David Boyle's Blog, page 51

The arrogance of monopoly power

As I whizzed back down the A303 last weekend, there was a great roar behind me and I was passed by the most enormous articulated lorry, bearing the logo of Riverford Organics, a great monster in the world of organic food.

Let's leave on one side the issue of organic lorries - a peculiar concept - because the encounter reminded me of an interview I heard some years ago with Riverford's founder Guy Watson.  This is what he said:

"We'd just started building a small packhouse to Safeway's standards so we could supply them with lettuce, and their buyer wanted me to come up to see the technical department on the Thursday. I asked if Friday would be OK since I had to come up to London for the weekend anyway and the phone went dead. I rang back and said we must have been cut off. 'No sonny,' he said, 'when we whistle, you jump'."

It was an important piece of the jigsaw for me when I was writing The Human Element and trying to work out the implications for effectiveness when organisations have too much power, when they assume that kind of wasteful arrogance that goes with it.
Then, this morning, the NHS blogger Roy Lilley was writing about Monitor, the peculiar NHS regulator whose job it is to watch over the foundation trusts.
Now when I was doing my review into Barriers to Choice, Monitor was a good deal nicer to me, more helpful and more patient with me than NHS England, which was infuriated that someone like me should come along and stomp on their patch.  But it is hard to justify the existence of another hands-off regulator, paying more than 30 of its staff more than £100,000 a year.  This is what Roy said:
"A week or two ago, at a railway station, I happened upon a group of familiar faces. A Trust Chief Executive and his top team were on their way to a meeting with Monitor. Six rail fares, six top people way from their desks, six people on their way down to London to do something that at best could have been done on a conference-call, Skype or Face Time and at worse Monitor could have got off their backside and gone to the Trust. Institutional arrogance says; 'I'm the Regulator, you come to me'..."

Familiar, isn't it.  Now I'm not saying that Monitor behaves like Safeway did, but there is a parallel here.  It is the arrogance of the all-powerful facilitator confronted with the people actually doing the work.
It isn't about public or private.  Monitor is a public body and Safeway is a (sort of defunct) private body.  It is about scale and about power, the two key elements of the Liberal understanding of monopoly.
Neither of the other alternative ideologies seem to understand this.  They are either wholly uninterested in monopoly (socialists) or they turn a blind eye to it (Conservatives).   The articulation of this core issue needs to be made in every generation by Liberals, and it hasn't been recently, thought here are signs perhaps that the Lib Dems are beginning to remember their genetic heritage at last. 
These issues are the core of the business debate and the public services debate.  Public versus private, or vice versa, entirely miss the point.

The silence of the Ukip lambs

Isn't it strange how quiet it has all gone for Ukip, apart from the rather miserable business of turning their backs on everyone at the European Parliament.  They are not being talked about in quite the same way now, and largely - it seems to me - because the BBC and Guardian are less obsessed with them.

That doesn't mean they have gone away.  Given that, in the absence of the Lib Dems, they are articulating the only insurgent challenge to the political establishment, I expect they will continue to grow in support.

You will gather from this that I believe that Ukip thrives when the Lib Dems start compromising their crusade against the structures of power.  And let's face it, they are bound to do that to some extent when they are in government - but only to some extent.  Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her ambitions because she was in government, and I don't believe that doing so need always be incompatible with the limits of coalition.

But let's leave that on one side.  Liberty have taken up a case which goes to the heart of why Ukip's challenge is also compromised.

This is about Eileen Clark, British and a mother of three children, who left her American husband in 1995 with the children after a decade of abuse.

She came home to the UK, and was charged with 'custodial interference' in the USA, a charge which she believed had been dismissed.

Suddenly, nearly two decades later, she finds herself charged by the US authorities with 'international parental kidnapping' and struggling to fight off an order for extradition.

She is obviously terrified to be taken back to the USA, in the custody of US marshals, to face her abuser in court.  Clearly no American citizen would be extradited from here in the same way.  Thanks to the changes made in the extradition treaty by the Blair government, we are now completely abject when it comes to defending our own citizens.

Yet, for some reason, Ukip are silent on the issue - presumably because they don't care about the imbalance in our transatlantic relationship in the way that they care about the imbalance in our cross-Channel relationships.  Though I don't see why not.

But the Home Office has been adamant and Eileen was put on a US plane at Heathrow yesterday morning.

I find it quite extraordinary that we are colluding with an attempt to use kidnapping legislation to tackle what ought to be a civil dispute, where a vulnerable family needs some protection.

The manipulation of children and the baying of hounds

This isn’t a blog post about the sculptor Eric Gill, but it might as well be.

Gill was one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century. His work Prospero and Ariel currently adorns the front of Broadcasting House. It is a beautiful, inspiring piece of work.

I’m sure the current rumour that the BBC is going to take it down isn’t true, but the sound of the BBC cleansing itself from the Savile affair is now pretty deafening – so who knows.  They have certainly been told to.

I told my informant that it could not possibly be so.

“But don’t you realise what he did?” he said.

The answer is I’m only too aware of what Eric Gill did. Gill fostered a number of strange political and spiritual opinions, some (but only some) of which, I must admit, I share. But his biographer Fiona MacCarthy revealed that his particular sexual obsessions were meted out, not just on his daughters, but on the family dog.

I’m not sure that this knowledge diminishes his sculpture, or undermines the power of Ariel. In fact, I don’t believe that art has to reflect the sins of the artist – though clearly it can do. Not only that, but when we start believing it does, we are on dangerous, potentially tyrannical territory. We are tackling evils symbolically.

It is an intolerant state of mind.  As if the removal of art by sex abusers would somehow remove sex abuse.  As if it was better for us not to see its symptoms than we should prevent it happening now.

Which brings me to Rolf Harris, a dangerous subject for a political blogger. And let me make clear, I’m not saying that he and Gill were really comparable.  Or that I somehow discount the seriousness of the guilty verdict.

But I remember knowing the words for just two current songs during my childhood. The first was ‘She Loves You’ (not difficult, that one). The second was ‘Two Little Boys’.

It was a strange hit for the 1960s, given that it was a revived Edwardian song, but it became infused somehow with the spirit of the time. I can’t hear it now without being catapulted back to ancient sunlight in 1969, lying in the grass, repeating the words.

Rolf was a huge part of my childhood. I revered him for a whole range of things that remain quite hard to pin down. But in the end, it was my childhood, and I refuse to think differently about it because society deems that I should.

None of this condones sex with underage girls. Quite the reverse. But I refused to let this affair – which has been such a tragedy for all concerned – taint my own memories. I refuse to let it cast a shadow over my life in that period, because I am supposed to have conventional opinions, or because I am somehow sharing in a wider sense of victimhood.

The bottom line for me is this strong stench of witch-hunt, when pictures get removed from galleries and opinion-formers struggle to prove their distance from the man. It smacks of a mass re-writing of history. It implies a kind of intolerance and group-think which I find more than a little disturbing.

Yet there is a sense in which the Rolf Harris affair is symbolic.  The truth about the 1960s and 70s is that large sections of our culture were dedicated to the sexualisation and manipulation of children, and underage girls in particular.  Whole departments of the BBC were designed to foster a sense of dissatisfied consumerism among the young.

It would be better (wouldn't it?) to look fearlessly at our combined social history in those years.  We might then learn something about ourselves - and we certainly won't learn it by taking down sculptures and flinging Rolf Harris’ art from galleries.

The next kind of localism will be economic

Should we be suspicious that Osborne and Adonis seem to be of one mind when it comes to devolving economic power to the cities?

There is a faint worry in the back of my mind that, when things are bad enough for both the two biggest parties to agree, then probably the world has moved on and it is too late.  That certainly seems to be Simon Jenkins' view this morning.

But don’t let’s be too hasty. There is no doubt that there is a head of steam behind the basic idea that cities should be encouraged to be creative, responsible custodians of their own economies.

This despite the fact that the mere whiff of the idea is anathema in some corners of the Treasury, where the idea of The-Bank-of-Our-Friends-in-the-North keeps them up at night. Despite the fact also that local government recruitment for a generation has tried to weed out entrepreneurial innovators (they didn’t always succeed).

Both the main engines of devolution under the coalition, the Localism Act and City Deals, have shared the same weakness – they are too often stymied in practice by Whitehall. In the same way, the Treasury stymied an ambitious plan for tax increment financing (letting cities pay for projects by keeping the tax revenues that result).

When I worked in television in the late 1980s, I tried to construct an environmental index for all the biggest UK cities. I found that the data was available for every big city in Europe except in the UK, where it was only available for London.

In other words, to take these ambitions seriously – and tackle this ingrained metropolitan snobbery – politicians need to go further than setting out their ambitions. They need to say how they will break through the restrictions of Whitehall.

They also need to say, not how this will work in Manchester or Bristol – that much is obvious – but how their plans will transform the economies of Bradford, or anywhere else where the economy appears to be passing by on the other side.

There is no point in the plans of Osborne, Heseltine and Adonis if all they do is help along the cities that can already look after themselves, and simply tie the less successful ones ever closer to the Whitehall embrace.

I’ve argued before that there is an ultra-micro economics sector emerging – new local banks, new local energy installations, new local enterprise institutions, new ways of procurement, and maybe even new kinds of money.

It is in the earliest stages, and designed to look afresh and what assets any neighbourhood has – wasted land, wasted people, wasted resources – and turning that into a sustainable economy that can provide some measure of economic independence.

Those are questions rather than solutions, though some solutions are beginning to emerge. This very local economics is potentially a basis for greater self-determination, and it needs to be at the heart of policy.

But what should political parties put in manifestos about it? The New Weather Institute has published a new report with some proposals, based on work funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd. It is called The Next Devolution and it was published yesterday.

See what you think.

The two different NHS systems, side by side

Remember C. P. Snow, he of the Two Cultures lecture (to read it would be to condone it, according to F. R. Leavis)?  He used to say that, to be hailed as forward-thinking in your own lifetime, the trick was to be only a couple of seconds - and certainly no more than a minute or so - ahead of anyone else.  Any more than that, and you look like a crank.

For people like me, trying to generate ideas and make a living out of it, this is a fearsome problem.  I am constantly either too far behind or too far ahead of the curve.

I spent six months, ending this year, sitting on the Lib Dem public services commission, which will report in time for the party conference.  I think parts of the report are pretty good but I worry we weren't quite far enough ahead, especially in our injunction for service integration.

I was thinking this reading the influential NHS blogger Roy Lilley yesterday, who was being generally flabbergasted that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was backing US-style Ascountable Care Organisations - and was clearly right behind the vertical integration of services.

In fact, one of the oddities about the NHS at the moment is that it appears to be going in two directions at once.  On the one hand (if you read the campaign blogs and the political press) then it is being sold off, disjointed and disco-ordinated (is there such a word?).  On the other hand (if you are in the Department of Health) it is being integrated.  On the one hand competition, on the other hand integration.

It is true that you can have both, but there is an accommodation to be sought and I'm not sure where that compromise is going to be - probably different in different places.  What is definitely true is that the NHS is turning out different to what Andrew Lansley designed in the early years of the coalition - and it is peculiar that this is barely rceognised in the political media.

I hope that the alternative providers will not confuse the integration (they needn't).  I hope the integration won't streamline so much that it will get in the way of individual difference, yet will allow the system to focus on the places and the people which where costs are mounting the most.

I'm not one of those who believe that the NHS would be best served by going back to what it was in the 1970s.  It needs other kinds of service, community support and a range of other things too, some of which can only be provided by other patients (see what I've written on co-production in my book The Human Element).

And here is the point.  There is no point in vertically integrating the NHS if you don't also integrate the service sectors it also needs - from social care to alcohol services, not to mention education and the police.

NHS integration really just begs the question.  How can we knit all the services that people need together in such a way that we don't have to deal with every one of them individually, with different protocols and systems?

And please don't tell me this is an information problem as if it can be solved by an app.  Nor is it an outcomes problem, as Roy Lilley implied in his praise of SMART commissioning - the trouble with commissioning for specified numerical outcomes is that it misses all the stuff between the definitions, narrows the outcomes and undermines the coherence of the service.

No, in the end, integration has to be very local.  It has to be human-scale and de-professionalised.  It needs to deal with people's complex lives as they are, not as the service designers would prefer them.  And we are still some way from that and, generally, hurtling in the opposite direction.  And that direction is ulimately extremely expensive.

We need to overcome the curse of positioning

Listening to Ed Balls last night, he sounded so authentically Labour that it made me smile a weary little smile.  As Balls explained, Jon Cruddas can't possibly have meant it when he said he was frustrated with Labour's treatment of his policy review.  Why, well he can't be, can he?  He was so supplicatory on the phone only a few days ago...

But actually Cruddas, who has been turbo-charging Labour's policy review, was really unambiguous in his rage against the political machinery which could reduce his review to what he called:

"Cynical nuggets of policy to chime with our focus groups and press strategy."

Cruddas is undoubtedly right, and there is no doubt that Labour's in a difficult position.  If its policies are too dull, everyone says that Miliband is failing to inspire.  If they are too interesting, everyone says that man is insane.

The trouble is that this malaise of  positioning goes way beyond Labour.  Michael Meadowcroft, the former Leeds West MP who is the closest the Lib Dems have to an in-house philosopher, was complaining about exactly these same thing in the Lib Dems in the latest edition of Liberator (along with a staunch defence of Nick Clegg, which I entirely agreed with, but not linkable).

And I've been wondering about this because there is no doubt that the curse of the focus group does suck idealism out of party platforms  Yet parties have to know what people think about their propositions.

How do you square the circle?  I think the answer is that, the ecstacy of positioning that characterises Lib Dem economic policy for the past generation may be inevitable - and even necessary - but it works only on two conditions.

First, that there has to be a general understanding about what your party is for (both Lib Dem and Labour have some years ago foregone this).

Second, that there has to be a ferment of wider debate - exemplifying purpose and ideals - that goes on incessantly in and around the party (Labour manages this but the Lib Dems, so far, lack the institutions of debate and the opinion-formers who carry on public debate, though these exist underground).

I must admit I have sat through some vacuous presentations on party positioning in my time.  I have wracked my brains why otherwise intelligent people take them seriously - especially those which rank policy areas in order of importance in the public's mind.  What does it mean if the public put health top, for example?  That they want more beds, fewer beds, less pollution, more NHS spending, more choice, less choice?  The answers are always assumed.

But Cruddas was pointing towards something yet more insidious.  It is the idea that you can create some kind of political crusade out of a series of opinion surveys stitched together.  A series of bright ideas and clever slogans. a paint-by-numbers approach to politics.  It is utterly vacuous and the public knows this as much as anyone else.

The want their politicians to believe something and, if it seems heart-felt and practical, they often give people a chance.  As long as they understand why these ideas hold together.

These are extremely hard things to achieve in these days of negative campaigning, but it is the moral coherence - or otherwise, and their authenticity or otherwise - that people respond to.  And if you ask me for evidence, just think for a moment what influences you.

So don't for goodness sake give up on ideas.  Because, outside Westminster, the ideas are emerging and they have some resonance.  Don't let's carry on as if the world hadn't chanced since 1979 (or worse, since 1945).

Is Farage the next Thomas Cromwell?

As avid readers of Master Shardlake’s chronicles will know, the 1530s saw a political and economic revolution in this country. There were political peculiarities about it which lay behind the way it happened – Henry VIII’s divorce for example – but there are reasons for thinking that it might have been inevitable sometime.

There were two linked events I wanted to talk about here. One was the severing of links between England and the sovereign European supra-national authority, the power of Rome (Rome and Brussels have played parallel roles in our history, as bogieman).

The other was linked to it. It was the privatisation of the social, educational and welfare support system, and the parceling out of the assets to allies of the crown – a set of events also known as the Dissolution of the Monasateries.  Both emerged from a new Protestant critique.

As I read the kind of language used by Conservative MPs recently, about the European Commission’s ideas for tackling something we seem unable to tackle ourselves - our disastrous 30-year house price bubble – I wondered if we were seeing elements of history repeating itself.

UKIP are, in that respect, a resurgent Protestant political force, in revolt against the Catholic power of the European Commission, and forcing the government to resit the imposition of a true Ultra-montanist, Jean-Claude Juncker.

I would not have enjoyed living through the period of the Reformation in this country. I will not enjoy it if that period comes again, but I have wondered over the last few weeks whether – for reasons of history – it is inevitable that the resurgent Protestant force will call the shots long enough to take the UK out of the European Union, and possibly also to sell off our welfare system.

Like the reformers designated the monasteries in the 1530s, there is a Protestant narrative which designates the welfare state as corrupt.

The irony is that the very elements the Protestant reformers hate the most – the mindless bureaucracy of the single market – was a creation of their forebears in the Thatcher government, and will be repeated if we leave in identical form in a new US-UK trade deal.

But is that a case that is likely to be understood in the current climate? Especially if a European Scotland, and its revitalised Auld Alliance with the continent, leaves the English Protestant rump behind?

If this is an accurate parallel, is history likely to repeat itself as farce? And if so, is there some way aof side-stepping it?  Ir is it really inevitable that we have to endure it all over again?

Liberal free trade is not conservative free trade

For years, I have been arguing that there is no real division inside the Lib Dems, who are (in my characterisation) – both the Orange Bookers and the Social Liberal Forum – uniformly uninterested in economics, its constraints or its possibilities.

But I went to the Orange Book knees-up conference yesterday, run by CentreForum, and have begun to realise that I have been wrong all this time. And on nearly all counts.

For one thing, listening to David Laws - the co-editor of the original collection of essays - I realised that he is certainly interested in economics. He may see things differently to me, but he is definitely interested, and (despite the way he is portrayed) interested in how you mesh together social and economic liberalism.  As I am.

For another thing, there is clearly a division. It is an irritating one, between two different kinds of economic conservatism, but you only had to look around the conference to realise the division was there. There was a handful of us not in the grey suits and ties of the Westminster mafia, but not many of us. Yes, there is a divide. I got it wrong.

Because I am always hopelessly late, I missed the first symposium about free trade. I had hoped somebody would try and define free market economic liberalism as distinct from free market economic conservatism. I gather that the only person who did so at all was Tim Montgomerie, former editor of Conservative Home.

But I listened closely to David Laws, and with respect – because he is a thoughtful politician, and there are not many of them.

He is also clearly a Liberal in his understanding of the constraints that poverty and social deprivation impose on open markets. He understands that, and ought to get more credit for it than he does – and his record at the Department for Education will bear this out.

But there are three weaknesses of ‘Orange Book Liberalism’ as he defines it.

1. Save to invest, which Laws says is a key principle, clearly implies investing to save. But it is ‘invest to save’ that is the really big Liberal idea, and where the difficulties are and which needs wrestling with. For those of us Liberals who still believe in thrift – a defining feature as far as I’m concerned – then investing to save is absolutely crucial. It has to be if it is going to prevent public services from being overwhelmed by need.

2. Choice and competition. This emerged in the debate rather often as two sides of the same coin, but – when they are linked together like that, as if they meant the same – they are both defined vaguely. One of the reasons that choice seems to me to have got so stuck under the coalition is because it is not defined precisely enough.

3. Monopoly. Here we get to the nub of it. By their failure to develop the Liberal understanding of free trade over the past two generations, it seems to me Liberals have allowed a their idea to slip out of their hands, and into the hands of those who believe it is just about deregulation. The prevailing understanding of free trade is dominated by American conservatives. Liberal free trade, the original version, is all about tackling the tyranny of monopoly, state or private. The prevailing interpretation of free trade, as understood by the IEA for example, is far too cosy to private monopoly, and – by letting monopoly off the hook – is not really free trade at all.

Liberal free trade is about enterprise, innovation and imagination. It is about the right of the small to challenge the big. It is not about giving absolute power to the wealthy and powerful. Quite the reverse. But who is articulating the Liberal interpretation of free trade?  I'm not sure I heard it articulated yesterday.

There was a telling moment when David Laws said that, unlike previous economic collapses, the 2008 crisis did not lead to an insurgent new understanding of economics. I have been wondering about this ever since, because he is both right and wrong.

It is quite wrong that there is no challenge to the prevailing, broken understanding of economics shared by the Whitehall machine. The combination of Piketty’s concern about equality and the emergence of the sharing economy is powerful but, so far, incoherent.

And yet, and yet, the sharing economy - the resurgence of mutualism in its broadest sense - is an example of precisely the kind of insurgent economic liberalism that I am talking about. But did the suited wonks in the room recognise that?  Had the hard-faced men who-had-done-well-out-of-the-coalition ever heard of it?

Because I find that, when I’m told that there is no emerging alternative in a room full of Westminster suits, all my contrarian instincts begin to emerge....

Amazon might still save the high street. Here's how

Have you noticed how the discussion about whether or not our high streets can survive has disappeared from our collective media radar?
So 2013, wasn’t it...
My article inthe Guardian yesterday suggests that there is a reason for this – the cheerleaders for out of town shopping are finding that the sums just don’t add up for them any more.
To the surprise of many of us, last September’s figures showed that out of town shopping centres were losing shoppers faster than high streets.  Even the Great King Clone of the retail world, Tesco, is on the slide.
I don’t think we realised back in the days of the Clone Town Britain campaign how the market would change – these days you either have to be cheap and convenient or local and authentic.  The economic writing is on the wall for anything in between.
In other words, the high streets appear to be on the winning side, for a change.
What I didn't say in the article – because I only had the regulation 700 words – is that the survival of high street shopping is certainly not assured either.  Three other conditions have to be met before they come anything close to thriving again...
First, they need an economic raison d'etre.  The preferred high street solution depends on there being space for culture, fun and eating out – what James Rouse used to call the 'festival marketplace' – but there is a problem here. For a secure future, high streets and town centres have to provide an economic underpinning. It can't just be pop-up art installations in the empty shops. Despite Mary Portas, who is right I have to say, we are not there yet.
Second, they need to escape the clutches of our pensions.  If the big property companies think they can still rake off the kind of rental profits that they wee used to in the days of upward only rent reviews, then the whole delicate edifice really can't survive
But the last one is the most important.  The tax anomalies that give such an advantage for the online providers have to be sorted out – the government simply must cannot turn a blind eye to the way Amazon routes its sales through Luxembourg in a way that John Lewis can't.  It is unfair, destructive and it is anti-business.
So when Hamish McRae in the Evening Standard last night asked why the government's tax take is going down even as the economy rises, it might be worth looking at the growth of online shopping as one potential explanation.
If we are heading for the imminent demise of what we might call Bluewater Mind (the tendency to spend a couple of hours sweating on a motorway sliproad just for the chance to consume), then we are paying for it by giving tyrannical power over us to the internet behemoths.

The current control that Amazon has over the economy is unsustainable and potentially tyrannical – and the failure of the coalition to act on their tax avoidance is one of its most important failures.

Can the new American revolution happen here?

"This is probably the most important period of US history bar none – I include the American Revolution – because we’ve run out of options. Either we develop a new way forward or fascism is a possibility or we will see growing decay."

This is a fascinating take on the future history of the USA, by the political activist and historian Gar Alperovitz, interviewed in New Start by Clare Goff last week.  Alperovitz is increasingly prominent in the political debate around the edges of politics, which takes a rather longer view (not hard actually) than the day-to-day debate.
It is the most important period of American history because there is an emerging sense, not just that the old systems are failing, but that radically differebt economic solutions are within reach.  Appealing to the self-determination of the American Revolution won't work over here, but it carries a sense of economic liberation which is intentional.  This is what he says:
"The systems that we have are generating great pain and are not capable of solving the problems we have. Whether it’s unemployment, the environment, or poverty, across the board you see growing pain. Most people take it on existentially and say 'I’m a failure' but people are beginning to say 'No, there’s something wrong here'. The traditional model for social democracy – the Democrats, Liberals, Labour party – has played itself out in its capacity to alter trends. The only awareness – and this is a profound change – is that there are no answers. A few years ago people would say that if we elect a Democrat all would be okay. No one believes that anymore. There’s not quite the awareness that we face a systemic problem, but there is awareness that something is wrong with the old system..."

Alperovitz is a fascinating figure, the author of What Then Must We Do? .  We have no real equivalent over here.  He is a compelling speaker - I heard him hold an audience spellbound on a winter night in a small town in western Massachusetts for an hour and a half, speaking without notes.  He is a Washington insider in the sense that he has worked in and around the Senate and House since the 1960s, and yet he is preaching a doctrine of complete economic renewal - based on mutualism and a new generation of economic institutions.
I believe he is right, and I am beginning to sense a new mood here too.  At the moment it is just a public distaste for greed (the treatment of Gary Barlow, for example), and a growing understanding that the banking system is no longer designed for most of us - but this is yet to translate itself into a clear political direction.  It is in a sense, the very quiet other side of the coin to the Ukip revolt.
The sheer pragmatism of the Lib Dems means they are not well placed to hear the signals from this new mood, or understand the new direction when it emerges.  The lack of pragmatism among the Greens also makes it hard for them to respond.  Both Labour and Conservative parties are so riven with disagreements about their political direction that we can't expect much from them.  Ukip is too blinkered.
So where is the new direction going to emerge?  The answer is - in the cities.  Once they wake up and realise that the ball is in their court.  Nobody is going to save them.  They will have to act themselves - and, when they do, I suggest they go to Gar Alperovitz for advice.