Don’t read this, read that
A recently submitted comment on an old post, makes a valid point. It’s in response to my repetitive and transparently self-serving requests for evidence that people read this blog:
‘Matthew, ten people want you to keep on blogging. Please employ a cost-benefit analysis. R’
The comment (leading me immediately to suspect anyone whose name begins with the letter ‘R’) panders both to my unquenchable thirst for self-deprecation and encourages me to spend less time posting. (See what you’ve done, ‘R’ – bet you feel pretty low now?)
Fortunately, I can kill two birds with one stone. Towards the back end of last year, The Times ran a couple of articles by me in their ‘4th plinth’ (as I call it) commentary slot. I also got invited to some great breakfasts to coincide with the publication of the newspaper’s Eureka supplement. At last, I thought, my ambition to be a regular columnist is about to be fulfilled. Sadly, the new dawn turned out to be a flash in the pan. Since then, I’ve sent in loads of ideas, and even a couple of full columns, with no joy.
So, human nature being what it is, you would expect me to read The Times comment pages with a jaundiced eye – ‘how can they reject me and print this rubbish?’ But I am bigger than that, oh yes, and being big is made very easy today when there are four brilliant pieces:
Duncan Bannatyne, urging British entrepreneurs to invest in Haiti;
Richard Kemp, on why we should feel positive and determined in the face of bin Laden’s latest claims;
David Aaronovitch, writing about the Edlington case with his usual mixture of common sense and scathing wit; and
Rachel Sylvester on Chilcot, making me feel (a little) better about my old boss. (Accompanied, for balance, by a clever and cruel cartoon.)
The fact is I could write articles till the cows came home, made themselves a light supper and settled back to watch Newsnight (or should that be ‘Moosnight’?) and still not match any of these.
I guess I’ll have to stick to the quality-assurance-free zone that is my blog. Sorry ‘R’!
The real problem of politics
There are two articles worth reading together in today’s Times: Rachel Sylvester says that politicians have no choice but to accept in full the recommendations on their allowances due to be made this week by Sir Christopher Kelly. Her column concludes:
‘ The real problem about expenses is that they have made it harder for politicians to show leadership about the things that matter far more. The verdict of the court of public opinion is too harsh on many MPs. But unless they accept it and move on they will never be able to convince the voters to listen to them on anything else’.
Turn back a few pages and there is Ann Treneman’s typically engaging Commons sketch, which has long been the paper’s only dedicated coverage of Parliamentary proceedings. It is Treneman’s job to encourage us to laugh at our politicians but it seems that any attempt she might make at belittling yesterday’s debate about the EU summit would pale by comparison with MPs’ determination to belittle themselves.
While all this is going on, the fundamental problem with our democracy is, if anything, getting worse. This problem is the gap between the world as it is and the world as the public thinks it is, or wants it to be – which, in turn, leads to an ever greater list of issues on which there is simply no honest position that politicians can adopt which does not risk public outrage.
Despite arriving late, Home Secretary Alan Johnson gave an interesting speech here yesterday (featured on Page 1 of the Times). As Michael Clarke, Director of RUSI, said in his thoughtful response, the Home Office, perhaps more than any other department, has to try to adapt to a fast changing and shrinking world. In so doing the department faces issue after issue, most created by aspects of globalisation, on which the public is profoundly ambivalent. Here are three examples:
• We want to know who is in the UK, to better enforce immigration rules and to ensure that people only receive the services and benefits to which they are entitled, but there is both scepticism and antipathy towards the national database which underpins ID cards.
• We want to reduce asylum applications and to return those who came here illegally or have not won the right to stay. Yet if we had befriended a Zimbabwean or Iraqi who had settled here with their family we would no doubt think it was appalling that they might be forcibly repatriated. In response to a question along these lines Alan Johnson told the Great Room that when some time ago the Home Office said that it would not return any fleeing Zimbabweans the number of applications from those who claimed to be from that country rose by 80%.
• We want our civil liberties protected but we would be outraged if a terrorist incident occurred which we felt could, by whatever means, have been avoided
It is not that these issues are irresolvable. Nor that the Government has always got its strategy right. Indeed, yesterday I left Michael Clarke and philosopher AC Grayling in John Adam Street agreeing that the Government had made the mistake of making the protection of lives more important that the protection of our way of life (which includes our rights and liberties).
My point is simply that these issues are difficult and that if we (or the press) are looking for simple and reassuring answers we are looking in vain.
This was one of the themes of my annual lecture last week. Here is an extract:
“ It is hard enough for politics to reconcile different interests and preferences in society but, now, a combination of the complexity of modern life and consumerist expectations mean that politicians face the challenge of reconciling conflicting interests and preferences in the same people. Generally, it is a challenge they duck. We have an economy and a public sector mired in debt. We have ambitious carbon reduction targets but no realistic account of how we are going to meet them. We are the fifth richest nation in the world but suffer high levels of child poverty. All this may be cited as evidence of how politicians have failed to face down the superficial and contradictory demands of voters.
If we wanted people to see democracy as inherently about dilemmas, and trade offs, balancing interests within people, within society and across time, what might we do?
If you want to know what I think is the answer you’ll have to read or watch the whole speech…..
MPs allowances: the dangers of winning, the virtues of clumsiness
There is one thing worse than losing a political argument: winning it. Given that all policy is seen to fail sooner or later, those who oppose an idea know it is only a matter of time before they can say ‘I told you so’. But the person who presses their case and wins runs the risk of being left the isolated scapegoat. In true ‘In the Loop’ fashion Whitehall insiders have their own version of an old saying: ‘success has many parents, but failure is a bastard’. I lost many arguments in my time at Number Ten, but if ever I thought I might win I made sure I wasn’t alone.
It is, I suspect, only a matter of time before we hear competing accounts of whose voice it was that last week piped up at Downing Street to suggest Gordon Brown intervene again in the MP’ allowances argument. Could it have been the same person who advocated the now shelved attendance allowance scheme and then went on to suggest the Prime Minister make his case on YouTube? If so they, like another unfortunate advisor, will soon find lifelong friends calling them by their surname (I had tea last week with an ex-Treasury civil servant who giggled uncontrollably each time he found an excuse to refer to ‘Mr McBride’).
By the way, while we are on the YouTube debacle I can’t resist repeating Catherine Bennett’s brilliant description of Gordon Brown ‘giving the impression of an unusually intelligent alien who has made a careful study of human beings, without ever having had the opportunity to meet one’.
On the substantive issue I refer back to an earlier post, offering a cultural theory explanation for the ‘clumsy’ system of MPs’ allowances. I made the point that there is no neat solution to MPs’ remuneration that doesn’t create new problems of its own. Oh, if only Number Ten read my blog, how much embarrassment they could have avoided!
The irony of all the talk of new systems is that the present arrangements are, I suspect, only one small reform from being workable, and this reform is about to be implemented. As the Scottish system shows, making all expense claims immediately transparent largely takes the heat out of the issue; for two reasons. On the one hand, all but the most shameless MPs avoid making claims that will bring them into disrepute. On the other, the fact that the claims are publicly available takes away the journalists’ ability to ‘expose’ the information in a sensationalist way.
One of the perils of policy making – and dangers of political hubris – is overturning a whole system when minor reforms could have the desired effect (did someone say ‘Frank Dobson and the NHS internal market?’). There is no popular way to pay MPs – as Rachel Sylvester argues cogently, this reflects a deeper malaise in political discourse - but the present system plus transparency may well be the best we can realistically manage. Not that I’d want to be the one who tells Gordon!
Cultural theory – and the link between George Washington and Gordon Brown
Cultural theory has changed the way I think about policy dilemmas and organisational problems. It can provide insights to everyone from political commentators to community activists to managers of large organisations. Over the next few days in some – hopefully – short, accessible posts I intend to lay out the key tenets of CT as I understand them by reference to concrete examples and contemporary issues.
I have the good fortune to be in regular correspondence with two of the world’s leading cultural theorists, Marco Verweij and Michael Thompson (who wrote a piece in the last RSA Journal). They are busy guys but I am hoping to persuade them to check in and comment on the blog and any follow up chat.
The first question is what kind of explanation does cultural theory offer? At its most simple it offers a way of understanding how people try to solve problems which is more powerful than many conventional approaches.
Here are some common ways of understanding why people adopt different strategies to solve problems:
• ‘Nowt so queer as folk’: We all see a problem in the same way, but people come to different conclusions about what should be done for reasons that are random or perverse
• ‘It’s who you are in society’: People come to different conclusions depending on their own interests and status; e.g. class, status, race, gender
• ‘It’s what you believe’: People come to different conclusions reflecting their deeply held values and political attitudes
• ‘It’s the type of person you are’: People come to different conclusions because of their personalities.
Cultural theory doesn’t deny that all these factors may be relevant but it argues that social problem solving exhibits the interaction of four basic categories of response: the egalitarian, the hierarchical, the individualistic and the fatalistic.
These responses are more systematic than the ‘nowt so queer’ account allows for; they are more complex and dynamic than fixed social interests imply; they cut through and across systems of belief and political affiliation; and – while people may have personalities that predispose them to certain options – the strategy a person advocates will in practice reflect the dynamics of each different problem solving process.
Tomorrow I want briefly to describe the content of the perspectives and summarise some of the evidence for these responses being fundamental and ubiquitous. But I’ll end today with an historical and a contemporary example of cultural theory in practice.
In ‘Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership’ cultural theorists Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky use CT to explore the ways Presidents from Washington to Lincoln have dealt with the circumstances and dilemmas they faced. You need to read the book, but it is typical of a CT perspective that the authors explain George Washington’s tendency to adopt pomp and ceremony whenever he could, his refusal to back the new French revolutionary Republic in its conflict with the rest of Europe, and his heavy handed crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion as examples of the dilemmas facing a hierarchical President operating in a fiercely anti-hierarchical (individualist and egalitarian) culture.
Fast forward 220 years and we see another insecure hierarchical leader, coping with what was, until very recently, an anti-hierarchical culture. Here is Rachel Sylvester writing yesterday in The Times about Gordon Brown;
“there is a sense in which the Prime Minister is dealing with the economic downturn so confidently partly because it requires greater state intervention – something with which he is instinctively comfortable”
Brown’s standing has risen because the world has come back to him; at a time of fear and insecurity, when the individualist consensus of the last thirty years has crumbled with the casino capitalism it sanctioned, we crave the certainties offered by hierarchy.
The four strategies of cultural theory are ever present options for those seeking social solutions. At certain times events strongly favour a particular response and those that advocate it. That is why a man who was just about our most unpopular ever Prime Minister six months ago has seen his standing rise and his impact grow (at home and abroad) despite being in the midst of a crisis for which most people hold him at least partially responsible.
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