Minister makes good speech shock….

June 10, 2009 by
Filed under: Politics, The RSA 

Occasionally I help politicians with speeches. It’s mainly my old chums in Labour’s ranks but I have been quoted by the odd Conservative too. It’s usually a frustrating process. Before I went into Number Ten, Tony Blair’s speech writing team commissioned me to author a whole speech to the TUC. I spent days on it but when I settled back to listen to my work being delivered by the great man all that remained was one rather pathetic joke.   

But tonight there is an exception. I’ve just read what I think is a really good speech by Tessa Jowell (so, after George Osborne yesterday, that’s two genuinely interesting political speeches in two days – what is the world coming to?). Tessa’s focus is on the need to disperse power in society and among the policies she advocates are greater employee ownership and more steps to turn public services into mutuals and social enterprises. 

 I get a name check near the end, but the passage for which I like to think I might be able to claim some credit is this: 

“ It’s easy to talk about openness, but the test is in bringing it about. First, both politicians and citizens must find new ways to talk about the choices our society must take. That means abandoning both the politics of false choices and the politics of no choices.

 In our early years, New Labour rightly focused on overcoming a series of pernicious polarisations – between employer and employee, social progress and economic progress, public sector and private sector – that were deeply damaging not just to our image politically, but also to our ability to govern with competence.

 But our success at overcoming these polarisations came at a price. Though we made it seem as if there were few hard choices, that decisions did not involve tensions and dilemmas, winners or losers, all of us know that life is not like this.  

We know the tensions and dilemmas – at home, in the workplace, and in the communities in which we live – that are thrown up by the myriad of choices that we each have to make every day.  

Now it’s time, not just for politicians but all of us as citizens, to acknowledge that politics is like this too: traditional economic growth comes at an environmental cost; that if the rich grow richer that carries implications for the overall levels of inequality; that one person’s local democracy is another’s post-code lottery. 

‘Power to the people’ is an easy slogan, but citizenship requires more from us than simply making our demands to politicians and then expecting them to go away and resolve the conflicting interests and viewpoints in a manner wholly to our liking.

 An open political discourse requires us to discard the politics of false choices. People don’t believe that one party has all the answers, so we should offer our policies as a means to illuminate and demonstrate the instincts and values that we bring to the choices we face.”

 Spot on Tessa.

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7 Comments on Minister makes good speech shock….

  1. Jonathan on Wed, 10th Jun 2009 4:39 pm

    2. This is something you hear time and again from front line people in local govt, that citizen engagement musn’t just create more sophisticated ways for people to make more and more demands that government must then disappoint. Has to involve mature conversations about what can’t be done as well as what can.

    Do you have a link for the speech?

  2. Pete B on Wed, 10th Jun 2009 10:32 pm

    3. “Tessa’s focus is on the need to disperse power in society and among the policies she advocates are greater employee ownership and more steps to turn public services into mutuals and social enterprises.”

    I haven’t read Jowell’s speech so I obviously don’t know its full contents. However I am concerned that there is no mention of education in the excerpts you provide. Only by equipping people with the intellectual tools to constructively engage in public debate can power be truly dispersed throughout society. To do this, people need to be engaged with the dilemmas and fine judgements of public policy while they are still at school. Beyond this, the education system needs to be reorientated from training students for exams, towards empowering people by nurturing confidence and creativity .This is not a false choice – for many, the emphasis on exams is precisely what undermines their confidence and creativity.

  3. Lopa Patel on Wed, 10th Jun 2009 10:34 pm

    4. Matthew,

    Excellent excerpts from your speech but I’m wondering if Generation ‘O’ can keep up with the complicated words, especially given the dire state of the quality English that is being taught in our schools.

    I’ve been plundering Obama’s speeches and note his tendency to stick to simple… yet powerful ideas “change is always possible if you’re willing to work for it, fight for it, and, above all, believe in it”. Obviously did the trick for him!

    “Every so often there are moments that define a generation”. Wow! wouldn’t it be great to come up with such beautiful “blue sky”, aspirationa language that moves people?

    I think that’s what’s missing from most of the political speeches I’ve heard lately.

  4. Brian Hughes on Thu, 11th Jun 2009 9:25 am

    5. I’m glad she’s mentioned the “one person’s local democracy is another’s post-code lottery” dilemma. I’ve been banging on about it for years mostly (but not exclusively) to bait the enthusiastic young MP for the nearby Forest of Dean.

    He has been known to go on about releasing professionals in health and education from the vice like grip in which “faceless Whitehall bureaucrats” allegedly trap them.

    But he also bangs on about how those constituents of his who happen to get their health services in Wales get a different level of services from the majority who ditto in England. The dreaded post code lottery which inevitably results from devolved decision making.

    In our deliciously complex world there are not many of the simple answers which tabloid editors, opposition politicians and furious bloggers so often demand…

  5. Public service savings - no pain, no gain : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Thu, 11th Jun 2009 11:27 am

    6. [...] of Tessa Jowell’s welcome call for politicians to be more open and honest about hard choices (see yesterday’s post), we have the Government and Opposition implying that it is only if we elect the other lot next [...]

  6. Rob Greenland on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 10:07 am

    7. Hi Matthew

    good post. Do you have a link to Tessa Jowell’s speech – i’m interested in the social enterprise/employee ownership bit.

    Thanks
    Rob

  7. matthewtaylor on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 11:02 am

    8. Hi Rob – you can find it here http://www.demos.co.uk/. It was part of the future of the left book

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