The consequences of throwing stones – and this time I really mean it
Apologies to Shane, Neil and Ian: you all commented on a post I wrote at Sydney airport on Wednesday afternoon which I then comprehensively rewrote when I got to Bangkok nine hours later. The original post was called ‘the consequences of throwing stones’ and contrasted the punishment being meted out to rioters and looters with the way those who behaved irresponsibly in the financial sector have got away Scot-free. I don’t sleep well on planes and at some point in the first leg of my journey back to London I decided the post was trite. But now, back in England, I find myself wanting to make the point more strongly. But this time in the form of an urgent challenge to the Prime Minister.
My conviction was renewed by two pieces on the BBC web-site. The first describes the sixteen month prison sentence for Thomas Downey, who helped himself to doughnuts from an already looted Krispy Kreme shop in Manchester. From his photograph and his record, Mr Downey is not, I think, the kind of person I would like to have as a friend or even sit next to on a bus. But, even so, banging him up for sixteen months for grabbing a box of doughnuts from a vandalised shop when he was drunk is surely unlikely to: (a) do him any good; (b) be a wise use of public money; or (c) appear to most people as a proportionate punishment.
The second story explores the profound and still unfolding consequences of the financial turmoil unleashed in the credit crunch. With stock markets crashing again yesterday (and it looks bad today) no one knows where all this will end, but we already know that hundreds of millions of people across the developed world will suffer hardship and insecurity and that many will never fully recover from the effects.
No one can argue that all this came about just because of the behaviour of bankers and speculators. I have been arguing since even before the crunch that the deeper cause lies in the fundamental and growing mismatch between public expectations of personal affluence and public services and what the state and market are able to provide in the absence of a strong civil society. But equally, there is no question that the finance sector bears substantial responsibility because of how it chose to make as much money as possible despite the risks and because it was a strong voice advocating the economic and policy framework which collapsed in 2008. Furthermore, there continue to be parts of the sector which not only make money out of adversity but also have an interest in adding to the turmoil (this is one reason why four European countries recently banned short selling).
I could stop here, simply highlighting the way rich and powerful people can cause great misery and get away with it and poor and hopeless people can be severely punished for minor misdemeanours, but we need to get past impotent rage. The contrast between what happened to Thomas Downey and the impunity of the bankers and speculators is at one level entirely rational. Downey was personally responsible for committing a crime, the finance guys are collectively responsible for making a killing in a system which has created, and is still exacerbating, a crisis. Some people do terrible things which aren’t against the law; other people do trivial things which are. The state can only punish the law breakers. It’s just the way things are.
But borne on the wind of turmoil and trouble can be heard the swirling murmur of contested moral equivalences. The Government is close to big finance and it made an explicit policy decision to put pressure on the judiciary to hand out longer sentences to all those involved in the riots, so it can’t simply shrug its shoulders if people find this imbalance of consequences ugly and unjust.
The Big Society is in part a way of addressing the limits of the state and market in meeting social need. And for this I have often commended it. But to have credibility, the Big Society must also be about a basic sense of justice, which is essential to social cohesion and morale. Fred Goodwin and thousands more like him are still rich and still making money out of decisions which have had a profoundly damaging impact on innocent people. Thomas Downey and hundreds like him, more guilty of stupidity and impulsive greed than malice, are starting prison sentences which could blight their lives. There may be nothing that can be done about this, but political leadership has sometimes to be about helping us understand why things seem unfair and describing ideas and principles which offer a better foundation for society.
A friend of my fifteen year old son got arrested after the rioting. He didn’t attack or hurt anyone physically but he was involved in the looting. It is clear that the consequences for him as a working class kid are going to be dire. My son said to me last night ’my mate was stupid and he knows it but he is going to lose everything. Why is it when rich people screw up they always seem to get away with it?’ As he spoke I sensed a deep and lasting impression is being made on him about the way things are and how unlikely it is that ‘the system’, as he sees it, will ever change.
If David Cameron is to return to the promise of his early years as Tory leader and provide a vision which unites, heals and invigorates society then he needs to balance the punitive rhetoric of the last few days. He needs to say something which touches and unlocks this hardening sense of injustice and cynical resignation. He needs to do it powerfully and he needs to do it soon.
10:10 is great but what has really changed?
I’m delighted to say that the RSA has today signed up to 10:10, the new initiative to persuade organisations and individuals to cut their use of energy. The campaign, backed by a sparkling array of celebrities. is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong who was behind the film Age of Stupid which we launched here at the RSA.
The campaign is based on the simple idea that we all have a responsibility to help the nation meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, and that it really isn’t that hard for us to make a cut in our own energy consumption of 10% by the end of 2010.
It won’t be easy for the RSA to meet our target as we have already done a lot in this area and the age and listed status of the House limits our room for manoeuvre, but we can’t bang on about ‘pro-social’ behaviour if we are not willing to do our bit on what is arguably the most important issue facing humanity.
Today’s 10:10 launch coincides with news that personal debt levels are falling for the first time in more than 15 years. A few months ago many commentators – including me – were suggesting that the global financial meltdown would lead to a fundamental questioning of the values that lay behind the debt bubble. The crisis would be a catalyst for a critique of a society that condoned greed and excess, that suffered from a range of social pathologies including falling levels of general well-being, and that was failing to grasp the scale of the environmental emergency.
But now we are clearly past the low point of the recession the question is: what has really changed? Bonuses are back in the City, house prices are picking up and we never stopped shopping even when it looked like things could be much worse. So is the only impact of the crisis to be on the direct victims – the unemployed and those who have lost their businesses? Is talk of a broader change of social values misplaced? I want to ponder this myself some time over the next few days, but I am, as always, interested to hear other people’s thoughts.
Why MPs’ expenses are driving me to religion
Major real world events have a cultural echo. As we were gripped by fear about AIDS there was a spate of movies warning of the wages of sin. When Glenn Close boiled the Michael Douglas’ family bunny we all wondered about our comeuppance.
In the wake of the credit crunch we are looking for people who can channel our sense of outrage and, in a more subtle process, act as the transference object for our complicity in the culture of excess and irresponsibility. Thus the last nine months are framed by the arc that begins with Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross abusing Andrew Sachs, passing through the pay and pension of Sir Fred Goodwin, before reaching the saga of MPs’ expenses.
Each of these episodes follows a largely predictable pattern. First the exposure, second the vain attempt to close down or justify, third the mounting hysteria, fourth the show of contrition (Sir Fred can only be admired for his refusal to play the game on this one), fifth the emerging consensus that it isn’t just the bad apples but the whole barrel, sixth the demand that something must be done, seventh – but much later – questions being raised over whether the remedy might have been worse than the original disease.
Maybe it just has to be this way. It is difficult to know what to make of these tides of outrage. There is something of the mob in the air – the targets of our wrath cannot be bad in just one way, we crave evidence that they are bad in every way. This is necessary so that we can be reassured that the bad people are nothing like us; there can be no question that in their circumstances we might have behaved as they did.
As I veer between joining in the public outrage and adopting a position of sophisticated distance, I have to admit that religion has – as I understand it – a powerful narrative for these times. Believers are not surprised by sin, they knew it was everywhere and in all of us. They urge us not to cast the first stone but to reflect on our own frailties and responsibilities. In the end we will all be judged, so we can put aside our rage and lust for revenge safe in the knowledge that ultimately no one gets away with anything but all must answer for their deeds.
True religion makes it easier for us to forgive and to accept our own complicities; even if the political practice of religion has often meant the very opposite. So while the impact of the credit crunch may be the right climate for public outrage, secularisation provides the fertile soil in which it grows.
PS: While I am tempting readers into a slightly more pious mode, this is just a reminder about my run on Sunday for the Alzheimer’s Society – if anyone would like to make a donation, they can do so here. Thank you.
Public spending – a looming trilemma?
Do we have to choose between social justice and universal public services? This was one of the issues raised at this morning’s 2020 Public Services Trust seminar.
Paul Johnson from IFS opened the seminar by explained the full scale of the fiscal crisis. The top line is that from 2011 the public sector faces a decade of year-on-year substantial real terms cuts. It is inconceivable that cuts like this can be made without a concrete and visible impact on public services.
This prospect framed the response from Lord McNally, whose distinguished past includes his time as a senior advisor to James Callaghan between 1976 and 1979. While recognising the scale of the crisis, he warned against alarmism, citing three sets of decisions:
• Roy Jenkins’ fiscal tightening in 1970 which many believe lost Labour the election of the same year
• Denis Healey’s agreement to IMF demands for cuts in public spending (cuts which some economic historians now argue weren’t necessary). It was this that led to the winter of discontent, Labour’s defeat in 1979 and its subsequent decline into near political suicide
• Margaret Thatcher’s economic and fiscal policies which – whatever their economic upside – led to huge social dislocation and the running down of public services.
The priority for McNally was the maintenance of social cohesion, even if this meant higher taxes and a large ongoing public deficit.
The economist and business woman Bridget Rosewell countered by, first, by questioning whether most public spending really did contribute to social cohesion and inclusion, and, second, highlighting the risk that a Government not seen by the markets to be facing up to its fiscal responsibilities would be unable to finance its debt.
The subsequent conversation reminded me of the concept of the trilemma: a situation in which policy makers may be able to achieve two out of three aims but not all three. A classic trilemma in pensions policy comprises: incentivising saving, targeting the poor and limiting expenditure. Recently, speaking to a centre right audience, Niall Ferguson suggested free marketers faced their own trilemma: free trade globalisation, social stability and a small state.
In the face of the structural public spending deficit do we face a new trilemma? This is between national economic viability, protecting the poor (those already being hardest hit by the downturn), and welfare state universalism. As an example of this kind of thinking, it is significant that Conservative MP David Davis yesterday advocated means testing child benefit as a way of saving a few billion.
If protecting the poor while safeguarding the economy means reassessing universalism the implications are huge and very troubling to progressives.
The pro-social council – what is to be done?
So here, in outline, is the argument I made to the Association of County Council Chief Executives yesterday morning….
This week’s budget confirms we are entering a long period of public sector austerity, yet needs – particularly those associated with population ageing – will continue to rise.
Even without the specific fiscal challenges we anyway faced what Professor Niall Ferguson described as a ‘trilemma’ (a situation where you can have two out of three outcomes but not all three). Ferguson’s trilemma (and he was addressing his arguments from a right of centre perspective) is between open market globalisation, social stability and a small state.
Public opinion finds it hard to accept this reality, which is why opinion polls suggest people want a Swedish welfare state paid for by American tax rates (although, judging by the generally favourable response to the budget tax increase for the wealthy, this may be changing).
The future looks depressing and even frightening unless we can close what I described in my first RSA speech as the social aspiration gap. To create the future most of us aspire to we need citizens who are:
• More actively engaged in collective decision making at every level
• Living more self sufficiently
• Contributing more to the collective capacity of society
More and more evidence tells us that the crucial determinant of citizens’ ‘prosociality’ is the thickness and range of social networks they belong to and quality of social support they receive. This evidence comes not just from sociology but from evolutionary psychology and behavioural science.
So the question for local government as it seeks to protect (or even improve) social outcomes with shrinking public investment is: how can it grow prosocialism, particularly through the fostering of stronger social networks. Another way of putting this is: how can public investment achieve a stronger social multiplier effect?
Here – in a highly abbreviated form – is a six point checklist for a council genuinely committed to this goal:
a) Spend less on opinion polling but seek to gain much more insight into how people actually live their lives and how they frame their social reality
b) In seeking to strengthen social networks start from those that already exist and seek to support and stretch them rather than trying to create new social infrastructures dependent on time limited public funding streams
c) Mainstream social network building. Don’t let this agenda feel additional to all the other targets and pressures; do the tough intellectual work of disclosing how stronger social networks can contribute to existing public service outcomes (like raisings school standards or improving public health)
d) Social networks are about relationships, behaviours and conversations. Behaviours matter more than words. If local authorities want to promote deeper more generous relationships between citizens then councils’ own practice must reflect this. Local Strategic Partnerships, for example, must be truly transformative spaces in which service leaders are willing to see beyond their own organisational imperatives to the fundamental needs of the locality
e) Engage local councillors in a redefinition of politics and social change, moving from a government-centric to a citizen-centric model. Support and incentivise councillors to be capacity builders (if this sounds crazy, there are places it is happening)
f) Understand that the evidence of greater cohesion and capacity lies not in everyone agreeing with each other or with the council, but in people disagreeing creatively (see cultural theory blogs passim).
It was a great session yesterday. My ambition now is for the RSA to develop a consortium of local authorities signed up to this kind of radical agenda and willing to work as an innovation set (each council committing to innovating and learning from others’ innovation).
And, by the way, there is also a lesson here for central Government: it has potentially an important strategic and network-hosting role in fostering this kind of practice in local government. But when it comes to the complex, locally-grounded, task of community capacity building, central Government intervention is much more likely to be damaging than constructive.
The crisis is an opportunity but only if public sector leaders are willing to think big and be brave.
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