Being right on the left
Being in the right makes us feel good, but it also makes it harder to resolve differences.
This is now the third year of RSA fringe meetings at the major party conferences. Every event we have put on has been packed out and all have been very well received. I have lost count of the number of people who have said from the floor, or at the end, that our meetings are more interesting than the average run of the mill event. The events have also been pretty successful in generating media interest which is very impressive given all the other distractions (I often say to people who hope to generate publicity at party conferences ‘there is one thing harder than looking for a needle in a haystack – looking for a needle in a pile of needles). This morning the Today programme contained two packages which came out of our event.
Part of the secret lies in our partnerships. This year we have the kind support of The Social Investment Business, which brings new funding into the third sector and helps the sector win public service contracts and whose Chief Executive, Jonathan Lewis, spoke on the panel last night. And because of our collaboration with IPSOS/MORI our events all begin with a vivid picture (provided by the always entertaining Ben Page) of the often contradictory and idiosyncratic nature of public opinion.
Our theme this year has been the Big Society but with a subtly different twist at each conference. Last week Sarah Teather and Simon Hughes were eloquent in explaining why they thought the Big Society could be a Liberal Democrat idea. Last night new Labour MPs Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall agreed with the debate proposition ‘Labour should wean itself off the big state’. Next week we will explore with the Conservatives how to generate a big society in the most deprived areas, even while they are suffering cuts to benefits and services.
Hunt and Kendall were both very impressive. It occurred to me that David Miliband’s campaign has restored the self respect and self confidence of the ’New Labour’ wing (for want of a better term) of the Labour party. These are people who had felt undermined and even tarnished by the Blair Brown Mandelson soap opera, not to mention some of Labour’s failings in Government. Despite his defeat, the honesty and clarity of the David Miliband campaign has reinvigorated the section of the party that most supported him.
Which goes to show that feeling you are right is a big source of energy. It is why defeat can sometimes be more energising that victory. However, the same emotion can also drive people to be self righteous and even become embittered. As I have said before in this blog, I wish we spent more time in debate trying to agree what we disagree about rather than simply proving the other guy wrong.
Following Ed Miliband’s solid, but less than earth shattering, speech this afternoon some David supporters may have their sense of rightness reinforced. It will, I guess, be important to the Labour Party that this energy is channelled not into recriminations but into guidance and support their new leader.
Can political parties be community organisers?
Having failed for years to persuade Labour’s bosses that the traditional hierarchical model of party organisation was bust I wrote positively last year about the attempt by the Conservative Party to turn its grass roots organisation outwards with the development of local social projects. Sadly, I later had to admit that the practice didn’t quite live up to the expectations.
So naturally I was interested in David Miliband’s weekend call for radical party reform. The bookies’ favourite to be the next leader of the opposition said:
‘ We have to rebuild the Labour movement as an organising, campaigning ‘movement for change’ – open, reaching out to local communities, more democratic. And it has to be bottom-up and not top-down.
This is in the best traditions of the Labour Party. It is where our movement started – trade unions, the co-op. Before working people had the vote they organised for change, to campaign against things like child labour and for things like decent working conditions. And it persists in some areas to this day – it is this tradition we saw in those seats that were held against the swing in the general election’.
I agree entirely with the sentiment. Society would be stronger and politics better if parties had deeper community roots. Sadly, it’s a lot easier said than done.
The biggest problem is reconciling local freedom and community organisation with party discipline. David Miliband quotes the success of Gisela Stuart’s campaign in Edgebaston as evidence of the power of strong community based organisation. But local activists have said that their ability to mobilise behind the MP was also related to her record of voting against the Government whip on controversial questions. This issue is even more difficult at council level. If a party runs the local authority but local branches then campaign against its unpopular decisions (and let’s face it there’s going to be plenty of them in the years to come) it undermines party unity and can confuse voters. Stewart campaigned against the decisions of the Tory Lib Dem coalition running Birmingham City Council but she will find it much more problematic if the council goes Labour again.
This is less of an issue if the local party is focusing on community self-help but the examples Miliband quotes – like London Citizens – tend to be campaigning organisations. The Conservative experience shows how hard it is to develop a social enterprise model. This takes us to the second issue – resources. Here at the RSA we have for several years been in the process of reforming Fellowship from the traditional membership model to one that focuses on collaboration and civic innovation. Most recently, for example, we have launched the Catalyst Fund which gives groups of Fellows small grants to develop social initiatives. The far-from-complete process of Fellowship reform has up to now involved multiplying the budget spent on outreach and support many times over. Although David Miliband is to be commended for digging into his own campaign funds to fund training for community organisers, it is unclear whether the national Labour Party has the money to invest in community development or that – when push comes to shove – this investment would be prioritised over more traditional campaign spending.
The third and possibly hardest challenge concerns organisational culture. Creative, committed people (the kinds you need for community self help) have a million and one options and distractions. It is hard to attract them and hard to retain them. Few community groups provide a good enough offer for such people. There is, in my opinion, one overriding reason. The grim reality of voluntary organisation is that bad behaviour drives out good more effectively than vice versa. It only takes one or two difficult people to make meetings unbearable and decision making impossible. The creative people quickly stop coming, leaving the wreckers free to complain that they are now the only activists. As part of a project we co-sponsored with the NCVO, I have discussed this dynamic with people from a whole range of membership organisations. After some initial flannelling, they all admit it is a huge problem. Indeed I once heard it described as ‘the inverse law of activism’ – the people you least want to be active are the ones most likely to become so.
Apart from election campaigning for friends I haven’t been active in the Labour Party for many years, so maybe it has already started to change. If not David Miliband faces a task of cultural transformation which – he needs to acknowledge more fully – will take many battles and many years to bear fruit.
The cabinet’s big gamble
Here, for what it’s worth, are my thoughts about this bizarre unfolding day of politics. First, expect the unexpected. Over the last two years no one predicted the huge swings of the political pendulum. Brown’s position was so strong in his first few months he nearly called an early election. He then went into free fall before starting to pull things back last autumn as the Conservative response to the credit crunch faltered. Then, in the last few weeks, in the wake of McBride and MPs’ expenses, Brown has taken Labour to new depths of support.
The last 24 hours are a microcosm of these wild swings. Listening to the radio last night after James Purnell’s resignation, the pundits were close to consensus that the game was up for the Prime Minister. But now with Miliband, Darling and Johnson safely ensconced in the big three jobs there is an emerging view that the Prime Minister may survive. Number Ten has a slew of major policy announcements on the stocks. Downing Street believes that if Brown can maintain sufficient momentum to get through the next few days his chances of making it to the general election are pretty good. But if this sounds like prediction, ignore it – the one thing we have learnt over the last two years is that political pundits are less reliable than horse racing tipsters.
My second point assumes Gordon Brown survives. He will then be able to rely on the total commitment and loyalty of his cabinet. Unlike almost everyone else, I try to take a charitable view of politicians. So, I assume that those ministers who have long had private criticisms of the Brown set-up have stayed in Government because they have changed their mind for strong substantive reasons. To be propping up a Prime Minister simply from inertia, fear or career calculation would be hard to defend. This implies the Cabinet must now be made up of people whose genuine political judgement it is that Grown Brown can defy the odds and come through next year, presumably by a combination of visionary new policy, economic recovery and drawing the dividing lines with the Conservatives.
Everyone in Labour ranks – including James Purnell – will hope those who have stayed have got it right, and given the swings of the last two years it is not inconceivable. But if they are wrong there will be nowhere to hide. After the Purnell resignation no one can say they didn’t have a choice.
So, on the one hand we have the possibility of another swing of the pendulum and the greatest political come back in modern Parliamentary history. On the other hand, if Gordon does stay and lose badly, Labour members could turn against the whole of its current leadership class. Few of the people then emerging as the architects of the post Blair-Brown Labour Party will be names widely recognised today.
David, Hillary and the power of face to face
By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be affection and respect, shared values and purpose, or a hard headed sense of mutual dependence. It looks like Miliband and Clinton have all three.
The recession is now leading to deep cuts in corporate travel budgets, but the defenders of executive jet-hopping emphasise the importance of face to face contact in deal making. In contrast, on-line collaboration is proving to be an elusive goal.
Personal collaboration, involving working through different interests and perspectives, relies on a high level of reciprocal communication. If we disagree on one topic I need to know, or sense, enough about you to calculate what appeal I might make to other values or interests that you hold. I have also to believe that if I give up some ground, you may too. Face to face, most of this happens though processes of unconscious communication (the evidence for this has been gathered by Daniel Goleman in his book, Social Intelligence).
There are, of course, many examples of collaboration on-line: Linux, Wikipedia, campaigns like Obama’s, but these are all vertical processes in which participants contribute to a central shared objective on the basis of agreed rules of engagement. Horizontal collaboration, when people of the same status agree their own objectives, ways of working and mutual commitments, is different and much harder. This is one reason for the limited success (in relation to the overall scale of on-line activity) both of attempts to translate on-line exchange into off-line activity and of forms of web-based deliberation designed to get people of different views to listen and learn from each other. The unconscious clues that tell us co-operation and compromise will be matched and rewarded are simply not there.
Another dimension of this is reported by Jonah Lehrer. It turns out that the social networks on Facebook are significantly different to those off-line. Whereas in the off-line world popular people tend to network with other popular people, in Facebook the networks of the most popular are often inhabited by those whose own networks are very small. As Lehrer concludes:
Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is.
The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington.
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