Newsletter spring 2008
See below: The Olympics and the new servile state capitalism.
Faceless Britain
I chaired a consultative session at the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool about this new campaign, led by Julia Goldsworthy and Danny Alexander, which goes to the heart of the vast bureaucratic nightmare that the British state is becoming. What comes next is to name the monster: the dehumanising result of a combination of giantism, bogus efficiency and the sclerosis of centralisation, public and private.
The next green agenda: mental health
The latest research is revealing the dramatic effects of trees and nature on people’s mental health, on their recovery rates in hospital and their state of mind in prison. So why are we still designing our cities, especially for the poor, as wastelands of concrete and traffic?
http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/politics/mental.html
Do good lives have to cost the earth?
My essay in the new book with that title says that the question isn’t new, that answers stretch back to a tradition that includes Morris, Ruskin, Chesterton, Cobbett, Schumacher and Gandhi – and the Distributist movement of the 1920s (see below). What we have that they didn’t is some practical answers.
http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/history/goodlives.html
The great public services debate
Why haven’t public services improved? Why are Beveridge’s Five Giants still alive? This it at the heart of the Lib Dem argument about public services, and I’m arguing about it online. Yes, there is a fault line between those who see people as active participants and those who see them only as passive supplicants. But it isn’t just those who want services to be privatised who are on the wrong side, it’s also some of the apologists for the local government status quo.
http://davidboyle.blogspot.com/2008/03/supplicant-state.html
The Beijing Olympics and Servile State capitalism
Captain Scott, the Titanic, I’m just going outside and maybe some time – 1912 was a year of heroic sacrifice, among other things. One of the minor sacrifices was made that year by the controversial writer, historian and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, abandoning his coveted seat in the House of Commons in disgust with the place.
That same year, he published his most important book, The Servile State, which catapulted him out of the Liberal Party and launched the now almost forgotten Distributist movement. His thesis was that both capitalism and socialism tended towards slavery, and that only giving people an ownership stake – homes, smallholdings and small businesses – could guarantee their freedom.
Belloc wasn’t a critic of free trade in itself, but he was warning about its perversion. He and G. K. Chesterton made a critical distinction between free trade by independent business and trade by giant semi-monopolies, but for some reason the British political traditions have barely articulated this difference since.
The original Liberal argument for free trade was that it was an extension of the battle against slavery, another guarantee of freedom – and certainly free enterprise has swept away the privileges of land and aristocracy. The alternative is that landlords and employers can insist on single suppliers and lethal prices to their captive clientele.
But Belloc was right too, and current trends are such that it might be time to revisit The Servile State – and preferably before the Beijing Olympics. Because, as he predicted, we now face a tyrannical combination of capitalism and socialism that uses the rhetoric of free trade, but is turning its back on competition – and all in the name of ‘efficiency’. This contains the seeds of a new kind of oppression: the subjugation of everything to corporate efficiency and government-sponsored profitability.
You can see it in the new phenomenon of Chinese socialist capitalism, with its brutal suppression of communities, tradition, dissent and much else besides.
You can see it in the phenomenon of Bush-Cheney American capitalism, with its $10 billion monopoly contract to Halliburton in Iraq.
You can even see it in Gordon Brown-style UK capitalism, with its consolidations, its dwindling of potential bidders for local waste contracts, where you can have anything you like – as long as it’s Tesco, with a security guard watching you from a chair by the door.
This is a new kind of capitalism, more socialist than enterprising, where we are supplicants to distant monopolies, observed and recorded by smartcards and subservient to financial service companies based offshore.
This is a capitalism where spin is substance. When Monsanto says its GM seeds do not drift, then – when they grow uninvited on neighbouring organic farms in Canada – the farmers are prosecuted for theft.
And when the UK government says its ID cards are foolproof, then – when our identities are stolen by fraudsters – then we must be guilty, because the computer says so.
The unveiling of this servile capitalism is the historic significance of the Beijing Olympics. It is a definitive shift away from the original meaning of free trade, towards a supplicant, totalitarian capitalism. An important moment in human history – unless we’re careful...
Newsletter autumn 2007
Anita the Great
I worked closely with Anita Roddick and miss her enormously. Her legacy will be widespread, and – despite the way she was consistently dismissed by the business press – especially in the way we do business. This is what I wrote about her for Open Democracy, also syndicated to South Africa.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/visions_reflections/anita_roddick
Why protesting can make you richer
Why should unravelling planning controls still further make places wealthier? All the evidence is the other way: it has been the consistent ability of my neighbours to occupy and prevent the development of local parks, over the past century, that has given the area value.
http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/politics/protest.html
Can you count a better environment?
Are targets undermining our ability to enhance the countryside? That's what I said in Ecos magazine (British Association for Nature Conservation). Not everyone agreed: this is my reply to them.
http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/systems/ecosreply.html
Liberalism and the search for meaning
Is the rise of Dawkins-inspired atheism actually encouraging atheism? That's what I said in the new collection of essays called Reinventing the State: Social liberalism for the 21st century (Politico's). Not everyone agreed again, and this is the blog discussion now going on.
http://joeotten.blogspot.com/2007/10/reinventing-state-chapter-6-liberalism.html
The tragedy of 1997 and the New Liberalism
Why the Liberal Democrats failed to capitalise on their 1997 breakthrough, and a bundle of ideas I believe can underpin a new language for the party. This is Jeremy Hargreaves' take on what I called the 'New Liberalism'.
http://www.jeremyhargreaves.org/blog/2007/a-new-liberalism-from-david-boyle/
Technocracy, daemons and Nick Clegg
"At minimum there should usually be three or more simple statements of three words or more each statement." A small quotation taken from the definition of a child reaching Level 1C in the national curriculum for literacy.
Over the recent half-term, in ubiquitous training rooms under fluorescent light, primary school teachers around the UK have been poring over such definitions, based on the idea that the key to success means encouraging children to use certain words which count for high grades in the government's all-important SATS tests.
The agony of this scene is that it tends to be interspersed by barrages of invective against SATS, and testing of primary school children in general. Those on the end of this training know that SATS results arrive after decisions about placements in secondary school – they are of no use to the poor children – but because they mark the difference between a successful and a failing school, the children will be crammed for them nonetheless. But that's the world they operate in – what can they do?
I have often written about how target culture forces honest people doing brilliant jobs into subterfuge and dishonesty. The voluntary sector manager forced to prove an impact that could never be proved. The successful lottery bidder forced to predict spurious racial breakdowns of beneficiaries for years ahead. Rival charities forced to fight over who caused the fundable 'outputs' when both were essential – targets compromise us all.
The misery of target culture in the public sector is just as intense, but it is probably at its saddest in education. Against all their professional instincts, teachers have to teach to this kind of technocratic regime, though it means deconstructing their lessons into 'learning intentions', concentrating on individual words rather than imagination, comprehension tests rather than whole stories.
And while they teach these elements of skills, encouraged by training manuals and DfES approved gurus – many of whom have serious doubts themselves – they know that this is not the drawing out of imagination and creativity that education is supposed to be, and which children need to operate in the modern world. No wonder teachers and pupils are both stressed and de-motivated.
Conventional political language has no way of describing this technocratic tragedy in our children's lives, because it is captured by no official figures. Are the class sizes within official limits? Are the SATS results rising? Well, then, what's the problem?
Except that this kind of ersatz education bores the most creative pupils most, sending some of them on the foothills of the slippery slops that begin with truancy.
But it's worse than that. The novelist Lindsay Clarke has written about the urgent lesson for children of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights: that there are people out there who want to cut off their daemons.
For me, this issue – and related issues about the prevailing technocracy that is corroding our lives – is the most important we face, which is why it is so relevant to the Liberal Democrat leadership contest. For two reasons.
First, the third party is the wedge that can drive new political ideas and language onto the mainstream. Without the Lib Dems, we would be seriously stuck.
Second, this issue provides a potential kernel of a new approach to public services – focussing on the human relationships that make them actually work – around which the Lib Dems can begin to grow a new liberal coalition which, if they handle it right, can deliver them the power to do something about it.
Chris Huhne has made a great contribution to the direction of the party, but we need a new direction, a new political language and a new agenda, and I think Nick Clegg is the one most likely to deliver it.
I'm not entirely unbiased: I know Nick and admire him enormously. I know him to be one of those few in the Lib Dems who recognise the power of new ideas in politics, who understand that the party desperately needs to have a renewed purpose. That's why I'm going to vote for him to be leader.
Spring 2007 newsletter
See below: A depressing moment of incomprehension at a Parliamentary select committee.
The lunch, the cook and the larder
Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy live in the countryside with an old professor in a worrying place where everything is provided by only one mega-corporation. But Edmund finds himself in another world where TescoVirgin isn't the only company left.
Who’s the entrepreneur?
The BizFizz programme of enterprise coaching uses a very local, face-to-face model of getting people started in business. It is the antidote to the tick-box style of business training currently funded by the government, and it actually works. Who’s the Entrepreneur is the BizFizz book, which I edited, and which seems to me to provide a genuinely local, genuinely revolutionary model of small business start-up.
Power, actually
The Liberal Democrat group on the Local Government Association has published my short book on how Lib Dem-controlled local authorities innovate, on a range of topics from democracy and regeneration to food. It is also an attempt to use narrative in a political context.
Detrimental effects
Why the Competition Commission has to prove itself by defending local retailing, and why they are not yet taking the variety of needs of consumers – now and in the future – into account, as they are supposed to do.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/competitioncommissionfailing120407.aspx
WHAT DOES BEING A POLITICIAN MEAN?
A sunny morning in late April, and I am in my suit – a rare occurrence – to give evidence on co-production to the Public Administration Select Committee in Parliament. I’ve never done anything like this before but, of all the gamut of possibilities, I don’t think I expected the looks of blank incomprehension I did in fact receive.
It wasn’t as if the three of us – Matthew Taylor from the Royal Society of Arts, Sophia Parker from Demos and me – were explaining anything wildly novel. The ideas behind ‘co-production’ have been in circulation for some time, after all. But, for some reason, it seems to be particularly difficult for people at Westminster to grasp the idea that people are more than just passive recipients of government largesse.
Since being introduced to the idea of co-production by Edgar Cahn – simply that police, doctors or professionals can make little happen without the active participation of public, patients or service-users – I have become fascinated with its implications for policy. ‘Co-production’ is a slightly inelegant term coined at Indiana University in the 1970s to explain what was lacking when the Chicago police left the beat and got into patrol cars, and the crime rate went up.
It is a simple idea, but it has major and complex implications. Quite apart from anything else, it begins to explain why the Welfare State has been so ineffective over two generations at doing what it was designed to do: to slay Beveridge’s Five Giants: Want, Squalor, Ignorance, Idleness and Want. The reason is that one way provision of services, which people are expected to passively and gratefully accept, do not create social change. Worse, they may actually inhibit it.
This is not any kind of proposal to wind up or privatise the welfare system. Quite the reverse. It is the beginnings of an idea to make it effective, by asking people for something back – both to help themselves and to help their neighbours, often providing services (like a friendly face) that professionals do not do well. Not so much to reform the Welfare State, but to do what Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV urges: to broaden it and deepen it.
Perhaps we made a mistake, giving evidence to MPs, was straying into their own territory – trying to explain the implications for politics. How do you explain to some politicians that there is more to the job than simply receiving the supplication of their constituents?
One MP (no names here) refused to accept this idea. Apparently he saw no evidence that his local people wanted any more from him than to extract more resources from Whitehall on their behalf.
Matthew Taylor explained, and did so very effectively I thought, about how so many local parks had been transformed over the past decade by local people forming ‘friends’ groups and taking some of the responsibility for the state and development of the parks.
“More floral clocks,” said another MP. I looked at him to see just how much he was joking, and how much he genuinely misunderstood, and I’m still not absolutely sure.
But even the committee chair, the formidably intelligent Tony Wright, seemed a little confused about the co-production agenda – as if it was primarily about paying more faithful attention to people’s needs. In fact, it is a shift of attention – not instead of their needs – but also to their abilities, their skills, their time, their passions, and the resources they represent. To what they can do, not what they can’t do, and to find ways to recognise them and ask them for help. Because in that shift lies an alchemical change that actually makes things happen.
It is a simple but revolutionary agenda for change. But how do we even explain what we’re talking about to those most locked into the old model of passive recipients?
COMING SOON: David Boyle – the novel:
Winter 2006 newsletter
See below: Why the new breed of aggressive atheists are fuelling the rise in fundamentalism.
A brief history of new economics
New economics is emerging as a discipline in its own right – a critique of conventional economics that sees no further than money. But it does have a history which goes back to Ruskin and before, as I wrote in the new economics foundation’s new booklet Are You Happy?
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=236
Why centralisers hate history
The memory of the local philanthropist William Stanley is being excised by developers and officials from Norwood in south London. Why does this happen? Is it because the mere idea of local history, and therefore local variation, scares those who are responsible for the centralisation of corporate and government power?
http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/politics/croydon.html
The real cost of closing post offices
Every urban post office that is closed will deprive the local ward economy of about £300,000 a year, according to new research by the new economics foundation, linked to my Hometown programme there, which quantifies for the first time the contribution that they make in some of the most deprived area of the UK.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/lastpost.aspx
The top 100 eco-heroes of all time
The Environment Agency has published a full list in Your Environment to coincide with its tenth birthday. Rachel Carson came top and E. F. Schumacher second. I contributed the essay on Schumacher.
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/news/1498806
http://www.schumachersociety.org/newsletters/06dec07.html
MOBILE PHONES AND FUNDAMENTALISM
Of all the predictions for the year ahead none quite took the breath away like those of the philosopher Daniel Denett. More information over the next decade or so, he said, downloadable via mobile phones and the internet, would lead to the end of religion and other pieces of what Richard Dawkins calls “superstitious juvenilia”.
Many of the predictions by scientists in Edge magazine had a similar edge of silliness which betrayed a naïve faith that technology would be the saviour of mankind. Why is it that scientists, and particular the fervent atheists among them, so misunderstand the way technology develops?
It seems pretty obvious to those of us who use mobile phones that, with some exceptions, the technology is increasingly dominated by corporate interests which prefer to keep us stupid.
To be fair, it is a naivety shared by others. I know one child in primary school who asked their teacher in a class about astronomy recently, about what the point there was in anything if the sun would eventually explode. “Good question,” they were told. “Why don’t you look up the answer on Askjeeves?”
The naïve faith of scientists is particularly worrying, because it is infectious.
For one thing, people still seem to regard the last century as a period of unprecedented change – mainly because of long-haul flights, telephones and wireless internet connections. Actually, on everything that is really vital for human survival, the twentieth century saw precious few of the urgent social innovations we need that might create peace and sustainable wealth.
Go back to London in 1907 and you’ll find the same bus routes, with much the same numbers, the same kind of hours of work, and the same number of people going to FA Cup finals (OK, in Crystal Palace in those days, big deal). Compared to the massive shift off the land in the previous century, change has actually been slowing down.
For another thing, the fervent scientific atheists are themselves contributing to the spread of fundamentalism. Thanks to them, our culture is increasingly uncomfortable with any kind of truth that isn’t unambiguously material.
In Climbing Mount Improbable (1997), Dawkins starts off by complaining about a lecture he attended on the literature of figs, in which the lecturer made the mistake of referring to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve: “The speaker obviously knew that there never was a Garden of Eden, never a tree of knowledge of good and evil,” he writes. “So what was he actually trying to say?”
When people are encouraged to believe that the only things worth saying are scientific – deriding any truth but the literal – they don’t just condemn symbolic, philosophical, moral or historical discussions, like neo-puritans. Nor do they just limit how we can talk about life. Nor do they just bang the drum for atheism, as they believe they intend. They encourage a creeping fundamentalism in all areas. They are lining up behind those who peddle a similar kind of narrow, intolerant religious truth.
If you follow these rigorous materialists too far, our national life will be shorn of mystery, paradox, poetry, symbol, myth and much of what makes life meaningful.
Autumn 2006 newsletter
See below: Bill Ford, Calvin Coolidge and why we need to hold onto our seats this October.
Who killed the idea of mutualism?
A century ago, the idea of an economy based on co-operation and mutualism was torpedoed by the Fabians. Would history have been any different if Joseph Chamberlain had gone through with his intention of marrying Beatrice Webb? All is revealed in my essay in a new book of historical counter-factuals called President Gore and other things that never happened.
http://www.politicospublishing.co.uk/titles.php/itemcode/72/
The new generation of government targets
Don’t believe what you hear about Whitehall targets being rowed back. The new generation of targets are biting even harder, and are seriously threatening the independence and effectiveness of the voluntary sector. See my speech to the NCVO/ASSN conference at Warwick University.
http://david-boyle.co.uk/systems/evidence.htm
A whole new kind of public services
There is an emerging new ‘co-production sector’ at the fringes of public services, which is humanising them and making them more effective. The trouble is, administrative systems are corroding it. See our new report published by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, Hidden Work.
http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/0356.asp
What if the NHS became a wellness service?
That was how it was envisaged, but now it just tries to cure people. What would the NHS look like if it became a genuine National Wellness Service? We set out some answers in Life Begins at Sixty: What kind of NHS after 2008, which is a prospectus for a new joint project between the new economics foundation and the Young Foundation.
http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/index.php?p=362
No more left versus right
There isn’t any public versus private in UK politics now. The future is big versus small, central versus local, systematised versus human. See my speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton on the party’s Meeting the Challenge policy process.
http://david-boyle.co.uk/politics/supplicants.htm
BILL FORD, SUSTAINABILITY AND THE CRASH
“The business model that sustained us for decades is no longer sufficient to sustain profitability,” wrote Bill Ford, resigning as chief executive of Ford in an email to all employees.
The clear implication was that he had no idea what business model would make sense now, and was unsure whether there was one. It was an important admission and a significant one, because it isn’t just Ford that’s in trouble.
Part of Ford’s woes, like so many of the other corporations that are struggling, is the rise in fuel prices, in this case their unimaginative adherence to the 4X4 market, which is now – as predicted – vanishing before their eyes.
But it is more than that. As many as three quarters of Standard & Poor companies are now rated high risk (two decades ago it was 35 per cent). The big global brands have been losing value consistently through the decade. The business environment is confused and the world is turning against the big names – with their indefensible salaries, their narrow horizons, glitzy ubiquitous offerings, tax breaks and state subsidies.
In the long run, their inexorable demise is good for the planet and good for the economy. There should be no place for the destruction that subsidised corporations are wreaking on the planet, while they their manifest privileges, regulatory and fiscal, have been suffocating the small enterprises that underpin the economy of the real world.
Even so, it is hard to be optimistic about the long-term future – and I am – without being aware of the short-term dangers inherent in this shift. The very instability of the dinosaurs poses a risk that is, in its way, even greater than the Iraq war and the mishandling of the War on Terror.
The indicators of business and property confidence in the USA are low. Dollar debt is at an unprecedented high, with $9 trillion borrowed by the American government alone. The derivative market, only three years since Warren Buffett called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”, is now worth $17.3 trillion, with little understanding of the consequences if these were to unravel.
For reasons unknown to science, financial crashes nearly always happen in October. This October, we are going to have to hold onto our seats. Because the chances are that the major disasters that George W. Bush’s presidency will be remembered for are yet to come.
It is possible that Bush will be remembered like Calvin Coolidge – also given to being photographed in cowboy costume – who famously pronounced the American economy in good health just months before the Wall Street Crash.
