No one's to blame Welcome to the office, the new Stasi state Purnell's miraculous conversion Power to the people Tory public service 'co-operatives' Labour to abandon target culture No excuses for being fat A 'Cage for Western humans' Nudge: More Links

"The wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow" This quote from Plato could well appear over the doors of Parliament and Whitehall offices, not to mention each party's H.Q. Put it another way: " ... in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves." The quote from Douglas Jay dates from 1937, and has recently been updated by Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.  Nudge They are less bold than Plato - possibly less bold that Douglas Jay - but the end result is the same: rulers are different from - wiser than - the rest of us, and they have to find ways of "nudging" us into 'the right' choices: Unfortunately, we often make poor choices - and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Plato's 'guardians' are alive and well. More

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 innate libertarianism - consumerism - of market forces.

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 by 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 is George Osborne, who also - so it seems - is returning to Tory roots - Edmund Burke's 'little platoons' - in search of communal - co-operative - ideals.  [5]

Then came James 'Photoshop' Purnell, who 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 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' acts both to deceive us as to our lack of power and control over our lives, whereas the thinkers who join Ivan Illich in wishing to see power move much closer to us would remove this deception.

Now 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 demonstrate:

Respect starts with you letting us run our lives, Godfather Blair

Miliband’s task is to promote community but suppress local government.

He must not tolerate any subsidiary democracy that might challenge the legitimacy of the centre and its regional viziers.

This is a paradox that Miliband cannot possibly resolve. The giveaway came in Blair’s explanation of how he would resolve it: through the police and law enforcement ... ...

What has been lost in Britain is the tier of neighbourhood control which, in most countries, is supplied by the little platoons, what de Tocqueville called democracy’s intermediate associations.

British politicians laud the success of community policing in America and Scandinavia. These successes were not imposed from above. They emerged from what Blair most abhors, local government.

Directly elected police chiefs in America were the catalyst for a return of street patrols and zero tolerance. Devolution to elected municipalities yielded the more effective crime regimes now operating in most northern European states. In both cases, public discipline is underpinned by elected (not appointed) neighbourhood and civic leaders. Without them, community policing has nothing on which to bite.

Communities without chosen leaders are mere composites of frightened families and demoralised professionals. They cannot be held together by police, any more than they can by regional offices, quangos and overnight Whitehall initiatives.

If he is to do anything but platitudinise, Miliband has to revive local leadership by granting it more discretion.

He has to galvanise local devolution and disband his army of regulators and inspectors.

The public realm has to be repopulated by willing doctors, teachers, lawyers, clergymen and other informal leaders such as farmers and businessmen. Their contribution to local life in Britain is barren compared with abroad ...

The Times 15 May 2005

Instead of elected local leaders, we have the police

Our society has no tier between individuals and the central state - and nobody to enforce communal discipline. ...

A tier of social control has been lobotomised from British public life. There is nothing between the individual or family unit on one hand and the central state on the other.

Britain has fallen into De Tocqueville's trap of an atomised society, where "every man is a stranger to the destiny of others. He is beside his fellow citizens but does not see them ... while above them rises an immense and tutelary power, that of the state".

We have lost the habit of association.

The nearest any British community has to local government these days is the police force. Local leadership is a 999 call ...

Go to any community abroad, whether in America or France or Germany or the Netherlands, and that figure will be a locally elected official, normally a mayor. He or she may represent a city, a village, a neighbourhood or just a block association, but they will be known by their people and trusted. Mayoral name recognition in France and Germany is 80%-90%. Legitimacy rests not on a uniform but on a vote ...

Guardian 27 February 2008

They preach citizenship, but are terrified of losing power

Real participation is not bestowed by politicians. New Labour needs to get over its obsessional aversion to voting.

In the week that France votes 36,000 mayors into or out of office, Britons are told to pledge their loyalty to the sovereign. Republican democracy versus monarchical centralism. Some things never change.

The former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was asked by the prime minister to chase two of his will-o'-the-wisps, citizenship and Britishness. Goldsmith burrowed away in the consultative undergrowth and has emerged covered in mud. His big idea seems to be to get teenagers to swear oaths of allegiance to the Queen ...

Where Goldsmith comes off the rails is in continuing New Labour's obsessional aversion to democracy. He regards citizenship, like Britishness, as a top-down obligation, as obedience, respect and the reception of messages from afar.

His paternalism is a barely sanitised version of Lenin's democratic centralism. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the civic space in which ordinary Britons live, breathe and conduct their politics, which is based on neighbourhood, community, village, town and city.

The participating citizen is not someone who, in the language espoused by Brown and Goldsmith, comes dutifully alive on national days to swear undying loyalty to the leader ...

Fear of voting is the prevailing disease of the British establishment. Britons vote less often, for fewer representatives, to more distant councils than in any other democracy ...

The Guardian 12 March 2008

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.

'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

'Dignity & Compassion' in the John Forbes Nash NHS    Take a second look at New Labour    Targets & Bonuses

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    Targets & Bonuses

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

Election 2010    Policy, Delivery, Accountability    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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