I can't remember which by-election this was, but it was more than a decade ago, but I had a sort of revelation about the Russell Brand position in politics - which is basically, don't vote; it only encourages them.
I had gone canvassing into a new estate, relatively prosperous, leafy and off a main road. There were 12 houses in a cul-de-sac. Every front door opened when I knocked, and everyone said exactly the same: the weren't voting, 'on principle'.
This was not apathy. Of course it would have been easy for me to snobbishly dismiss the beer-bellies I had seen and call it apathy, but it wouldn't have been true. It was a moral position they were taking, of deep disapproval.
Even so, I am surprised to hear Jeremy Paxman coming to Brand's defence. If anyone knows about the compromises inherent in the art of politics, he does. The issue isn't about lying, as Paxman claims. What politicians do is frame the truth (didn't I promise not to use that word a few blogs back?) - but doing so for a purpose.
So I don't agree with Paxman or Brand that the problem is 'lying'. Politicians can never be completely open, and nor would we expect them to be, with the pressures they are under. Though the antics they perform before microphones are occasionally embarrassing and usually irritating.
No, there are three different reasons why Paxman and Brand have a point.
1. The corrosion of political language. Most of the political language of choice now was hatched in the 1940s - 'education for all', and so on, even 'social security'. People don't believe it any more. It goes in one ear and out the other. It is a symptom of a deeper dishonesty and a failure to think afresh. It is enraging because it is so deadening.
2. The hollowing out of political parties. The combined membership of all our political parties is smaller than the circulation of a small women's magazine because there is nothing to do, no content, no training beyond electioneering, no careers beyond elections, no thinking, no nothing, except some deference and piles of unwanted leaflets couched often in the most objectionable language. Why would people join? What commitment would there be to them as individuals if they did?
3. There seems no purpose behind it all. This is why the untruths are so alienating. 'Framing the truth' might be forgivable if it was to some purpose, but modern politics seems so often to be defending indefensible and useless institutions or worn-out ideas, rather than imagining how things might be run more effectively. It is as if the political class has been drafted in to defend the status quo by creating a complicated charade that gives the impression they are seeking change.
Change those things, break open the consensus, break open the tired old parties and then maybe we might get people to put aside their principles and vote again.
Until that happens, you have to concede that Brand has some element of truth on his side, imperfectly 'framed' perhaps...
The ten most disastrous decisions by UK governments
As the Home Office flings out more and more peculiar gimmicks - poster vans, bonds for foreign visitors, doctors as immigration officers - I have been musing over the weekend what the ten worst decisions by the UK government have been since the Second World War.Let me say straight away that these are decisions with a serious long-term impact, which means that it may go too easy on the coalition - the fact is that, since they have only been in office three years, it is hard to see which decisions will really resonate down the years (personally, I think the idea of investing in nuclear energy, when the rest of the world is shunning it, might well be on a later list).
You can't tell which decisions really have long-term implications without mulling it over for a few years at least.
The other thing to say is that some these decisions are worthy and vital, like the NHS and ending the 11+ exam, but which were taken in a flawed way, allowing the arguments to echo on disastrously through the decades.
So, those provisos out of the way, here is my countdown:
10. The Pensions Act (1986): It ushered in a faulty design for personal pensions which would encourage people to think their retirement was covered, but actually flung them into the hands of the financial services industry which has systematically fleeced them. The result: the average pension pot in the UK is now £25,000 (will pay out £1,250 a year).
9. Tony Crosland's flawed blueprint for comprehensive schools (1965): Following the American model, and ignoring the evidence which showed otherwise, UK comprehensive schools were designed far too large, as mini-factories, far too impersonal - they consequently alienated sections of the middle classes who would otherwise have welcomed them, and the education wars continue now as a result.
8. Setting up the NHS on an over-professionalised basis (1948): The most disastrous legacy of the Attlee government. It meant that the voluntary infrastructure for health disappeared and, in the case of poor communities, was systematically destroyed - guaranteeing that the NHS, the most important decision of all in some ways, would eventually become unaffordable.
7. Harold Macmillan's deregulation of building standards (1951): In search of the magic number of housing starts (300,000 a year), Macmillan ushered in the age of the jerry-built high rise flats, at vast expense, still not paid for and still blighting the poorest communities.
6. Gordon Brown's great roll-out of targets in public services (1998): The target approach wasn't new, but it was a disastrous adoption of the line most identified by consultants McKinsey. As a result, services were hollowed out, became much more expensive, productivity went down and their very future is now in doubt.
5. The Iraq War (2003): A flawed project, paid for largely by the Chinese, which resulted in a million dead in Iraq alone and seemed to reveal the western powers as powerless and duplicitous.
4. Geoffrey Howe's abolition of the Corset (1980): This was a direct result of the abolition of exchange controls the previous year, the Corset kept house prices low by limiting the amount of money flooding into the housing market. Its demise led to the 30-year housing bubble and the slow impoverishment of the middle classes (see my book Broke).
3. The failure to shape the European Community (1955). The UK withdrew from the crucial Messina Conference which led to the founding of what is now the European Union, failing to shape its institutions and consequently finding itself forever dissatisfied with them.
2. Big Bang (1986): Financial services in the City had to face modernisation, but the decision to divide jobbers from brokers fatally ushered in the conflicts of interest that would turn financial services into such an overwhelmingly corrosive force.
1. The decision not to create an Oil Fund to invest the revenues from North Sea Oil (1976): The Callaghan government decided not to create a sovereign wealth fund like Norway's to invest oil revenues running at £18bn a year. Nor did subsequent governments use the revenues to invest in new, renewable energy sources. Consequently, we are now buying Norway's gas and we squandered the money. We allowed the rising petro-pound to throttle the UK's unmodernised industrial base, without using that wealth to modernise. A national tragedy.
Those are my top ten, perfectly balanced between Labour and Conservative governments. Which brings me to the second part of the question. Do they have anything in common? The answer is, yes. They are all either:
- Decisions based on ideology, disconnected from the real world (8, 4, 2).
- Decisions based on faddish solutions (10, 9, 6).
- Decisions taken in abject surrender to more powerful forces (5).
- Decisions taken with breathtaking UK-style short-termism, and a bone-headed failure to look ahead (7, 3, 1).
This is one of the areas where my new venture, the New Weather Institute, the UK's first mutual think-tank, is dedicated to seeking out solutions.
When people manipulate target data
More than a decade ago, I was asked by a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet (to pass the time of day) what I was writing about. I had just published a book about new kinds of money, and I told him I was writing about our habit of measuring too much.He looked completely non-plussed – targets were regarded as a vital and clever innovation in those days – and said: “But what else can you do?”
The news from Colchester General Hospital, where managers are said to have bullied staff into falsifying target data, confirms that it is now time we worked out an urgent answer to this question.
The problem about using numbers to control is that they only give the appearance of hard objective data. In fact, the numbers are chained inexorably to definitions, which involve words which can be endlessly manipulated.
The truth is that the target culture, which the coalition has failed to completely confront, creates a kind of cage where – the more safeguards you put in – the more difficult it is to operate at all without manipulating those definitions.
When a hospital has to bully staff to manipulate figures, then you clearly have evidence of a failing hospital, and there have been complaints about Colchester for some time now. But the real point is that Colchester is just the tip of an iceberg. We are still living with the cage of numbers woven by Gordon Brown.
This is the advice of system thinker John Seddon, that manipulation is absolutely endemic, and it isn’t the fault of the frontline staff who do the manipulation – it is the fault of the system that requires it.
Worse, the advent of turbo-charged targets with money attached (payment by results contracts) turns that manipulation from a simple but regrettable management habit into outright fraud.
The problem is that this manipulation gets so habitual, in every sector, that it takes up most of the creative energy of the staff and managers (I don’t exaggerate), and it spills over into outright falsification – which seems to be what has happened in Colchester.
This kind of control by measurement carries within it a kind of fantasy about objectivity. It is the fantasy also that you can somehow measure outcomes, real objectives – not the pretend outcomes that service managers gargle with – and that all you need to do is check up on the process, and the great humming machine that will get you there.
The coalition rejected the symptoms of this Blairite fantasy, but allowed themselves to continue the great humming machine fantasy. Hence the current difficulties.
And this is just the beginning. This time, next time, or the time after, the scandal will result in a widespread investigation into the manipulation of targets, especially in privatised services, which will find that it is absolutely ubiquitous. The emperor will clearly have no clothes then, so work is going to have to start now on the system that replaces it.
But I could not put the problem any more clearly than the influential NHS blogger Roy Lilley this morning. This is what he said:
"The toxic cocktail of targets, savings, inspection, reputation-saving, top-down bullying, confused responsibilities and hubris is making the NHS unmanageable and dangerous. Inspection does not make us safer. People do, People don’t come to work as liars, target fiddlers and cheats; it's what organisations reduce them to."
Quite so. It really is time the coalition got to grips with this toxic legacy of the old regime.
When the Koch Brothers land in the UK
I have gained a bizarre insight into the strange regulatory world about what you can say as a charity or a community interest company (CIC), mainly because I have been helping to launch a new mutual think-tahnk, the New Weather Institute.
Here is what the regulations say about political activity by CICs:
"The promotion of (or opposition to) changes in the policy of a governmental or public authority in relation to any matter is not allowed."
But in case you get too over-excited that this is a 'gagging clause', as the internet campaigners 38 Degrees might put it, you scroll down a little further and find this:
"Any political activities in which CICs do engage should be closely related to the non-political community benefit activities which they are set up to carry out."
Here is what the regulations say about political activity by CICs:
"The promotion of (or opposition to) changes in the policy of a governmental or public authority in relation to any matter is not allowed."
But in case you get too over-excited that this is a 'gagging clause', as the internet campaigners 38 Degrees might put it, you scroll down a little further and find this:
"Any political activities in which CICs do engage should be closely related to the non-political community benefit activities which they are set up to carry out."
Now, is that a contradiction or just a paradox? I don't know, and I need to know, but for the time being it tells me two things:
1. The regulations about semi-political activity and what CICs and charities can say in public are already tangled and confused, have been so for years, and - hey! - I'm not even intervening in an election campaign.
2. The storm which 38 Degrees has drummed up about the Lobbying and Transparency Bill now going before the House of Lords today is ridiculously off the mark.
I say this partly because I find 38 Degrees increasingly irritating, and partly because the Bill is not - despite what they are saying - changing the contradictions about third-party political campaigning, or about political campaigning by charities, which have been for the last 13 years confusing and confused.
All they are doing is lowering the spending limits for people, organisations or oligarchs who want to intervene in elections.
Now, it seems to me that two reforms are urgently needed here. First, we need to close the loopholes that allow billionaires and oligarchs like the shadowy Koch Brothers in the USA to spend money intervening for or against candidates in elections. It has hardly happened yet, but it will - probably over something like Europe, immigration or abortion, probably in a handful of marginal constituencies.
The other reform we badly need is the converse of that, to prevent billionaires getting around this legislation by giving vast sums to political parties or setting up their own.
The Lobbying Bill tries to do the first but not the second. It should do the second, but the fact that it fails to do so does not take away from the fact that we need to close the Koch loophole urgently.
I don't understand why 38 Degrees has drummed up such a storm against such an urgent reform. Because once Koch UK has landed here, it will be far too late.
I know the campaigners say that the new law will confuse matters for campaigners. It won't: the law is already ridiculously confused and needs sorting out, but the Lobbying Bill won't make it any more so, and it is disingenuous of 38 Degrees to pretend that it will.
The real question we need to ask them is: why don't you want to legislate to stop oligarchs intervening in our elections? I don't get it but I do hope the Lords have the guts to ignore 38 Degrees and pass the Bill this afternoon.
Why should taxpayers subsidise wages?
I gather it is the anniversary today of Soviet troops marching into Hungary in 1956. A good day, in fact, to think about the consequences of ideologues - especially as I heard the most irritating ideologue on the Today programme this morning, talking about the living wage (starts at 1hr 40 mins).
The Living Wage, as most people know, is the amount calculated that people need to earn to survive economically without recourse to benefits. It is, inevitably, rather higher than the minimum wage.
So enter the ideologue, in this case Steve Davies from the 'free market' think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs.
I put 'free market' in inverted commas on the grounds that I also regard myself as being in favour of free and open markets, as one of the guarantees of liberty (yes, I remain an old-fashioned Liberal). But I am not a true believer - I'm not a heretic, defined in religious terms as someone who pushes one doctrine to the point of absurdity.
Unfortunately, the Today programme is still subject to the Law of Confident Economists. Which means that you can apparently silence interviewers and conversations on almost any subject by mouthing economic doctrines in a confident tone of voice.
Davies explained that Ed Miliband's wheeze to encourage companies to pay a Living Wage through the tax system was a bad idea, on the grounds that only increased productivity can genuinely raise wages. Otherwise it will lead to job losses as businesses become unprofitable.
All of which is true, and that would indeed be the end of the argument - until you look at the other side of the coin. Who exactly does the IEA imagine will subsidise the salaries of these people who are in full-time work but not paid enough to get by?
Presumably the taxpayer - but why should the government subsidise business in this way? And isn't it ironic that a supposedly free market think-tank should praise a situation where businesses have their payrolls subsidised by the state?
No, the situation where companies pay salaries which are impossible to live on is not sustainable for so many reasons. What the IEA needs to do is to raise its eyes from the articles of holy writ and see the world as it really is - and get to grips with the way that life is becoming unaffordable for so many of us, even when we are in work.
Blame monopoly. Blame inequality. Blame the banks, but something else is going on which breaks all the rules of the kind of free market that the IEA espouses.
And if you want an example of it, take a look at the World Development Movement's data about the five mega-banks which have made $2.2 billion from speculating in food over the past two years, making it increasingly expensive for the poorest people in the world.
That's what happens when you hand economics over to ideologues, true believers and fundamentalists.
The Living Wage, as most people know, is the amount calculated that people need to earn to survive economically without recourse to benefits. It is, inevitably, rather higher than the minimum wage.
So enter the ideologue, in this case Steve Davies from the 'free market' think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs.
I put 'free market' in inverted commas on the grounds that I also regard myself as being in favour of free and open markets, as one of the guarantees of liberty (yes, I remain an old-fashioned Liberal). But I am not a true believer - I'm not a heretic, defined in religious terms as someone who pushes one doctrine to the point of absurdity.
Unfortunately, the Today programme is still subject to the Law of Confident Economists. Which means that you can apparently silence interviewers and conversations on almost any subject by mouthing economic doctrines in a confident tone of voice.
Davies explained that Ed Miliband's wheeze to encourage companies to pay a Living Wage through the tax system was a bad idea, on the grounds that only increased productivity can genuinely raise wages. Otherwise it will lead to job losses as businesses become unprofitable.
All of which is true, and that would indeed be the end of the argument - until you look at the other side of the coin. Who exactly does the IEA imagine will subsidise the salaries of these people who are in full-time work but not paid enough to get by?
Presumably the taxpayer - but why should the government subsidise business in this way? And isn't it ironic that a supposedly free market think-tank should praise a situation where businesses have their payrolls subsidised by the state?
No, the situation where companies pay salaries which are impossible to live on is not sustainable for so many reasons. What the IEA needs to do is to raise its eyes from the articles of holy writ and see the world as it really is - and get to grips with the way that life is becoming unaffordable for so many of us, even when we are in work.
Blame monopoly. Blame inequality. Blame the banks, but something else is going on which breaks all the rules of the kind of free market that the IEA espouses.
And if you want an example of it, take a look at the World Development Movement's data about the five mega-banks which have made $2.2 billion from speculating in food over the past two years, making it increasingly expensive for the poorest people in the world.
That's what happens when you hand economics over to ideologues, true believers and fundamentalists.
Look what happened to my grandparents' home
Just before the First World War, my great grand-parents bought a house in Mulberry Walk in Chelsea. They were modest town houses but it was an attractive street, with its gas lamps and brick pavements - and it had to be to attract the right clientele given that Chelsea remained a raffish suburb full of artists and slums.My great-grandfather was killed at the Battle of the Aisne, six weeks into the war, and my great-grandmother lived there for the rest of her life before dividing the house into flats for her daughters. I don't remember her, but I know she was at my christening, almost certainly with her usual copy of Liberal News.
My own grandparents lived in the downstairs flat, and I remember it very well. When they sold it in 1975, during one of those slumps in the property market that used to happen in the 1970s, it still had one of the original gas-lamps concreted into the back garden. It gave the whole house a kind of Narnian air of magic for me.
By then, it was clearly going up in the world. Sir Keith Joseph had lived there when he was health minister, but it was within a brisk walk of the World's End, and that was then a different world.
I don't come from a wealthy family by any means, or so I kept having to say when I wrote my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes earlier this year. But I did keep meeting people, while I was writing the book, who could no longer live anywhere near the neighbourhoods where they grew up.
We have become used, during the debates about gentrification, to believing that this was just a working class experience. It isn't. I live in a small house in Crystal Palace. My children will not be able to afford to live here, any more than I can afford to live in Maida Vale where I grew up.
But even so, I got a bit of a shock when my cousin forwarded a copy of a property article (not online) which used Zoopla to describe Mulberry Walk as the 16th most expensive street in London.
The houses are all the same as those where my great-grandparents had walked down in 1914, but one of the double-fronted homes like they bought has just gone on the market for £15.75 million.
I don't know what they bought it for, and I expect my great-grandfather used the legacy from his father - he was on a Lieutenant-Colonel's salary. It wasn't huge. But even so.
The point I'm making here is that the experience of being priced out of your own neighbourhood is now so common in south east England, and other parts of the country, as to be almost ubiquitous.
It is a by-product of the ongoing 30-year housing bubble that we have endured and which is corroding the idea of a property-owning democracy - leaving us at the whims of landlords, and equally bubblesome rents, for all our lives.
In a generation's time, my own children will be staggered that I used to stay in Mulberry Walk most weeks. It is a sad memorial for the middle class dream. I'm pretty staggered now.
Small business and the new Mutual Party
Do you remember the Australian Democrats? They were the real 'Liberals' in Australian politics and dared to use the slogan 'Keep the bastards honest' in their elections since 1980.Despite the daring of the slogan, and the horrified admiration from some Lib Dem campaigners I know over here, the slogan wasn't really a success. The party lost all its national representation in 2007 and are now down to 0.3 per cent of the vote. We might perhaps diagnose their difficulty as a party which did not really know what it was.
Such is the danger of the Lib Dem besetting sin - to paper over ideological cracks with narratives that are all about process and positioning. It works for a bit but then, like the Democrats, there seems no real purpose and the whole thing just implodes.
So I was fascinated to see there is a new radical Liberal-style party in Australian politics, and they call themselves the Mutual Party.
What I find so interesting about this is that it may be a glimpse of what a new Liberal Party would look like anywhere, if it started now, without some of its peculiar baggage - because it is both recognisably Liberal and also obviously modern.
The Mutual Party has emerged out of the Australian Centre for Civil Society, and stands for mutualism, localism and breaking up concentrations of economic power. This is how they put it:
- Support for self-employment, small businesses and independent owners - a wide distribution of ownership of economic assets and property and the breakup of concentrations of economic and market power.
- Support for civil society - a strengthening of community groups, voluntary associations, support networks, social enterprises, cooperatives and mutuals.
- Individualised funding for consumers and families - self-directed services and individual budgets in disability, mental health, ageing, education, and social services.
- Governance reform in democracy, parliament and public institutions -innovation in public voice and citizen empowerment and the end of career politicians.
Sure enough, this is what the Mutual Party says:
"The big ideological dispute in the 20th century was between liberalism (based on individuals) and socialism (based on the state). That dispute is now over."
Years ago, I pointed out to the Lib Dem leader at the time that it was significant that, even though we had only a handful of seats, most of them were in the top ten local authority areas for self-employment.
He didn't agree with me and I thought then - and think now - that we are missing an opportunity to align ourselves alongside the real entrepreneurs. It looks like the new Mutual Party has done so.
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