hating politicians for hatred’s sake, or demanding mutually contradictory things from our leadership is no different to a heckler in a comedy club (usually female, mid 20s….) thinking they have the right to interrupt everybody else’s good time because they’re offended by a certain piece of language used by the comedian. Feeling offended is the price you pay for laughing at jokes about other people.

The downward spiral in both fields is the individual becoming the role. It’s paradoxical. To be a good comic you need to be prepared to cash and burn on stage and feel public humiliation for as long as two years before becoming good. It’s horrendous. But the first time he (let’s just be honest…’he’…) gets a room full of laughs, he becomes a total junkie for that feeling. He just needs it again. It’s the same thing with political leaders. We all have the human tendency to behave in a way that we feel is congruent with what we perceive as our identity, it’s just that people in the public eye feel this more intensely than the rest of us because of the mass exposure and recognition they get for their performance. What would it mean for George Osborne and Tories who bought all his spiel to now change course on debt/borrowing/austerity measures?

The same thing happens to polemicists, controversial journos, Fox News presenters. Many of them started out fairly shrewd. The comedian’s persona on-stage often becomes his personality off-stage. The best example of this was probably Andrew Silverstein who used to do frighteningly accurate impersonations, one of which was a disgusting misogynist called ‘Dice’. Soon enough, he was Dice all the time.

If we look to the States where the best comedians are, the arithmetic becomes scary. It was estimated by Joe Rogan that there are perhaps 1,000 professional comedians out there. Of that total, how many are actually funny? Possibly 300 if we’re being generous. Out of a population of 300 million. That’s literally one in a million.

Those are same odds of us finding a truly great leader for times like these.

Livy

junius on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 11:52 am


‘What we need is national leadership on a different plane to what we have right now.’

Am I mistaken in thinking that you are proposing a form of benign dictatorship above the futile travails of party politics. Ironic that, given such handwringing about the centralized remoteness of the political system and popular disengagement/ alienation from it, your preferred solution seems to be a kind of central benign dictatorship above the parties.If so. who would occupy this position, one wonders. Mr Tony Blair- your former boss- in some sort of (post Iraq) come back now that he has thrown off the garb of mere party?

I am surprised, given the RSA’s commitment to ‘enlightenmment’ ,that you have not thought of following the example of those countries benefiting from 18th century democratic revolutions, whose polities have constitutionally separated executive governments from their parliamentary assemblies. Consequently, parliamentary ‘representatives’ should be responsible and accountable only to the constituencies who vote them in, terminating the control exercised by parties through the phenomenon of party creatures awaiting career advancement via executive patronage.

Perhaps, radical constitutional change to bring about such a separation followed by the replacement of the 18th century Burkean ‘independent’ representative- in reality, the 21 century party controlled creature- with the delegate who is elected and instructed by the constituency would promote a significant advance in local engagement and dismantle the current centralized control of party machines.

It is disingenuous (in your post) to suggest that the funding crisis in home care services for the elderly is of very recent origin. The crisis has been building up over the period of a number of governments, including the New Labour governments in which you served as a political appointee to Tony Blair.

Richard Humphries on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 1:44 pm


Junius is correct to say that the funding pressures on the care of older people have been building up for years, but incorrect to suggest that Matthew was inferring otherwise. In any case the poor care described in the EHRC was not simply about lack of money. And everyone who is familiar with this subject – it is my specialist area – believes that it is a long term challenge exceeding the term of a single parliament, thus need cross-party consensual leadership. Which I think is the whole point Matthew is trying to make.

Livy on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 5:26 pm


Junius:

…did we both read the same blog entry, or did I get it totally wrong?

Zio Bastone on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 6:20 pm


I think you misrepresent not only the nature of political space but also the various forces operating both within it and upon it. 

Increasingly ‘democracy’ (or rather its simulacrum) presents itself as a sort of theatre in which the actor-politicians keep telling an audience of electors (rather innumerately) that the bank is about to foreclose. Meanwhile sections of that audience either doze or agitate for ticket price reductions or complain that the seats are too hard. 

But what’s missing here isn’t the advent of, say, Sir Tony Cameron-Clegg, actor-manager, one of Livy’s ‘truly great’ leaders; I share Junius’ unease about your tone. It’s the play. It’s not the horseman (as Mario Tronti said of il Cavaliere, ie Berlusconi); it’s the horse. And what is present, unfortunately, like the Camorra, is an unaccountable financial oligarchy (just ten players control more than 90% of the world’s trade in financial instruments, which is itself many times larger than the entire world’s GDP) for whom the political establishment (reading market data as though they were the Ouija board Prodi and Baldessari once employed back in Bologna in the 70s) are just impotent apologists.

Whereas the riots were, I think, an assault upon the material ruins of what we used to have what the Occupy movements are attempting is some sort of reclamation of the void within those ruins. However, neither represents in any way the sort of electoral discontent that would parachute in Mervyn King in a right wing fantasy of strong leadership, facilitated presumably by Betty Battenberg. And nor did anything like that happen in Greece or Italy, quite contrary to what you imply, where the instigators of both those palace coups were not the electorate at all but those in thrall to the Vampire Squid

Livy on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 6:59 pm


Zio Bastone:

Hi Zio.

“But what’s missing here isn’t the advent of, say, Sir Tony Cameron-Clegg, actor-manager, one of Livy’s ‘truly great’ leaders”

I’m not sure I explicitly referred to any of the three names you mention in my comment.

The only point I was trying to make was how unbelievably rare good leaders really are, and how unbelievably difficult it is for those leaders to remain unaffected and mentally strong.

We all want honesty, character and authenticity from these people, but it’s when they conform to our wishes and seem to have the popular touch and appear less contrived that they’re overwhelmed by our widespread reaction to them. Their policy positions can even start to be intertwined with a public – no longer merely private – identity, from which they now derive most of their personal validation and self-esteem.

Same with hacks. It’s basically what happens to (essentially well-meaning yet) utterly cringeworthy young people attracted to leftist politics in the UK, as well as hardcore social conservatives in the US. Think Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck. They’re basically all the same.

Zio Bastone on Sat, 26th Nov 2011 8:19 pm


Livy:

Just to clarify, because I was too hermetc, outstanding individuals emerge out of their times as much as (and probably more than) they actually make them. To see the Renaissance as ‘You wait ages for a genius and then several turn up all at once’ is almost certainly to misread it.

But the thrust of my comments (not particularly aimed at you) was that leadership wasn’t the answer. Or rather that the question wasn’t so much Where can we find a good leader? as What on earth is to be done about Goldman Sachs?

Livy on Sun, 27th Nov 2011 12:51 am


I guess this is the kind of thing that I find equally worrying, the sort of leaders we have:

“Every state school in England is to receive a new copy of the King James Bible from the government – with a brief foreword by Michael Gove, the education secretary”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/nov/25/michael-gove-king-james-bible

When I first saw it I thought it was a spoof website of the Guardian, a mock news thing like The Onion.

Hilarious.

junius on Mon, 28th Nov 2011 9:15 pm


Livy, I don’t think we were reading from different scripts. We just took different messages from the posting . You responded to the “leadership” prompt whilst I placed “leadership” down the scale of importance and prioritized democratic accountability. We need ‘leaders’ less than we need power, in all its forms, to be made accountable. Indeed, power, when made truly accountable, may furnish the best form of leadership.

I believe the emphasis upon democratic accountability is the point made by Zio and he is correct to raise the issue of how the corporate peaks of finance capitalism are to be made popularly accountable.

Marx’s analysis of the tendency of capitalism towards crises and inherent inequalities may still be highly relevant but his 19th century views of how to remedy these are no longer appropriate to the social movements and modes of thinking of the 21 century. We have to address how, in the UK, the interconnections between the Westminster/ Whitehall state, the City Corporation and the financial power-houses form a largely unaccountable and highly protected Establishment immune from change and a dead hand on the development of popular pressures and struggles calling for it.

Livy on Tue, 29th Nov 2011 10:14 am


There was a time I used to be able to follow along and understand these arguments. I reckon I’m losing it in my old age.

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