Andrew Lansley's speech to think-tank Reform adopts "Nudge" to try and escape from the dilemma posed to modern government in wanting to regulate behaviour, whilst at the same time needing to facilitate the hedonistic, spendthrift consumerism which drives corporate profit.

To this end both parties try to hide their support for Plato's authoritarian mode of government by paying lip service to 'empowerment'.

First in the field was Liam Byrne, who appeared to be junking New Labour's target culture.  [4]

The reality might be more prosaic: the prospect of spending cuts being masked by talk of empowerment.

Not to be outdone are Dave 'n George, who also - it seems - are returning to Edmund Burke's 'little platoons' - in search of communal ideals.  [5]

Then came James 'Photoshop' Purnell, who also wants Labour to return to its 'communal' roots.  [6]

Rightly, Henry Porter demolishes these fantasies by pointing out the authoritarian realities of the government in which both Byrne and Purnell served as ministers.  [7]

After thirty years of relentless centralisation, this all comes as a shock. Can it be genuine, or is it a 'third face of power' ploy to gull cynical voters in the run-up to the 2010 election?

The optimism of empowerment's seminal thinker Ivan Illich is shared by John Seddon, Charles Leadbeater and Amartya Sen, but - and here's the important but - their work is implicitly or explicitly grounded in the notion that there is such a thing as society, and that liberty and libertarianism are diametrically opposed.

There is an important sense in which New Labour's libertarianism - shared by many on the Tories' dominant 'free market' wing - is a partner to totalitarianism, since it offers a camouflage for the real loss of liberty - and democracy - inflicted by neoliberalism.

David Smail's 'sense of agency' warns us not to be deceived by politicians' subterfuge.

The reality is that the neoliberals have substituted consumerism for the loss of power and control over our lives, whereas those thinkers who join Ivan Illich in wishing to see our re-empowerment would remove this deception.

Currently, however, the dystopias imagined by Aldous Huxley - 'Brave New World' - and Ray Bradbury - 'Fahrenheit 451' - are unfolding.

In this context the rise of the misuse of drugs - legal and otherwise - should not surprise us.   [ACT]

The advent of the The National Safeguarding Delivery Unit confirms that the centralisation of the public sector procedes relentlessly in response to problems which arise locally, and would - arguably - be best resolved by vibrant local activism.

Simon Jenkins has had a great deal to say on this subject in recent years, as the following extracts confirm:

[TT1]    [TT2]    [TT3]

The acid test for the Byrnes, Purnells and Osbornes is whether they are willing to take a risk, and delegate powers back to local government, give it the kiss of life with real democracy - [ER] - [PDR] - ensure equality of funding - [LT] - and then butt out.

Ivan Illich's 'conviviality' might emerge from such a regime, but it will not emerge without it, for underpinning the current neoliberal dystopia is the process of commodification of services - and people - which is the bigger enemy of democracy than defective political mechanisms, since commodifying everything is essential to the ultimate 'success' of the 'free markets'.

All else is of marginal significance.

Charity chief says cuts could destroy David Cameron's 'big society'

As councils, NHS primary care trusts and Whitehall departments attempt to deliver the massive budget cuts from next March, recent surveys suggest huge numbers of charities face potentially calamitous losses of grants, contracts and infrastructure support.

Examples in the last fortnight include:

• About 2,500 charities that provide welfare services in Greater Manchester – around a quarter of all voluntary groups in the area – could go bust because of the cuts, according to estimates by the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation.

• A quarter of charities in the north-east of England which depend at least partially on public funding will go bust in the next 12 months, according to research by Voluntary Organisations Network North East. It says that while demand for services has rocketed, 64% of charities surveyed say they will be forced to close services.

• A third of charities nationally that receive state cash say they will have to reduce the level of services they provide, while over a quarter expect to make staff redundant, a survey by the Charity Finance Directors Group, consultants PWC and the Institute of Fundraising found.

The charity thinktank New Philanthropy Capital recently estimated that the voluntary sector's income from state sources could shrink by between £3bn and £5bn as a result of the cuts ...

Guardian  29 Dec 2010    'Big Society'

Community Links open letter to PM

Quarter of Greater Manchester groups could close

North East charities face closure

Managing in a Downturn

Preparing for cuts

Blackwell owner is giving bookseller to staff 'to keep the name over the door'

• John Lewis partnership model to be adopted
• Toby Blackwell, 81-year-old owner, fears damaging takeovers ...

Guardian  09 Sept 2010    Economic Democracy

David Cameron's 'nudge unit' aims to improve economic behaviour

Squaring the circle with 'Libertarian paternalism'

Cabinet office team will look at how to create environments that help people choose what's best for themselves and society ...

A "nudge unit" set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.

The unit, formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, is being run by David Halpern, a former adviser in Tony Blair's strategy unit, and is taking advice from Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor generally recognised as popularising "nudge" theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society.

Thaler was in London for three days this week advising ministers, and in a speech urged the government to adopt longer term horizons.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said he believed the unit could change the way citizens think ...

The initial work of the unit will be focused on areas such as public health issues such as obesity, alcohol intake or organ donation.

Halpern ... has argued that a society of trustworthy citizens is a platform for economic growth and individual wellbeing.

Thaler has focused on how to nurture an individual's better instincts, or how to use nudge methods to persuade people, for instance, to save for retirement or hold back on excessive consumption.

In his speech, Clegg warned of citizens becoming short-termist, one of the traits nudge theory seeks to resist.

He said: "The question is whether our capacity to balance the immediate with the long-term is keeping pace with the expansion of choice.

"In real life, people eat doughnuts, decide not to go for a run, and put off making payments into their pension fund ..."

He said: "The challenge is to find ways to encourage people to act in their own and in society's long-term interest, while respecting individual freedom."

Guardian  09 Sept 2010    David Cameron    Nick Clegg    Plato v Illich

Nudge

Does one Hug, Shove or Smack as well as Nudge?

From Obama to Cameron ...

From Push to Nudge

'Choice architects'

Richard Thaler

Behavioural economics

Behavioral economics

Companies that put employee engagement policy into practice

The top-scoring FTSE 100 company in our employee engagement survey, BT won points for having reported on the issue for the past five years and for providing consistent data for the past three.

Of course, a 147-page corporate social responsibility report does not automatically mean that BT is getting things right all the time, but it does show a willingness to be open about employee relations.

Giles Slinger at Transparent Consulting, who compiled the rankings, says:

"Lots of information in itself does not make a company a high performer, but BT's reporting was also clear and consistent, giving a window on its efforts to evolve how it engages with employees."

The telecoms group has been collecting employee feedback increasingly regularly and putting more of an onus on managers to engage with their staff.

As of this year, each manager gets a report on their team's aggregate responses to feedback schemes, and they are expected to work with the team to make improvements.

Sharon Darwent, head of employee engagement, stresses the need for action to be taken quickly and locally:

"Our current survey closes this Wednesday. Ten days later, we'll deliver the results to the board and to every manager whose team has responded. We'll be looking at what actions have had the most impact on engagement and what can we replicate elsewhere." ...

slabman
22 Aug 2010, 8:09PM

The paper promised a poll on this issue. Can't find that so I'll comment instead.

Employee engagement comes under the heading of corporate bullshit.

The board read the staff survey, barricaded behind their bags of money, and wonder why they are so roundly despised.

In a desperate attempt to appear caring, they implement employee engagement measures.

The poor old employees have to pay lip service, because it's not enough to do the job - you have to show the brand values run through you like a stick of rock.

Yet more of the smiley-faced lying through the teeth that makes the modern workplace such a stress-free delight.

Thanks Guardian, for the uncritical, one-sided article.

Employers - I suggest you take your employee engagement and shove it up your corporate bung-hole.

Guardian  22 Aug 2010    Economic Democracy

Co-operatives offer template for David Cameron's big society

None of the building societies that were turned from mutuals into publicly quoted banks in the 1980s and 1990s has survived as an independent entity.

They have all either been gobbled up in takeovers, gone bust or been bailed out by the taxpayer. The past three years have exposed as a fallacy the idea that the only way to run a company is as a profit-maximising, shareholder-driven plc.

Against this backdrop, it was perhaps unsurprising that all three parties went into the election campaign supporting the idea of co-ops and mutuals

calminthestorm
2 Aug 2010, 1:21AM

...

Larry Elliot seems to have stumbled onto co-operatives, Googled out a few "facts" and written a piece on mutuals without the slightest understanding of the history or values of the co-operative movement and its politcal links.

Co-opertaives are about community working together for the benefit of all, not giving cover to "rolling back the state" What the author of this piece is avocating is actually counter to many mutual ideas. It is a venier of co-operatives for the selfish, just like "free-schools" It is appropraiting co-operative and mutual language for something that isn't co-operative at all in many respects and in others fails to see it is already being advocated because of some anti-Labour blinkers.

I will take just one example, Royal Mail. Tories now say they plan a "John Lewis" model. How? By offering shares to employees. Well that isn't a "John Lewis" model, it is not equal ownership or influence. It is giving them a few shares. Same old polices dressed up as something new to fool those who write business columns that have no real idea of the mutual movement.

Basically some of the column is what the Co-op Party and co-operative movement has been saying and doing for years.

It really does make me mad that the few mentions co-ops get in the mainstream media are often simply so wrong as to misleading. Do your homework next time Larry.

Guardian  02 Aug 2010

Funding the Big Society

Here in Scotland, the SNP government – with whom Labour should be making common cause prior to the Scottish elections next May – has created a strange beast called the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT).

The SFT, which resembles a non-toxic investment bank, has been labouring for over a year on new public financing options, particularly the development of 'not for profit' alternatives to the PFI schemes developed by the Tories and enthusiastically adopted by New Labour.

It is ironic that Labour not only opposed this attempt by the SNP to de-fang capitalism red in tooth and claw, but also had the cheek to call the SNP 'Tartan Tories' for their pains.

SFT progress has been slow, but it has a decent team, and body of expertise, and mainly fulfils an advisory role.

They have probably saved the Scottish government a small fortune in professional and advisory fees, but that fact is unremarked.

The SFT recently made a submission to the independent budgetary review which reports today to the Scottish Government, and this otherwise unremarkable paper contains a key insight ...

LabourList     'Broken Britain' - Dave's 'Big Society'    

Co-operative Party

David Cameron launches next stage of 'Big Society' plan

And there's the catch - projects will get an 'expert organiser and dedicated civil servants' to make sure they don't take 'people power' too seriously. It's more Hazel Blears than Ivan Illich.

Mr Cameron used a speech in Liverpool - one of the areas to benefit - to hail the potential for shifting power from the state to individuals.

But he insisted he was not "naive enough to think that if the Government rolls back and does less, then miraculously society will spring up and do more".

"The truth is that we need a government that actually helps to build up the Big Society," he added.

The other three areas picked to receive initial help with projects are Eden Valley, Cumbria; Windsor and Maidenhead, Berkshire; and the London Borough of Sutton.

Each will get an expert organiser and dedicated civil servants to ensure "people power" initiatives get off the ground and inspire a wider change, the Prime Minister said.

Independent  19 July 2010    Dave's 'Big Society'

Big tents don't have room for all

But what if the Big Society doesn't work?

We can all see you're conning us, Hazel

'Prize draw' to encourage voting

Demos sees big role for supermarkets in regenerating poor communities

A spokesperson from Demos was interviewed on Radio 5's "Morning Reports" slot after 05:00 today.

His main concern appeared to centre around 'poorer' people getting their five fruit and veg a day!

(More 'Nudge' than Ivan Illich.)

The give-away is the prospect of 'local people' running their local services cheaper than the state.

Note, also, ASDA's concern about property taxes, as in can you lower them please, Dave?.

Demos thinktank argues for tax breaks for supermarkets if they can turn sink areas around ...

Demos argues that the presence of mainstream retailers such as Tesco or Asda can encourage a sense of pride on struggling estates, raise aspirations, create jobs and give access to affordable food as well as raising perceptions outside the area.

The supermarket giants should even be offered time-limited tax breaks to help end the "brand deserts" that stigmatise and isolate deprived communities, according to Demos.

The presence of mainstream retail brands, the report argues, has helped to transform Castle Vale and Balsall Heath in Birmingham, areas which had been renowned for high levels of deprivation and crime.

Balsall Heath is one of the areas that is said to have inspired David Cameron's "Big Society" policy ...

The report also suggests that "micro-mayors" serving 1,000-1,500 people should be elected annually to resolve problems such as littering or anti-social behaviour.

The mayors would be funded through a small local levy.

Other suggestions include allowing local people to take over and run services such as Sure Start, parks, health centres and employment services, and giving cash back to those communities that could show they could run a service more cheaply than the state ...

Asda said its stores played a leading role in helping to regenerate communities, including offering work to local unemployed people, and it would welcome incentives to expand its activities.

Jonathan Refoy, the company's head of property communications, added: "As well as the need for local and national planning policy to give more weight to support the significant contribution new store development can bring to communities, it is also important that property taxation encourages investment."

Guardian  07 June 2010    'Broken Britain'

Civic Streets

Dave's Big Society: RIP

Big tents don't have room for all

Whatever the differences, Cameron and Osborne still behave as if they are the heirs of Blair. They both prefer the choreography of politics to the details of policy ...

The deeper point which emerges from Steve Richards' commentary is that politics is, well, just not political any more.

Nor should this surprise us.

The details of the lead item today - 'Coalition to rush through £6bn of cuts' - reveal that the new government is failing to think outside the box.

Government is now a managerial job, struggling to make a grotesquely over-large centralised state function, if not well, then without too many crashes.

It must be a great feeling if you get to play with the levers for the first time, as Blair did in 1997, and the Dave 'n Nick duo are currently.

Later on, however, "stuff happens", which is also what we should expect since it is vanishingly unlikely that such a massively shambolic sprawl could ever be effectively controlled. But the coalition is not there just yet.

The rush to cut £6bn suggests an operation akin to the Captain of the Titanic not just shifting the deckchairs, but throwing them overboard in the hope that a lighter ship might stay afloat.

The opportunity to make a sea change, by both localising the management of the public services, and injecting real grass-roots democracy into that managment, could both widen Blair's very narrow concept of 'stakeholders' to include all of us, and also result in shed-loads of bureaucats getting well-earned P45s.

The difficulty, of course, is that democratic management of schools, hospitals and the police would run counter to the commodification of services, and offend the supremacy of the market

So, moving government from Plato Mode to Ivan Illich Mode is not at all what politicians and the commentariat have in mind.

The commentariat's symbiotic relationship with politicians - alternately massaging or trashing their fragile egos - would lose it's purpose; and the policians ... well, they might just have less to do, like ensuring the differing local authorities have equality of funding.

Independent  18 May 2010    Dave's Big Society

Coalition to rush through £6bn of cuts

A deceptively modest tax break

In which 'Nudge' comes up against fiscal reality

Here is a potential government ... wanting to send a moral message ...

We should not be deceived. The implications of what the Conservatives are proposing go far beyond the initially modest bonus of £150 a year ...

Independent  12 Apr 2010

'No one's to blame'

A tale of how Plato's guardians look after each other. But no one else.

Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.

Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.

But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.

Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.

Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months' salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.

He was said to be medically unfit to do so, though he sent some information to chairman Robert Francis through his solicitor ...

Health Secretary Andy Burnham accepted 18 recommendations from Mr Francis and immediately announced plans for a new inquiry, to be held in public, into how Department of Health and NHS regulators failed to spot the disaster ...

Daily Mail  25 Feb 2010

Welcome to the office, the new Stasi state

David Craig, whose books, including Plundering the Public Sector and Fleeced, earn him honourable mentions in dispatches on the follies of the centralised state, cites dozens of examples of a top-heavy bureaucracy.

In 1997, the NHS had 12 hospital beds per manager; now it has four. Even in 2008, when politicians were protesting that they wanted to protect front-line services during the recession, the NHS had a 2% increase in medical staff and a 10% increase in managers.

In local government under Brown, the number of people in councils earning more than £50,000 a year has shot up by a factor of 11 from 3,300 to 38,000, while in the economy as a whole it only went up by a factor of three.

I could go on quoting him, but it ought to be clear that while the characteristic beneficiary of the Attlee era was the factory worker and the characteristic beneficiary of the Thatcher era was the entrepreneur, the characteristic beneficiary of the Brown era has been the target-setting manager, regulator or consultant ...

Observer  21 Feb 2010    Economic Democracy

Reforming the Regime

James Purnell's miraculous conversion

It's interesting to see who is making the running for the post-election Labour leadership fight ... there is James Purnell, who has been attending to the reinvention of the left in a way that is plainly prompted by political rather than academic ambition.

To launch his latest pamphlet for the Open Left project at Demos he's written an article entitled, Power to the people:

"Once people have power, government can admit that it needs to share the task of governing with them, because only the people themselves can lead us back to a society that is reciprocal, a market that works and a world where empowerment isn't just a cliche that makes editors wince."

I don't mean to dampen Purnell's enthusiasm for empowerment, but what he is saying is totally at odds with the way the government, of which he was an enthusiastic supporter and then a member, has treated parliament and the people over the last 13 years.

The whole thrust of New Labour was to concentrate power at the centre, sideline parliament and place the British public in the unblinking gaze of the state ...

Guardian  17 Feb 2010     Corporate Media

Power to the people

Labour's 'communitarian roots'

Why has empowerment become such a dry, empty, derided word? Because politicians use it but don't mean it.

A false promise of power is worse than none at all ...

But rather than ditch empowerment, I want to ask what it would look like if politicians really meant it, and how that could inspire a radical Labour manifesto.

First, it would mean that we would actually check whether our proposals gave people power.

In schools, for example, are we happy to have replaced selection by ability with selection by mortgage? What power is there for parents who can’t afford to move close to a good school? ...

In a democracy, empowerment means a voting system where all votes count and people can choose their party without worrying that they are wasting their vote.

Crucially, empowerment must mean something in the economy too. As R. H. Tawney said: “The brutal fact is that, as far as the mass of mankind is concerned, it was by fear, rather than by hope, that the economic system was kept running.” ...

Labour took its statist turn in 1945 — we were victims of our success. But Labour didn’t start as a party of the State.

Early thinkers such as Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, founders of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, argued for “a co-operative commonwealth” — that people became powerful through association.

Labour has often remembered, but just as quickly forgotten, those co-operative or communitarian roots ...

Times  17 Feb 2010

Conservatives would allow public services to run co-operatives

It might appear that Osborne has been reading up on Ivan Illich, but - as Robert Peston points out - this may simply be a new route to privatisation.

As part of a Conservative pre-election appeal to Labour-leaning public sector staff, Mr Osborne said a Tory government would offer a “power-shift to public sector workers”. The move could allow teachers and nurses to remove underperforming managers and take over the running of schools and hospitals themselves ...

He added: "This is a power shift to public sector workers so that they take control of their own working environment and they get away from these top-down bureaucracies which have made life a misery for so many people in the public sector." ...

Mr Osborne said that collectives would still face some central control on the way they provide services.

"The check on quality here is that they would be contracting services to the local authority or the National Health Service and they would be providing a contract, for community nursing or for primary education.

"And we would be making sure, as taxpayers, that we were getting value for money and it was appropriately run and the standards the kids were being taught to were at the right level and the like. So it is not a complete free for all."

Standards such as the national curriculum would remain ...

Telegraph  15 Feb 2010

   Reforming the Regime

Conservatives need to work on their credibility

Tories renew pledge to allow public sector workers to form co-operatives

The John Lewis state

The Government will next week unveil a new range of rights to health and social care, education and policing, Liam Byrne, the minister in charge of public service reform, disclosed.

Entitlements to personal tuition in schools, minimum GP waiting times and access to neighbourhood policing are among the proposals being put forward.

In an interview, Mr Byrne said: "We need a power shift from Whitehall ministers and civil servants that currently have the power and move it to citizens.

"We know the argument for public services has got to change so we have been developing a strategy that takes public services away from a target culture to giving people rights and entitlement to core public services."

Mr Byrne said the state should act as "the guarantor" of rights that will be offered across the social spectrum and that people should be given more effective avenues to complain if they feel they are being cheated.

Gordon Brown will announce the new scheme on Monday when he publishes a document, Building Britain's Future, alongside a draft legislative programme ...

Telegraph 27 July 2009

Labour ready to abandon Tony Blair's public service targets

The shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, will use a speech to the thinktank Reform, entitled No Excuses, No Nannying, to set out proposals on how the government and business can work together to address problems caused by poor diet, alcohol abuse and lack of exercise. ...

He will ask a new working group to consider:

· supporting EU-wide proposals for mandatory front-of-pack food labelling

· asking the food industry to reduce portion sizes

· a clampdown on food advertising

· using role models and positive peer pressure to promote healthy living

· local campaigns to promote sport, exercise and healthy lifestyles. ...

Guardian 27 August 2008

Since these proposals involve interference with the market - a.k.a. the "Invisble Hand" - it will be interesting to compare the reality of a Cameron government with its predecessor!

... Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought.

The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly.

Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called "Fuck You, Buddy" (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken ...

A separate strand in the documentary is the work of R.D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory.

His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate strategems during everyday interactions ...

All these theories tended to support the beliefs of what were then fringe economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, whose economic models left no room for altruism, but depended purely on self-interest, leading to the formation of public choice theory.

In an interview, the economist James M. Buchanan decries the notion of the "public interest", asking what it is and suggesting that it consists purely of the self-interest of the governing bureaucrats.

Buchanan also proposes that organisations should employ managers who are motivated only by money.

He describes those who are motivated by other factors — such as job satisfaction or a sense of public duty — as "zealots".

As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of Laing and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public.

Curtis shows that it was this belief that allowed the theories of Hayek to look credible, and underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher, who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible—and placing former national institutions into the hands of public shareholders — a form of social equilibrium would be reached.

This was a return to Nash's work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic, society could result.

The episode ends with the suggestion that this mathematically modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas, statistics—and that it is these figures combined with the exaggerated belief in human selfishness that has created "a cage" for Western humans ...

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