David Boyle's Blog, page 7

But still not enough to support the self-employed...

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. It is a time of excitement and of fear, of enthusiasm and exhaustion, generosity and selfishness. It is a moment for breaking rules; it is an epoch of clinging to tickbox processes.

If I was Charles Dickens, I would probably go on. The key point is that it is an age of paradoxes, and especially when you start to think about the longterm results of this virus shutdown.

In 1939, when we last declared war in this kind of all-embracing way, you might go into shops or any organisation and be told - if you dared to complain about anything - "Don't you know there's a war on?"

I haven't yet been told "Don't you know there's a virus on". But as I try to negotiate my way through Santander's tickbox facility, trying to negotiate myself a mortgage holiday - where the phone directs you to the website and the website directs you back to the phone - I half expect that classic response of the second rate and hidebound.

This is what I mean, and amidst all the bravery and new thinking too. Here are some other long-term trends we might expect:
The return of the boffin. Experts have had a bad press recently, but now there they are flanking the prime minister at his press announcements. It is economists that still require forgiveness.More local heroes and heroines. And yet the people we will be most grateful to by the end won't be experts at all - they will be engineers hacking ventilators and our neighbours setting up outreach systems or local bookshops heroically staying open, at least by delivering books by bike.The roaring twenties. Well, that's what happened last time economies were unleashed again.The return of inflation. And yet - despite the threat of deflation - it seems unlikely that the government will be able to balance the work going on in the economy with the circulation of cash.A spike in divorces. We have all heard the phrase: "If I'm going to be stuck here with you for the next three months, then you're going to have to..." Christmas leads to divorces and this is like an endless Christmas.The return of the baby boom. And yet, when people are reunited, we also know what happens. And it will be widely understood, except by the government officials who plan ahead for school places. So expect trouble around 2026.Perhaps the most interesting question is around which of these economic changes are likely to be permanent - especially given how close to the edge so many companies have become.

I'm not sure anyone will miss the airlines and airports (except the British, of course, who fly more than any nation on earth). The future of food looks set to be local with short supply lines after all. But if the economy was in such a dire situation before, then it may be that some government support for salaries will have to be semi-permanent.

At the moment, these arrangements suffer from two major problems - they are are much too complex to get the money out quickly. Santander isn't the only organisation to keep their tickbox systems in place - and directing the self-employed towards a dodgy and overwhelmed universal benefit system seems doomed. Then there are huge problems with quantitative easing, which we know means even more inequality. It is as if Rishi Sunak didn't mean it when he said that would set aside ideology - except, apparently, the ludicrous pretence that governments don't create money.

It pains me to say it, but Trump was probably right that the way to preserve the economy is to provide what the Japanese call helicopter money for everyone, to fend for themselves and pay basic bills over the next few months. I would suggest that the Bank of England creates about £1,000 per adult per month.

The main question is whether this will put further pressure on the pound. This seems unlikely if the Americans are doing it too. There may be inflationary pressures as a result - given how little work is actually happening in the economy - but those may also counteract the deflationary pressures that are also going on.

If it goes just to self-employed people and sole traders who employ themselves (I have to declare an interest here), it would mean an injection of £10-£20 billion a month, probably directly via the tax system. Speed counts - nobody has time for tickbox any more.

It may be that they need to increase income tax temporarily by 1p in the pound to take it out of the economy again.

Alternatively, we have to innovate along similar lines, using a parallel digital currency along the lines of the recent scotpound proposals by the New Economics Foundation.


They great advanatge for these is that they are simpler to administer and very much faster to get into people's hands that the tickbox ways the government is proposing.

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Enochophobia in the time of cholera, and the new Shell Crisis

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

In the time of cholera, which - despite Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I take to be the 1830s, there were riots in the back streets of London among the poor who believed the government's intention was to let them die so they could turn their bodies into what they called 'nattomy soup' - to feed the others.

By the 1840s, there was Ebenezer Scrooge worrying about the so-called surplus population. There was the government allowing the Irish potato famine to take its course.

There has always been a strand of British government that treated the governed with some disdian and fear. It is a fear of the mob, a problem known as enochophobia.

So when we believed the government's plan for treating the corona virus was 'herd resilience' - and it meant that 70 per cent of the population needed to be infected, it would mean that, at only on one per cent rates of mortality, losing half a million dead in a few months. To put that in context, that is twice as many as died in UK cities during five years of blitz in the second world war.

The good news is that the health secretary has denied that is the policy and it is now clear that ministers have changed their minds. It would have been a traditional mixture of Tory disdain and radical utilitarianism if it had been - but what is the policy? And why does there remain some confusion about it?

My worries about this derives from the road-building programme in last week's budget - which represents an exhumation of the old Lloyd George Roosevelt New Deal policy of road-building to boost the economy. They cannot possibly believe, as they claim, that it will do anything to rebalance the regional economies. Quite the reverse: more roads means there will be a subtle sucking noise as economic activity sucks down to London - are ministers really so old-fashioned that they have never thought these things through?

That is the kind of boneheading thinking we feared from this government. Luckily, they do seem to be getting to grips with things a little. So in case you thought the government's approach to corona was enochophobia dressed as science, then here are a few bits of better news...
There has now been some recognition that they need to organise the emergency manufacure of respirators and ventilators, with the same kind of urgency that the government sought out exocet missiles on the black market during the Falklands War. They may not succeed, but if you know of a capable manufacturer, please pass on this spec.There does seem to be a home testing kit on the way, even if ministers have not yet grasped that they need to have some alternative to official testing, If they don't know when they've had it, then people will find it impossible to stop self-isolating when they are actually well - and can help.Once those are in people's hands, it can't be long before they launch a website which will allow people to upload their experiences of the virus and to give researchers some idea of its spread. Like this one on open source equipment.Ministers must by now have grasped that they can have people self-isolating OR looking after older relatives, but not both. There are now community groups that are gearing up to keep people safe and to help those who are sick. See the article by my colleagues Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms on genuinely civil contingensies.There is no doubt that the Chancellor's statement yesterday is an important step forward, but probably the only way of preserving the economy is to organise a new form of money creation on the Japanese model of helicopter money - I would suggest an off-balance sheet payment of £1,000 a month to every adult (more on this later).Politically, I have a feeling that the potential game chnager is the looming ventilator scandal. It reminds me of the shell scandal of 1915 - which led to the replacement of one old-fashioned premier (Asquith) by a more ruthless though less principled one (Lloyd George).

It may be that the lack of ventilators will lead to the replacement of slow-moving, lovelorn Boris Johnson with celtic determination in the shape of Michael Gove.


One final hopeful thought: the sound of community singing in Sienna in locked down Italy, through open windows. There is the authentic noise of the human spirit.

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Why Back to the Land is about to roar back (come along on 19 March?)

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...
I have an unproven and probably unprovable theory about new movements - political or otherwise - which is that they usually involve reaching back into the past, borrowing an idea and reshaping in a modern way.

That would, for example, explain slow food, a movement that emerged from Italy in the 1990s - reaching into the past is how we give radical ideas a sense of authenticity. Without that historic edge, it can appear too glitzy; without the modern edge, it is liable to collapse into a morose and deeply conservative melancholy or fundamentalism.

That is for example when the original Populist Party in the 1880s, the people who inspired The Wizard of Oz, became white supremacists. Or when the social credit movement of the 1920s and 30s collapsed into anti-semitism.

One thing that follows from this theory is that one way to seek out future mvements is paradoxically to look to the past. Which is one reason I believe the Back to the Land movement is about to beome politically important again. 
Back to the Land is one of south east England's contirbutions to the world - a reaction against the first great industrial city (London). It grew up in the early 19th century, and included inspiration from William Cobbett (a radical), Samuel Palmer (a Tory), William Morris and Richard Jefferies (socialists), John Ruskin (a high Tory, or so he said), Peter Kropotkin (a communist), Mahatma Gandhi (an Indian nationalist), G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (both Liberals and then Distributists), Henry Williamson (a fascist), and Fritz Schumacher (Green?) and so on.

All of these influenced each other in a tradition that stretches through to today, and these may not have been the political labels they would have chosen to describe themselves. Most (though not all) of them also have high Anglican or Roman Catholic links, even if was just an obsession with gothic architecture.

Their big problem was that the conservaive part of their nature tended to struggle with the radical parts over the issue of gender equality.

One of the reasons I think that Back to the Land will become an important political factor here - apart from its obvious relevance to the climate crisis and the issues around local regeneration and how to achieve it - is that women are now the driving forces.

Perhaps this began with the American Distributist Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic Worker, who marked a shift of energy in the Back to the Land movement from predominantly male to predominantly female. After her death in 1980, those who came after her – from Pam Warhurst in Todmorden to Wangari Maathai in Nairobi, from the pioneers of the local food movement in Dorset to the Chipko women of Uttar Pradesh – have tended to be women.

It was the Distributists who had led the way battling against eugenics, agricultural cruelty and pesticides. But while Ruskin wrote and Palmer painted, and did it very well, the women acted. Gandhi’s programme of agrarian devolution plus nation-rebuilding – in some ways an offshoot of the same English tradition – is so often led by women.

Perhaps the most obvious symptom of this shift is the change in the status of allotments in the UK. By the 1970s, this tended to be a dwindling retirement activity for men of a certain age, like pigeon-fancying. Now the 100,000 people waiting for allotments in London alone, and those who are growing things on the extraordinary multi-ethnic informal landscapes that allotment sites have become, are overwhelmingly women.

These issues will be important in our new world of changing weather and far less foreign travel - even if it is to avoid whatever infection that follows the corona virus, and visited upon us by our globalised middle classes.

That is anyway going to be part of my message on March 19 when I'm giving a talk on 'Could Distributism still change the world?' at the Ditchling Museum in Sussex. If you can be in Sussex then (near Hassocks Station), it would be lovely to see you...
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How might we go about enacting a no #tickbox policy?

This post first appeared on the Radix blog...

Here are the three most egregious versions of tickbox that I have run across in the last few days…

First, the government’s proposals to reform the early years foundation stage, which the Early Years Alliance warns is risking turning it into “a series of bullet points … a narrow tickbox approach.”

Second, the unmissable NHS blogger Roy Lilley used a similar word to attack the CQC, the doyennes of tickbox in the health sector:

“The Confed, Providers, NAPC, the Shalfords, the Mulberries, unions, the think-tanks should find the guts to say what the dogs in the streets know…

…it is time for a narrative that says; when we started to look for quality improvements all we had was a clip-board and a box to tick. Now, we have data, algorithms and machine learning. We are able to spot problems in the making, warn leaders and support them to sidestep disaster. Keep us safe...

When there are viable, sensible alternatives, to carry on with clapped-out inspection wins no applause from the people failed by quality…”

Third, the so-called uberization of mental health in an important article by Dr Elizabeth Cotton who writes the blog Surviving Work. The article followed the conference last year called the ‘industrialistion of care’.

This refers to the way the government’s favoured IAPT approach to mental health is “based on a series of patient assessments that use tightly-scripted questionnaires allowing only minimal freedom of discussion between therapist and patient.”

This is the model that is increasingly being delivered online, often by staff unqualified as psychologists.

Complaining about people’s lack of qualifications is the layman’s version of tickbox, but there is no doubt that people’s special mental health needs requires this excessive simplification. More on the mental health aspects of tickbox in my book.

I suppose I would probably add the government’s consultation on green regulations for new homes, now closed. Stupidly in my view, they want to prevent local authorities from experimenting with setting their own higher environmental standards for new build – on the grounds that you can save money if everyone has the same regulations.

Thus is a classic tickbox mistake, because economists tend to measure economies of scale but ignore the diseconomies of scale.

So whether it is bowlderisation, stupidiification or uberization – or McDonaldisation (the title of a 1993 book by Georg Ritzer) – we know tickbox now for what it is, an insidious and creeping problem that is suffocating our ability to act on the world.

I proposed in my last blog a self-denying ordinance, a pledge signed by professionals, promising to ignore the tickboxes imposed on them and do what is necessary for who ever stands before them.

That seems to me to be one approach, appealing to the humanity and pride of the professions and challenging them to show they have not been completely hollowed out.

Could we also legislate for large organisations so that, when they use a tickbox system, they must also provide an obvious and easy access to a human being if people want one? But then, what such legislation would actually be trying to tackle would be the way that some organisations, public and private have such overwheening confidence in their own systems (the Immigration Service and myHermes spring to mind) that there is no way to register a complaint which has any chance of reaching a human being.

What else do we need for a fully-fledged No Tickbox policy that might be enacted? Please let me know…

Buy the book from Hive. Buy from Amazon. Buy the audio version.
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Towards a heroic No #Tickbox pledge

This blog first appeared on the Radix UK site...

It has only been a fortnight since the publication of my Tickbox book, but the trickle of background information that was beginning to emerge when the book was first out has now become a flood.

That is clearly also my mood to some extent, even more than when I was writing the book: I now see symptoms of tickbox everywhere I look.

Teachers tell me that this is the reason they are leaving the profession. I’ve heard from NHS psychologists, prison officials, health workers - though not yet the marketing or HR people responsible for the ubiquitous five-point surveys every time we have any kind of interaction with businesses…

I suppose my top tickbox this week will have to include the news, uncovered by the BBC’s Moneybox programme (no relation!), that serious complaints about the Department for Work and Pensions can take around four years to resolve.

This example reeks of tickbox because the DWP makes the absolutely classic mistake of measuring their performance only from the moment their senior experts open the file, which is usually at least 18 months from the time the complaint is made.

There should be a word for that kind of dodge, because it happens so often - and always has done (a symptom of Goodhart’s Law in action). As far as I know, there isn’t.

I’m also glad to be cited in the British Medical Journal, no less, by Miles Sibley in his plea for more person-centred feedback being required if the NHS is really going to provide person-centred care.

I was fascinated to see a link there to a blog by Andrea Siodmok in the open policy blog of the Cabinet Office, looking for what she called 'thick data' alongside more conventional but doubtful big data - most of it seriously compromised by Goodhart's Law.  She means data with depth, about human beings - not instead, but so that big data and thick data is required to test each other.

Then there was the news that, unsurprisingly, the roll-out of universal credit - a good idea undermined and stupidified by tickbox - has been delayed again.

I came away from my Steyning Bookshop event (see picture) with a greater understanding of the meaning of tickbox. It means that people take less responsibility for the inevitable way in which the people they serve fail to fit the preferred process.


There is both the meaning and a potential antidote to tickbox. It amounts to a plea to people serving the public to take a little more responsibility. I don't mean flinging caution to the winds, but enough to make the system work. Perhaps we need some kind of public pledge - at least an I WILL NOT TICKBOX bumper sticker?

You can buy the Tickbox book from  Hive  or  Amazon .

The great #Tickbox campaign starts here...

This month, I have published two contributions to what I hope will be a new debate about the insane and unhumane system that is attempting to manage the world on behalf of those who own it. One is my co-written Radix pamphlet Whatever happened to doing ? and the other is my book Tickbox .

The great thing about having named a modern phenomenon is that you get sent examples from all sectors. These are now pouring in. Here are three of my favourites from last week…

The first is the most obvious, in some ways. It was the BBC news story about inspectors warning schools against gaming their league tables by making pupils take less prestigious games GCSE exams, rther than giving them a proper rounded education.

The Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman is in fact emerging as one of the scourges of tickbox, but she can’t slay the beast alone.

Then there was the example, which I was forwarded on Twitter (thank you, Naomi and Jon) about going to a school parents evening and seeing even the best teachers starting conversations using tickbox colour-coded exam score predictions:

"Every teacher, even the good ones, began with a colour-coded grid of test results. I don't care. Does he show love for the subject? Does he knuckle down when asked? Has he got ideas? Is he fun? Does he ask questions?"

Quite. In my earlier books The Tyranny of Numbers, I found myself suggesting an Emperor’s New Clothes test which any numerical targets or KPIs should be subject to - yes, the exam results are impressive, but are they educating people; yes, they have a high ‘grit’ score - one of the ways my children’s school asseses pupils - but are they happy?

Finally, and most depressingly, is the letter at the top of this post, sent to looked after children (I don’t know where). Can you imagine a real parent sending anything remotely like that to their own children?

The letter includes the sentence, after apologies for the inconvenience, about how the latest SDQ “requires the completion and return to your allocated worker no later than 10/01/2020 (incidentally, the same date as the letter).

There is little sign of a backlash so far, though the one review I have received so far on Amazon is critical. The reviewer does not understand how identity politics has anything to do with tickbox (“God only knows how,” he says).

Perhaps I might humbly ask him to read my ‘tickbox politics’ chapter again, where I try to explain precisely this…

He also claims that I am “anti-science” for criticising the official cult of ‘evidence-based’. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I also believe science should be about asking difficult questions. That is how knowledge progresses. When and if it became simply about testing concordance with existing knowledge, then it would indeed have succumbed to tickbox. Luckily, I have more faith in scientists than that…


So if you feel differently, do please add a review to Amazon (pretty please!). I would be ever so grateful.

You can buy the Tickbox book from  Hive  or  Amazon .

Tickbox and the mystery of the disappearing books

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

Why are there so many blank walls in public libraries these days? Is it because librarians have, despite decades of inculcation, conceived a dislike to the printed form? It seems unlikely.

I first discovered the phenomenon visiting the award-winning Thornton Heath Library in Croydon. The design in concrete and glass certainly looked impressive - but what happened to all the books?

There are people who might have said that was what a library was for - some of us still read after all (especially after the decline in ebook sales) but libraries are still slinging out the legacy of human knowledge, preferring us to dependent on knowledge via Google.

It is unfortunately also the trend for school libraries, blank walls, empty shelves, more iPads, especially those which follow trends most slavishly…

But the we had the good fortune to visit one of the biggest schools in West Sussex, where the school library has built up, among other things, an enviable local history book collection.

We asked the librarian how she had managed to swim against such a tide, and she said it was a matter of keeping your nerve when the library system instructs you to dispose of any books that haven’t been borrowed for six months.

It is precisely this kind of system that face so many people working in the public and private sectors - the mixture of online tickboxes, KPIs, targets and centralised controls that their managers rely on to monitor performance.

This is the ubiquitous system I have called Tickbox in my new book of the same name, and which explains - or so I argue - why we feel so badly let down by governments, services and companies alike.

Most of us know precisely what is wrong with Tickbox - that most of these measures or targets either miss the point or get finessed by managers. Those who can’t see it tend to be the elite forces who run the world - and who believe what they are told by the frontline. And who dream of automated systems that can manage organisations without what they fear are messy human interventions or decisions.

The result is that officials tick boxes to allow them to move on but where nothing has changed (as tey seem to have done at Grenfell Tower), or we get tickbox targets which focus on the wrong things because what we really want - love, care, education - isn’t measurable.

Or we find ourselves in a ridiculous complaints loop where is is impossible to talk to a real person who would understand our problem in seconds (try myHermes if you really want this kind of entertainment).

Or we get irritated by being asked on a five-point Likert scale how we would rate our latest minor interaction with the bank - where the rep ‘suggests’ that you might make it a 5.

Now the example of the school librarian is instructive because she just refused to throw the books away. And because it is all virtual, nobody seems to have complained.

Though, actually, we never asked her about that.

It is an excellent example of how we take back control of the world - though Tickbox has encouraged an administrative culture where nobody takes decisions. We just say no.

There are few enough examples of this in practice, certainly in the public sector. The Local Trust has been charged by the Big Lottery with giving away a million pounds each to 150 impoverished or isolated neighbourhoods, with the single proviso that local people come up with an agreed plan to spend it. That is the opposite of tickbox (tockbox perhaps).

More controversially, the Dutch healthcare system have developed its own method of ‘scrap sessions’, where staff get together to identify targets or tickbox bureaucracy that needs to go. We need something similar in the UK.

But we first need to name the problem - which is why I wrote the book. Tickbox is the machine those who run the world have created to manage things in their absence: we need to call it out and then switch it off.


You can buy the Tickbox book from Hive or Amazon .

Optimism, naivety and the counterculture - towards a way forward for a radical centre

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

Long-standing lib Dems, battered by a disappointing general election result – the third in a row – then had to cope with a Guardian column by former Times editor Simon Jenkins, urging the party to wind itself up.

Let’s leave aside some of Jenkins’ arguments about tactical voting – which don’t really stand up – and tackle the central claim that there is no potential role for the Lib Dems to fulfil, even if they do not at the moment.

Because, we have to face it that – if that was true – then all of us who are trying to develop the radical centre ought to pack up and go home. That would leave the field free to two ancient and backward-looking perspectives – perhaps also ideologies – with their negative way of looking at the world.

For me, there are three areas we need to investigate to find ways forward and to show why Jenkins was wrong.

First, and most important, is the vast gap for any kind of political vision that represents the view of families and communities across the UK. Of course, there are families and people who are cruel or exploitative to each other, and worse. But there is no point in building political correctness, let alone an ideology, on the cruelties.

Racism, hate and sexism are neither of them best fought by assuming they are everywhere. Love between people is absolutely ubiquitous, and communities are more usually accepting, supportive and creative places – and, if you think otherwise, then that is liable to re-shape them.

Unfortunately, the culture war that appears to be engulfing us sees hate everywhere, and more and more the angrier both sides get, believing that under every bed and in every closet there is exploitative, dysfunctional rage – or somebody spreading it in the opposite direction.

Yet there is a potential ideology that spreads power downwards, trusting people because people care for each other – not because cruelty is impossible, but because we can confront it better if it isn’t hidden in plain sight by all the rest.

This will be regarded by both sides of the culture war as naïve. Which is what I was told when I claimed during my only appearance on a radio phone-in programme – a programme called ‘Honey, I’m home’ in Halifax, Nova Scotia during the G7 summit there in 1995 – when the very few callers who weren’t wrong numbers accused me of exactly that for my point of view that economics could rescue the world if it re-thought itself.

I said then, as I believe now, that all I was saying was that everything wasn’t completely hopeless. If we are to build a way out that can’t be dismissed as politically correct, based on the obvious love between people you see nearly everywhere, that is the attitude we will have to confront.

Second, neither of the two ideologies to which Simon Jenkins wants to hand a monopoly on political debate has much interest in the devolution of power – probably our most urgent missing element in reform (as Jenkins recognised himself in his pamphlet Big Bang Localism ). Because without it, the government of the UK is set to become even more sclerotic than before.

The centralisation of power is the main reason we have been so badly governed over the past generation. Not because our politicians are so poor, but because the system they ate operating is failing, The Lib Dems have pushed the cause of devolution since the invention of Liberalism, but they seemed to have partially forgotten this – I would suggest – during the past election.

There always was a tension between the devolution of power and support for the EU. It maybe that the tension is unnecessary, but there does appear to be a kind of erosion between the two of them.

Third, the same applies to economics. If the radical centre will not defend the free market from the monopolies that make such a mockery of it – and increasingly so – then nobody will. The Conservatives believe that the free market is the some kind of Darwinian force, justifying pretty much any abuse, and Labour has little or no interest in free markets.

So who, if we are just left with them, will defend the liberal idea of free markets that allow the weak to challenge the strong and wealthy?

For these reasons and others, the radical centre is not just an obscure and dwindling sub-ideology, but the way out.

The culture war we are now experiencing appears to be the death knell for the emotions so successfully spun by John Lennon in his song ‘Imagine’.

But ‘Imagine’ was simply one expression of the counterculture that emerged out of the 1950s and 60s and provided the fuel for so much people-centred, humane reform – for which the Liberal Party so reluctantly and unconsciously provided a political pathway.

We don’t really understand these roots because, as far as I know, there has been no proper history of the ideas behind the counterculture, or community development, and other elements. In fact, if anyone out there feels the same way and would like to fund me to write one, please do get in touch!


But I believe that somewhere amidst the optimistic roots of the counterculture – optimistic about people and their nature – lies a way forward. Whether the Lib Dems are able to grasp this and to reform accordingly remains to be seen.

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That narwhal horn might have slowed the Johnson juggernaut

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog....

Heavens above, political campaigners can be obstuse and dull: I was never so aware of it as I am now. Of course, what now seems obvious to me – that people are motivated by something different to the rhetoric they are presented with – may be wrong. It is possible that I am the obtuse one after all. Yet, think back to last time around and you will perhaps see what I mean.

After the 2017 election, I found myself writing about the shift – at least in my own psyche – brought about by the change in rhetoric following the previous London Bridge terrorist incident, which took place at a similar stage in the election to this one.

It was a shift in the language from fear to pride made by the then new Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick. I wrote about it here. She allowed us a little pride in ourselves – the fact that people had attacked the terrorists by throwing beer glasses at them and at great risk to themselves, and I felt a shift in the public mood:

“It wasn’t that she whitewashed the perpetrators – quite the reverse – it was that she declined to waste airtime on them. Instead she paid tribute to the courage of the bystanders. We all stood a little taller as a result.”

I wondered then, and wonder now, whether people vote a little less cynically when they feel good about themselves as a nation or community. The think a little more generously.

There was no statement that I heard from the commissioner this time, but perhaps it is now unnecessary: the statements by the Mayor and Prime Minister about “hunting down” and “standing firm” were too cliched to stick in the memory.

The problem last time for Jeremy Corbyn is that the spirit of individual heroism was not reflected in Labour’s rhetoric, as it rarely is on the socialist left. Nor was it reflected in Lib Dem rhetoric, which it could have been – there was something individualistic about it, linked with self-help and self-determination that could easily come from anywhere on the radical centre.

That is why I have been wondering whether Boris Johnson’s somewhat cynical camaign is threatened by the narwhal horn with which a member of the public floored the terrroist.

Yet there is a clear problem about why the other parties are unlikely to grab this opportunity. The whole language of general elections is about what alternative governments can do for people. It assumes a widespread and somewhat hopeless passivity. There is no obvious election language to draw down in praise of the idea of people doing things for themselves.

There are other reasons why this is important – not least of which is that, actually (as I argue in a forthcoming pamphlet with Steffan Aquarone) our political culture feels increasing discomfort about the idea of actually doing anything. So I fear that, by the time you read this, the moment will have passed.
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Stick that in your manifesto!

This post first appeared on the Radix UK website...“There is no Country in Europe, which produces, and exports so great a Quantity of Beef, Butter, Tallow, Hydes and Wool, as Ireland does, and yet our common People are very poorly cloath’d, go bare-legged half the Year, and rarely taste of that Flesh-Meat with which we so much abound. We pinch our selves in every Article of Life, and export more than we can well spare, with no other Effect or Advantage, than to enable our Gentlemen and Ladies to live more luxuriously abroad.”I found these words, about the economic effects on Ireland of absentee landlords in a book I’m currently reading, Simon Loftus’ excellent The Invention of Memory. That passage seems to be profoundly true, though it was written by an anonymous Irish pamphleteer in 1730 – the same year, incidentally, when the much more famous pamphlet by Jonathan Swift suggested (satirically, we assume) that his fellow countrymen should solve their poverty problems by breeding babies to eat.So why do we keep forgetting it? Locally and nationally, money is like blood – it has to circulate. There is no relevant bottom line. And when it gets siphoned off, whether it is to Tesco in Hertfordshire, or Amazon in Luxembourg, then of course people are poorer than they should be. We all have our absentee landlords.Yet, you won’t find anything about this vital issue in any of the party manifestoes.We are not all voting Lib Dem at Radix (though I probably am). But I was relieved to see how much we had influenced the Lib Dem manifesto – in their commitment to schools (see our book The Death of Liberal Democracy?) and their backing for small, local banks to underpin the economy (see my blog last time).We even seem to have provided Jo Swinson with her 1970s/1870s joke, for which I take responsibility.But once you get past the divisions on Brexit and the rhetorical figures, there is a peculiarly disturbing set of parallels between themes in the main four manifesto – they include housebuilding, the NHS of course, innovation and green technology. They all want more police and nurses; they all want a greener prosperity,The impression they give is that, despite the sound and fury of dispute – mainly over means – there is a great deal of agreement. This is, in fact, the mushy and un-radical centre. It is what we all tend to think these days, right down to the Tory commitment to filling potholes.There are clearly exceptions to this (like the Lib Dem push for local banks). But it is worth reminding the politicians that what is likely to stymie their plans for house-building is a major, looming labour shortage. And that last time the UK pushed homes up to 300,000 a year, it led to slums in the sky, high rise flats, system building, too high densities, Ronan Point, structures stuffed with cigarette ends, and all the rest.It isn’t about the numbers. So why do politicians have to pretend that it is? It is about why and how – how, for example, will you build the homes and run the NHS in a period of nearly full employment? What is your interpretation of the problems we face and your analysis of what should be done? We hear almost nothing to satisfy a radical centrist.The Green manifesto does at least set out an analysis, with two big proposals (a Green New Deal and a universal basic income). The Lib Dems have their commitment to devolution, Labour has his opposition to privatisation and Tories have their commitment to Brexit. And yet…I long for more of a radical organising idea. For example, here are three ways of looking at our current national malaise:The sclerosis caused by an obsessive and exhausting centralisation, administratively and financially.The monopolistic power of IT companies, and others like them, which is sucking out energy and money from our local economies.The ‘tickbox’ system that attempts to manage all decisions centrally, and undermines their effectiveness and efficiency (see my forthcoming book  Tickbox ).You will find almost no mention of these at all in the party manifestos.Get a free copy of my medieval Brexit thriller on pdf when you sign up for the newsletter of The Real Press. 

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