Life and death issues hidden by the fog of indignation

May 27, 2009 by · 19 Comments
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Public policy, The RSA 

Yesterday I suggested that the big problem with politics is neither MPs’ expenses nor the conventions of the constitution (although I am a reformer), but the content and tone of the conversation between the people and their representatives. There is something febrile and disconcerting about the state of public opinion. A few days ago I described an arc of indignation starting with Ross and Brand travelling through Fred Goodwin and Sharon Shoesmith and landing now on MPs. Daniel Finkelstein is, as always, very sharp on this today.        

In this atmosphere what chance is there for enlightening debate about the challenges facing our country and the world? In yesterday’s FT, Gideon Rachman made a powerful point: countries facing severe economic downturn and fiscal crises have to make hard choices. This happened in Latin America around the turn of the century and it is already happening in some Eastern European countries; for example, Estonia has cut public sector pay by 10% while Hungary has raised the retirement age and cut pensions by 8%.

It may be because the people of these countries had a strong memory of harsher times that they were willing to accept tough measures as the price for getting back on track. Can we imagine such resigned fortitude emerging from our own indignant, intolerant and self pitying public discourse? 

The big danger here is that by putting off hard decisions today we will make the pain tomorrow longer and deeper, and that our economic and financial problems might then turn into a social and democratic crisis. Our apparent inability to have a grown up discussion (a politics of citizens not clients) also reduces the possibility of creative thinking.

In a fascinating talk here this morning- jointly hosted by Policy Network and the RSA 2020 Public Services Trust - the Director of the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy, Professor Anton Hemerijck, laid out the core arguments of his forthcoming book on the welfare state in Europe after the financial crisis.  Among a wealth of data and analysis, I was particularly taken by his five dimensions of welfare state recalibration. These are:

• Functional: what should the welfare state do? For example in the UK we have reduced entitlements for HE students but increased them for under fives

• Normative: what are the duties and values underpinning the welfare state? For example, in the last two decades across Europe, there has been a growing emphasis on responsibility, with a shift from supporting people out of work to seeking to get them back to work

• Distributive: who gets what? For example, there has been a general shift in thinking from redistribution being primarily about class to focussing on distribution across the life cycle 

• Institutional: how is the welfare state organised? David Cameron (in contrast to Margaret Thatcher) presumably thinks retrenchment will be done better if more responsibility is decentralised

• Referential: who do we compare ourselves with? Over the years there have been various fashions in economic and social policy; enthusiasms for Japan, Germany, the US and Scandinavia have come and gone (it is a rule of comparative policy that just when the world’s experts agree that a country has the perfect system that system promptly starts to collapse). But which national model will be seen as the best for coping with recession and retrenchment?

This is a rich agenda for debate. Call me out of touch but I can’t help thinking it may be just a little more important for us than whether ministers should get tax relief for accountancy services.

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‘The market is bust but so is the state’

April 7, 2009 by · 7 Comments
Filed under: Credit crunch, Public policy 

This is the headline of Philip Stephens’ piece in today’s FT. The intriguing thing about Stephens’ discussion of the relative merits of state and market solutions is that he fails to make any mention of the third – or civic sector. The growing economic and social crisis will turn into reality the warning we have been given by many social and political theorists: state and market alone are not sufficient for sustainable progress – indeed both state and market rely on the civic sector.

 The big question for the coming decade is this: in the face of a depressed market and an indebted state, how can we enhance civic capacity? Unless we are individually and collectively more able to develop and to meet our own needs then it is difficult to see how we face anything other than a decline in the quality of our lives and the fabric of our communities.

 But this issue is still only at the margins of debate. There are now more examples of new and reconfigured public services which draw on capacity outside the state:

  • The Youth Opportunity and Capital Fund provides money which young people control and decide how to spend on activities and facilities in their area. An amazing variety of processes have developed to engage young people and an even more impressive list of initiatives in areas ranging from community cohesion and sport to culture and environment.
  • Direct payments enable social care clients and carers to access payments directly and decide how to spend them. In just a few years this revolutionary idea has spread from the disability movement to being rolled out in councils across England. As more and more people sign up, so new ways for people to collaborate on buying and providing services are starting to emerge.  
  • In March 2009 the Government announced the £30 million Community Assets Programme. This allows local third sector organisations to apply to gain control of and refurbish underused local authority assets.  This initiative, recognises the impact that has been made by community organisations like ‘friends’ of local parks who have worked with councils to revive dilapidated and under-used public spaces.

Arguably, the single biggest example is domestic refuse recycling where responsibility for managing domestic waste has shifted from being primarily the responsibility of the local authority to being a shared responsibility between householder and council.

Yet still this is at the margins. Every public service manager needs to have an account of not just how they provide an efficient service but how they contribute to civic capacity. And the private sector too faces searching questions about its impact on our social resilience and well-being.

When it comes to the ability of Britain to survive and grow from adversity, statists and free market absolutists are like Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’. In this new world, the state cannot succeed and the market cannot thrive unless we attend to the civic foundations upon which both edifices rest.

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The G20 and the challenge of leadership

March 13, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Politics 

I am being interviewed this afternoon as part of a public engagement exercise ahead of the G20. So I was interested to read Philip Stephens’ piece in this morning’s FT. Maybe Stephens knows more than he is letting on because the piece gives great many reasons to be pessimistic about the G20 before ending up on a positive note.

The issues Stephens raises are pretty difficult; not least the fact that there is no consensus on what the G20 is and, even, who is in it.

Beyond these challenges what kind of ambition do the G20 leaders have for the process itself? I don’t mean by this what specific outcomes do they want, more what are their commitments and hopes for the G20 as a process of leadership decision making.

I am sure there are other better established typologies than this (if so please tell me) but it is possible to distinguish four levels of ambition for engagements between leaders of different organisations.

The least ambitious level is where the parties have fixed predetermined positions and are hoping, at best, to find a way of packaging these so they look like a more concerted international effort.  This has in general been the limit of most previous G7 or G8 summits

The next level up is where the parties are willing to negotiate around their fixed interests. Through a process of negotiation it may be possible to achieve some progress simply because the interests become better aligned.

The third level is where the leaders are committed to exploring new solutions which go beyond the aggregation or horse-trading of existing resources and strategies. This is the ideal captured in the famous cartoon of two donkeys straining at either end of rope, neither of them to eat from the bush just out of their reach. In cartoon two the donkeys come together and in cartoon three they take it in turns to walk together to each bush and eat their fill (I searched the internet for this cartoon but couldn’t find it – can anyone help?).

The fourth level is transformative. This is the level at which the distinction between my interests, your interests and shared interests breaks down, indeed the inadequacy of the very idea of clear and definable interests in a situation of challenge and complexity becomes apparent.         

To have any chance of level four there needs to be, first, an over-riding urgency and ethical commitment. Second, someone has to start the process of giving up the idea of fixed interests to be traded. Third the group has to achieve a ‘gestalt’ moment when the sum is greater that the total of the parts.

One example I heard of concerned a Local Strategic Partnership in a Northern town. The LSP agreed that unless the town could establish a higher education presence it would continue to lose all its brightest young people and this in turn meant the place would be confirmed in its status as an old industrial town with no future. At this point the FE College Principal, who chaired the LSP, offered to give up the small number of HE courses at his college as part of a package to attract an existing University to put a campus in the town. There was no way it could be shown that this would be in the FE college’s interest yet the Principal won support and the campus duly arrived.

The G20 has one key ingredient for transformational change: a clear and present economic crisis, not to mention an ever more urgent environmental emergency. But for response to match challenge will require an act of real, disinterested, leadership from one of the big leaders and the emergence of a powerful synergy between the leaders themselves.

I don’t know how the summit is structured, but if I had anything to do with it I would start with a powerful and globally respected figure (Mandela maybe) calling, first, on the leaders to aspire to transformation and, second, on the people of the world to judge their leaders not by their ability to defend national interest but on their willingness to be part of a profound demonstration of global leadership.

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