David Boyle's Blog, page 31

The three problems with Corbynomics

My time for Labour MP Graham Stringer's conspiracy theory about the Labour leadership rather expired when he said there were Lib Dems joining his party to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader. In my experience, most Lib Dems I know find Corbyn's campaign rather a refreshing change.

I realise that contradicts the world view of many of the stodgy Labour Party types who are some miles from understanding their Liberal opponents. But so it is. Corbyn is offering an alternative, and it is about time somebody did.

But is it a forward-looking alternative or a backward-looking one? Well, spurred on by James Graham, I read his economics document and listened to his interview with Andrew Marr - and I think I agree with James.  The problem with Corbyn's economics is:

"His solution to everything is state centralisation."

It is fascinating and exciting that someone has managed to break the Labour blancmange but there are difficulties with an economic policy that claims to be about 'rebalancing' but is actually deeply conservative. So here are my three problems with Corbynomics:

1. Where are the mutuals? There is very little about transformative new structures of enterprise like mutuals, especially those which can be genuinely innovative running public services.

2. Where is the local lending?  The idea of a national infrastructure bank, spending money created by the Bank of England, is a sound one - but it doesn't solve the problem about how that money filters down to the entrepreneurs at local level because that requires access to local risk information. It makes precisely the same mistake as the coalition, assuming that - if they provided money to the big banks and told them to lend it to SMEs - they would be able to do so. In fact, as it proved, the banks had long since abandoned their own local structures and were consequently unable to lend the money effectively.

3.  Who is the community? Corbyn claimed in one sentence that "the state, the government, the community" were all one and the same. This is precisely the mistake that state socialists have made throughout - they can't see the distinction between the Man in Whitehall, the ministers who instruct them, and you and me. Here is the basis of a new kind of tyranny: The People have spoken, and we must do their bidding.

A nervous shiver ran down my spine when I heard that he wanted to re-nationalise energy production.  Because, of all the institutions that have disappeared over recent decades, I go down my my knees to thank providence that we don't any more have to contend with the old Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB).

I remember the futurist Francis Kinsman describing an encounter with one of their managers after a talk he gave on the rise of the ‘inner-directed’ approach to life – those people who put independence, health and self-improvement above keeping up with the Joneses.

While much of the discussion had been about the benefits to business of independence of mind, the CEGB manager took him aside afterwards to ask how they could recognise inner-directed people on the payroll.

It transpired that his interest was not to promote them, or get ideas from them, but so that they could weed them out.

Let’s face it, only centralised bureaucracies on a truly Soviet scale – buttressed by centralised assumptions – could have succeeded in producing the staggering waste, delay, expense and secrecy of the British nuclear industry over the past half century.

This is not to suggest that the current oligopoly is much of an improvement, but don't let's leap out of the frying pan and into the fire.

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The Conservatives turn against business

The bizarre news stories yesterday morning about entryism into the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn as leader convinces me of at least three things.

First, the Labour Party doesn't trust its own members. Second, the disappearance of their ideological foundations and purpose - some decades ago now - could mean that Labour might go in almost any direction.  Third, we are in one of those peculiar periods when party positions are seriously in flux.
We have Ukip and the Greens - sleeping at the moment - but poised to divide Labour support between them once they come back to life. We have Labour about to divide into two, or possibly three. But the potential shift that nobody really seems to be talking about is the strange way that the Conservative Party is turning against its traditional allies in business.
Joe Zammit-Lucia and I talked about this as a practical possibility before the election in our pamphlet A Radical Politics for Business here.  
We argued that the old relationship between business and conservatism has now broken. Business wants openness to ideas. They want open borders. They want long-term thinking, not the insane short-termism of the political world. They increasingly want education that promotes practical vocations, rather than suppressing them. They want schooling that looks beyond basic skills – important as they are – and which trains people to be entrepreneurial and creative, not just trains them to mind machinery.

None of those attitudes are offered by the current Conservative Party and, although some vestiges of the coalition attitudes remain in the current government, the evidence seems to be that they are prepared to undermine business to make an ideological point.
Why otherwise would you torpedo the progress of a new industry that is hugely important, not just for our own future, but for UK exports? The support for solar and wind was for a specific objective and for a limited period. Yet it has gone.
It can't really be about cutting energy bills because the other measure designed to cut people's energy bills - the low carbon homes initiative - has also been scrapped, to the horror of the volume housebuilders which have been gearing up for it.  
Nor has Hinkley Point nuclear power station, which is set to seriously increase bills for the foreseeable future, yet been cancelled - though it seems likely that it will be.
The damage to solar energy is limited. The cuts are regarded as necessary because solar is now so popular that it has exceeded the money set aside by the coalition.  It may well be that, for other reasons, solar will carry on growing - but what an opportunity to lead the world missed.
I'm not sure also that the perverse decision - which I hope will be challenged in the courts - to lift the ban on bee-killing chemical neonicotinoids falls into the same category. It is a direct threat to the emerging local food and organics sector.
What appears to be happening is that the government has taken against a number of new industries, rather as the Labour Party used to do in the 1970s, and is quite happy to torpedo those investors and undermine confidence in them if they can.
It will take some time for this to be clear one way or another. It will take even longer for it to be widely recognised, though the euro referendum will provide an opportunity to bring this shift to the forefront of people's minds. But the implications for politics are important - because it may be that business will once again be represented most successfully by a left of centre political force, dedicated to small enterprise, entrepreneurs and setting business free to challenge monopolies.
That sounds unlikely, but that was the case throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and it could be again. The question is whether Jeremy Corbyn or Tim Farron will be the one who can rise to the occasion.
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See you tonight to talk about Englishness

There was such an interesting article in Saturday's Guardian - alright, I admit it, it was written by me - listing five key aspects of English culture which are not English in origin.

But what really struck me were the responses. Within a few hours, there were more than 700 furious comments at the bottom of it from readers, variously accusing me and each other of various aspects of xenophobia or treason.

Of course, below the line in the Guardian is a frightening place, where monsters lurk. If you took all the comments about your articles written there too seriously you would quickly go insane. But it made me realise what a controversial subject this is.

One early comment put it like this, and clearly having known enough about me to guess my political affiliation:

"You can never win with liberals. If you take pride in your own culture, you are derided as being 'insular'. If that culture has enriched itself through aculturalisation, then they tell you it doesnt belong to you. In the next breath, they are lauding other cultures and defending some particular facet or other of it. In short they are reverse bigots and petty minded xenophiles. And then they wonder why their political representatives are rejected..."

That is clearly the first time I have ever been called a 'petty-minded xenophile', obviously from the UKIP satchel of minor insults.

I have been wondering why this should be so controversial. I couldn't have written How to be English unless I loved my own culture, but I suppose I am up against misunderstandings from two sides:

1. The right-wing obsession with purity, as if Englishness was either one thing or another, and as if every tradition must be unsullied by corruption from outside these islands.

2. The left-wing obsession with deconstruction, as if nothing - absolutely nothing - can be taken seriously because it is all an agglomeration.

I'm on the absolutely opposite side. English culture is wonderful because you can see its history in every twist and turn. It is gnarled and deep and confusing, and attracts the flotsam and jetsom from around the world and makes them its own. Nothing about that is critical. Quite the reverse.

One of those who left their comment who did understand this quoted Billy Bragg's song along similar lines, called 'English half English':

My mother was half English and I'm half English too
I'm a great big bundle of culture, tied up in the red white and blue
I'm a fine example of your Essex man
And I'm well familiar with the Hindustan
'Cause my neighbors are half English and I'm half English too

My breakfast was half English and so am I, you know
I had a plate of Marmite soldiers, washed down with a cappuccino
And I have a veggie curry about once a week
The next day I fry it up as bubble and squeak
'Cause my appetites, half English and I'm half English too

Well, I'm also half English... But if you would like to talk about these issues some more, especially the lighter side of them, I'm talking tonight on 23 July, at the Steyning Bookshop.... See you there!

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Services could conceivably be cheaper - but not the Osborne way

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will know that I am a great admirer of the systems thinker John Seddon.

He remains a controversial, even embattled figure, but I'm sorry he is no longer writing his furious e-newsletter about public services. I suppose, if you have not been well, it makes sense to calm down a little. But it always raised the blood pressure to read it; goodness knows what it must have been like to write it.

Seddon's great insight is the existence, in any system, of what he called 'failure demand' - the avoidable pressure that comes from its failures to be effective, or failures elsewhere in the system.  See his latest book about the profound implications this has for services.

The key to saving money is therefore to find out where the failure demand is coming from and to put it right.

But here is the snag. Saving money is paradoxical in the Seddon world. It's a bit like friendship - you can't do it directly.  If you can get rid of failure demand, by studying the system as a whole, and find ways of tackling it, then you can save quite large sums. If you start by trying to save money - putting IT systems in place, merging services across geographical boundaries - then the failure demand tends to rise.

What tends to happen is that the minority of cases that are not amenable to digital solutions then start banging about trying to find someone to help them, and every time they get failed they create more costs.

That is the fate of most money-saving attempts in public services, but it is also a source of hope. It means that costs could be brought down, if Whitehall understood the way services worked as a whole.

All of which is a way of saying that George Osborne's attempts to cut 25 per cent off public spending in some departments might be possible - but. if he goes about it in the way he seems to be, it will cost more money in the long-run.

It can't be done by asking Whitehall to propose 40 per cent cuts, which is a recipe for sclerosis and a boneheaded failure to see the system as a whole. Under the current set-up, it will mean that most of the cuts fall in practice on social care - which is uncivilised and will cause knock-on costs in the NHS.

This is what he needs to do instead:

1.  Scrap the vastly expensive white elephant projects (Hinckley Point springs to mind).

2.  Launch simultaneous studies into failure demand in the major services, including the NHS - if you can really improve services by reducing costs, as he says, why exclude the NHS?

3.  Give the services the time to innovate in a major way, and discourage lazy percentage cuts.

4.  Launch an initiative to turbo-charge the involvement of frontline staff in making services more effective, as Al Gore did as US vice-president. More of this later...

The truth is that, to really reduce costs, the government will have to row back from the disastrous public service policies of the Blair-Brown years, which concreted in costs in ways that Seddon has outlined.  They still haven't done that. The only way to cut costs is to develop flexible, integrated systems which can tackle people's problems or requirements once and, as far as possible, once only.

The way to lower costs is therefore not narrow efficiency, it is higher effectiveness. That requires thinking and innovation. It requires the involvement of people receiving public services in their delivery, and it requires a major devolution of power to the front line.

What isn't going to work, paradoxically, is an attempt to look at the balance sheet and shave bits off. Osborne needs to go beyond bleeding the patient.

More on some of these in my book The Human Element.

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Farron is stronger with his faith than without it

There is a kind of boneheaded Englishness, usually but not always Conservative, that believes someone's faith makes them a potential enemy within - that they somehow can't help being committed to other nations or ethics or moralities. That they are therefore not quite 'one of us', at least not to be trusted with political office.

It tends to go along with another English peculiarity, a strange and basically ignorant belief that the teachings of the Christian faith are mainly about homosexuality.

Actually, the condemnation of homosexuality is so central to Christianity that Jesus doesn't mention it once in any of the gospels.

Through the centuries, the English have returned over and over again to these themes. For some time it was felt that Roman Catholics must have their basic allegiance elsewhere - to the king of Spain, the Pope or some combination of the two.

Then, in the twentieth century, similar things were said about Jews: they must - or so it was said - owe their basic allegiance to the state of Israel.

These days, you usually hear this kind of nonsense spouted by crusty English establishment types about Muslims. Or by Guardian-reading 'evidence-based' types about people who describe themselves as Christians - again, the whole implication is that there must be some tyrannical hidden agenda, some secret allegiance elsewhere.

Tim Farron, the new Lib Dem leader, had to face this line of questioning over and over again from the media during his first weekend in office, and did so with his dignity intact. And I, for one, respect him enormously for it.

It is true that there are strands of illiberal socialism and conservatism which see no distinction between morality and policy. Who only have to disapprove of something to want to legislate against it (or, in the case of Tony Blair, to bomb it).  Liberals, it seems to me, are able to distinguish relatively easily between morality and public policy.  Not just their own conscience, but there is a difference between objective morality and policy too.  If we start trying to legislate against everything we believe is wrong, we will live in a tyranny.

When Bill Clinton famously closed down the abortion issue in 1992 in the US presidential election, he said he wanted it to be "legal, safe and rare", but did he get cross-questioned about why he wasn't urging more abortions? No, but I fear he would have done in the UK, where religious faith remains a source of suspicion - just as it did back in the days of the Tudors.

Why is this an English obsession? It is true that I may think this because my book How to be English  is published this week and I find myself obsessed with the topic. But actually, I think there is a connection - there is a streak of puritanism which runs deep in these islands.

I don't mean puritanism as purely religious. English puritanism remains a kind of extreme protestantism, but it has moved its position since those days.  Once they used to smash stained glass windows or cut down maypoles and close theatres. These days, they rage at against anyone who believes anything beyond what can be verified by five senses - worse, it is their five senses that has to do the verification. This is puritanism reborn as a kind of narrow positivism.

Yes, my understanding of Dawkins is that he is an extreme protestant, so disapproving of spirituality that he has become an atheist. It is the logical conclusion of puritanism, in my humble opinion. It is the latest manifestation of the traditional English fear of priestcraft and mumbo-jumbo.

The kind of narrow empiricism it is based on is another seventeenth century idea, and it is getting a little frayed.  But I expect it will live on here long after it has bitten the dust everywhere else.

I am personally glad that the Lib Dems are led by someone who has some spiritual belief, some sense that this isn't all there is.  And since 77 per cent in the UK describe themselves as ‘religious’, it makes sense for aspiring political leaders to share some idea of what they mean.

Certainly, if there is a future for the left in the UK, we are not going to find it by withdrawing into a small cult of puritans, disapproving of everyone's spiritual beliefs and congratulating ourselves for being so 'evidence-based'.

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Time to work out what it means to be English

“Dinner was announced soon after our arrival, which consisted of the following things,” writes the Rev James Woodforde describing his meal on 20 April 1796, in a diary which – in a very English way – lists the food in great detail but barely mentions God at all. Then he takes a deep breath and sets out the table before him:

“Salmon boiled & Shrimp Sauce, some White Soup, Saddle of Mutton rosted &c; Cucumber &c., Lambs Fry, Tongue, Breast of Veal ragoued, rice Pudding the best part of a Rump of Beef stewed immediately after the Salmon was removed. 2nd course. A Couple of Spring Chicken, rosted Sweetbreads, Jellies, Maccaroni, frill’d Oysters, 2 small Crabs, & made Dish of Eggs... We got home about half past nine, as we went very slowly on Account of Briton’s walking, who ... was very imprudent indeed, but I believe he had been making too free with Mr Mellishs Beer &c.”

There is a glimpse here, perhaps, of the soul of the English. We have a culture like a rummage sale, like a white elephant stall, hideously divided and bizarrely coherent – and, over the last century or so, obscured by an even more varied invention known as ‘Britishness’.

The British have a terrible reputation for cuisine, but the English have a different reputation: for over-indulgence, and plain, gargantuan portions.

That is the way the English used to eat, and I have a feeling they would do again, given the chance. There is a little of the over-indulgent eighteenth century in all of us. Perhaps not in our genes, there are so many people here – and always have been – from other parts of the world. 
With the best will in the world, there is no way they can share the particular mixed English genetic heritage. Nor is it quite the English environment and weather which we all share that shapes us all, because the weather has changed from the heat of the twelfth century to the frost fairs on the Thames of the eighteenth.

No, it must be something else – some other historical imperative, some psychic beating of the traditional heart of the land – perched on the far north west corner of Europe, peering out towards the west. Something shapes the English – it does not homogenise them, which would not be English at all – but it makes them stand out, whether they like it or not, whether they are from the back streets of Karachi or the tiny Jewish villages of old Poland. 
We can’t know what that is, but we can look at the flotsam and jetsam of history that amount to the whole, and maybe celebrate Englishness for what it is - not for the purity but the sheer diversity of it. In fact, it's rather important that we do, and I've had a go in my new book (out today), How to be English.
Ask yourself this - if you made a list of the 100 elements that make up English culture for you, what would you put in the ragbag?
In the meantime, if you are in Sussex on 23 July, come and join me to discuss it at the Steyning Bookshop...

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To lead the political debate, you have to lead the intellectual debate

There is something bizarrely uniting about Lib Dem leadership elections, or so I realised last night.  Not for us the bear pit of the Labour leadership - which is more about uncovering the great chasms that lie between the candidates, and between the candidates and the people.

Norman Lamb managed to get nearly 44 per cent of the vote, and Tim Farron turned up the heat and produced an extraordinary performance last night. I felt hugely proud to be in the same party as both of them. And on top of all that, a 900 vote majority in a council by-election in Kingston the same evening.

I backed Norman Lamb because I believed he would shake up the party the most. But I became aware during the campaign that other people I respected were supporting Tim Farron for exactly the same reason.  I hope and believe he will.

Because I think we are poised for an exciting period, but - to lead political debate, you first have to lead the intellectual debate.

As they did in the early hours of May 9, the Guardian very kindly asked me to write a comment about the Farron victory shortly after it was announced, and I delivered as he climbed onto the rostrom at 7pm last night.

I'm always nervous about doing these things before I've had a chance to take the temperature - or at least think a little more deeply.  I don't know how I managed, but you can judge for yourself here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/16/farron--lamb-to-help-create-flurry-of-new-thinking-the-party-needs

Turning off Labour's lazy funding tap

There is a new, or at least renewed, Co-op store in my town.  It is the only supermarket here and it isn't exactly cheap.  On the other hand, it is pretty convenient, and I find myself popping in and out in the most unsystematic way.

I bank with the Co-op (not actually a co-op, because there is no legal format for a co-op bank in this country, but owned by a co-op).  I carry a Co-op credit card. I'm steeped in the place.

But I must admit, I have a qualm every time I go through the door of my local store.  I remind myself that a slither of everything I buy there will go, against my will, to the Labour Party.  Last year, the Co-op group agreed to fund the Co-operative Party - a wholly owned subsidiary of Labour - to the tune of £625,000 over 18 months (£34m since 1992).

This is enough for me to choose a different shop whenever I have the opportunity. I don't like it and don't want it, and it irritates me that I have no say in it.

I thought of that when I read the government's proposals for trade union reform today.  Let's leave aside the other reforms - some are important but it is important that we have an active, responsible and healthy trade union movement in the UK.

But what about the question of opting into the political funds, especially when they go to the Labour Party, rather than opting out?

The Co-op doesn't give me either option as one of their customers. But funding a political party ought to be a conscious decision, and the current set up has only been allowed because neither Labour nor Conservative parties were prepared to work with the Lib Dems to clean up political funding and put it on a proper democratic basis.

I would go further. This kind of involuntary or at least lazy funding of the Labour Party has, in this respect, allowed the current situation to continue.

Worse, it has continued in existence a political force that is so linked to the era of big trade unions, mass membership, and industrial unrest, that the nation's political culture is still stuck there.

It seems to me - every time I go into the Co-op, in fact - that the Labour Party is a great useless lump, full of sound and fury when it is out of office, but a timid lamb too frightened to shift power when it is in office, because it is out of its time.

Perhaps, I say very tentatively, if we turned off the involuntary tap, it would not survive and would leave space for a political party of our own time, which might make the changes we need.  In the meantime, and over recent decades, the Labour Party has been kept alive artificially.

Turn off the life support mechanism, I say. But then, I'm a Lib Dem, and you might say that it's my party that is now on life support. We'll have to see, I suppose.

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The corrosive dangers of victimhood

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that putting a 94-year-old in prison for four years leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.  Perhaps you deserve it if you were the so-called 'Bookkeeper of Auschwitz', as Oskar Groening was, but this isn't to do with who deserves what - it is about the dignity of the judicial system.

I'm not of course arguing that there should be a statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, or on sexual predators in the BBC in the 1960s come to that. Just that prosecuting at that distance means you don't catch the worst offenders - just the minor offenders who happen to stay alive.

For Germany to send a 94-year-old to prison is to extract the pound of flesh in a way that brings these issues into disrepute. Doing the same to Greece, over their debts, will rebound on the peace of Europe.

Nobody doubts, in either case, that Germany has rights on their side - they are owed money by the Greeks, they must hunt down war criminals. But they seem unable to see that these rights must not be prosecuted with too much zeal.

But at least I was able to hear again the inspiring interview with the Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor, who not just forgave Groening but embraced him, and demonstrated the power of letting victimhood go:

"I am a victorious human being, who has been able to rise above the pain, forgive the Nazis; not because they deserve it but because I deserve it."
It reminds me how damaging it is for people to hold too closely to their own victimhood. It isn't that a great wrong was not done to them - as Auschwitz survivors or child abuse victims. It was. It isn't that these crimes should not be investigated or the perpetrators brought to some kind of justice. They should be. But doing so for too long sometimes allows the victims to stay victims - and that can just close down their lives, and reduce them to nothing but victims.

Sometimes the appearance in court can help them release this status and it is important that they have it. Sometimes it will be the vindication that allows them to let go. But the systems should not give people an excuse to fail to break from the past, to do what they were born to do, to love wholeheartedly - and to keep making the effort to do so.

None of that suggests that they are not held back by the original crime.  They are.  Or that it is easy to escape it. But Eva Kor seems to me to have articulated why we have to help people escape if they can - because the key to life is to be a "victorious human being".

I'm just not sure that civilised societies pursue people into the mid-nineties.

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The economic consequences of the bail-out

I know the ferocious bail-out of Greece is not the Versailles Treaty. Nor are the debt-repayments reparations exactly The Economic Consequences of the Peace. but John Maynard Keynes knew a thing or two when he stormed home from Versailles in 1919 and wrote it.

There is something horrific when a great institution like the European Union becomes obsessive about one thing, so obsessive that it is prepared to put one corner of itself - one whole nation - into a state of semi slavery to achieve it.

This is what Keynes wrote in 1919 about the negotiators a century ago:

"The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated."

It is as if, in defence of a flawed continental currency - one designed so that it would suck up the available money and power into the centre - its first victims should be so punished. Because "the future life of Europe was not their concern". Apparently.

I must say, reading the outrageous terms visited upon the Greeks - apparently without any debt relief - I've been wondering whether I have been right about many things.  If the European Union can remove the rights of self-determination from a corner of Europe then, really, I want none of it.
If the peace of Europe becomes less important than the currency, or the debts, then it may well be best that we make our excuses and leave. Because I fear that what we saw today was a glimpse of a new European tyranny. From being the protector of the peace of Europe, the European Union is now threatening it.
It isn't that somehow they are squeezing the life out of Greece accidentally, it is that they are doing so deliberately - because Greece is less important than the currency.
What is even more frightening is that, if it hadn't been for the Lib Dems in 2010, the same kind of measures might have been visited on us. But at least we have a central bank. We can print our own currency if we need to, if national pride or desperation or ingenuity drives us to.
But our own austerity seemed such a temporary measure, a short-term pretence that the debt and the money is somehow real. Even Syriza, the great radicals, appear to have no alternative to offer their people but to sign on the dotted line of indentured servitude.
I don't feel very optimistic now, but there is an optimistic thought. That this is the beginning of the turning point, when we claw back a little of our futures from the financial world - because Greece will have to work out how, and we will follow where they eventually lead.
The worry is that they don't look as if they will lead us anywhere right now. And some of the places they might lead are extremely dark.

As Keynes concluded his book:

"If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp."

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