David Boyle's Blog, page 72

The demise of the middle classes - support at last!

Thank you, Suzanne Moore. 
All summer, I have been defending the thesis in my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes .  I have had a great deal of support, as well as a great deal, of the opposite thrown in my direction as the weeks have gone by, but have felt pretty alone in the argument. 
Most recently, I was called a 'gentleman squire in London'.  On my own blog too.  If only I was...
And now, here is Suzanne Moore in the Guardian coming up with much the same thesis (thank you, Simon), though basing it on the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier.  The middle classes have had their economic purpose surgically removed by a combination of management re-engineering, globalisation and the internet – and it matters.
It matters because the existence of a middle – rather than the huge sprawling proletariat and tiny elite that Marx predicted, which seems to be emerging ever faster – is absolutely vital for democracy.
If the middle class can’t escape, then nobody can.
Suzanne, God bless her, points out – as I did – that the traditional values of the middle classes, smug as they may be, are completely at odds with the demonstrable values of the new elite.  Greed instead of thrift, irresponsibility instead of responsibility, immediate gratification instead of deferred.
Again, this matters.
One reason that she points out is that that it may produce – not so much a middle class fightback – but a bitter campaign to blame the poor.
This is true.  The English middle classes are so naive, so ignorant about economics (this is not so true of the Scots, Americas, still less the Brazilians) that you see them flailing around confused, when it ought to be obvious that they are being manipulated and impoverished.
So you get people pointing out how wealthy the poor have become (they have widescreen TVs, shock horror).  You have the poor manipulated put-upon middle class punters in Legoland hitting each other with iron bars, when they ought to have been laying into their monopolistic hosts.
But we are in the early stages of this process.  The middle classes – so clever in money, so stupid in politics, said George Bernard Shaw.
That is going to have to change.  And when it does, when the middle classes realisedthat their children will face the same tyranny from landlords and employers that faces the working classes now, then change will come.

We need choice to mean something broader

A year ago, I was getting into my stride running the Independent Review into Barriers to Choice, wandering round the country asking everyone I met what their own experience had been.  More about this in the report published back in January.
But there is no doubt that ‘choice’ is a strange concept, when it is an end in itself. The basic problem in the NHS at least – there is a different basic problem in social care – is that choice happens despite the existing systems and institutions.  It is that much harder, if you are less confident or less educated, to push as hard as you sometimes need to.
That central issue - whether choice can make service inequality worse - is the one that the British Council in Denmark has been wrestling with.  They have commissioned five articles from radical thinkers about public services in the UK about exactly this issue, including me, and they are published today.
I have tried to develop the idea that emerged in the Review report, that we need to look again at choice - not as a semi-formal economic choice between different institutions, but as a way of injecting flexibility throughout the system.
My article suggests that broadening the scope of choice – so that it emphasises flexibility rather than just competition between providers – might make choice more widely accepted, might increase the equality between service users, and might open the way to cost reductions too.

That is the big question.
A more flexible system would mean fewer set systems, but more human connection. It would certainly require up-front investment, and it would mean a rigorous concentration on preventing those diseconomies of scale that cost so much in the inflexible systems. 
It would mean fewer organisations, more local, multi-disciplinary teams, and a shift from back office costs to frontline costs – and organisation for the huge number of volunteers that would be required to humanise services and allow them to reach out. 
It would be hard to prove its costs and benefits to officials wedded to the current industrial processes, so this is as much about a cultural shift – taking localism to its local next stage – as it is about organisational change.

But one anecdote makes the point. It is about the famous doctor’s surgery with the hedge outside which is trimmed once a year in the summer, and – when it is trimmed – all these rejected prescriptions fall out. 
 What happens is that patients come out of the door with a prescription they don’t really want and shove it in the hedge. It is wasted because doctors and patients were unable to communicate properly about what was needed and what was wanted.  
It is a symbol of the waste in the system when it is too inflexible.

The strange story of the Fairy Investigation Society

I've been away for the weekend and was astonished to discover myself quoted in Folklore magazine about the strange disappearance of the Fairy Investigation Society.

Folklore is the academic journal attached to the Folklore Society and the article is by the historian Simon Young, who has carried out the most amazing detective work about the peculiar and, ultimately, underground organisation.

A naval officer and telecoms inventor called Quentin Crauford founded the Society around 1927, designed to promote serious study. Over the years, it managed to attract a number of prominent supporters, including Walt Disney and the Battle of Britain supremo Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, whose post-war career was not helped by his public expressions of belief.

But by the 1970s, the Society could stand the cynical public climate no longer and it went underground. In 1990, I wanted to organise a TV documentary about fairies and was given their address - somewhere outside Dublin - by the Folklore Society.  I wrote and had a strange letter back. It was from a man claiming that he knew the society’s secretary, but he said he didn’t want to talk to anybody. 
Not only had the fairies disappeared, but the fairy researchers seemed to have fled as well.
I am fascinated by the unrecorded history of organisations like this, just as I am in the revival of interest in fairies - which the historian Ronald Hutton called the "British religion" - in the early years of this century (and of most centuries, actually).
This is also an excuse to mention my own attempt to put fairies back on the map, with my novel for grown-ups - involving Lord Byron, a missing lover, and the underworld somewhere under Surrey.   Leaves the World to Darkness  is now published as an ebook.
I realise this isn't the kind of thing that a hard-headed policy-maker is supposed to write, still less a former Independent Reviewer for the Cabinet Office. But, when all is said and done, we do need to stand up for a bit of magic.

Why radical change is coming

There was an article in the Sunday Herald  in Glasgow yesterday, by the financial journalist Ian Fraser, whose book on RBS is due for publication shortly. It reported on some of the events of the Edinburgh Book Festival with an economic slant, including mine. It quotes me being staggeringly optimistic:

"This is the calm before the storm. Given the poverty of the current political and economic arrangements - and our own understanding of the way things actually work - I believe that change is about to happen.  If we meet again here in five years' time, there will be a different political spirit abroad. There will be a much greater focus on finding ways for our children and our children's children to live meaningful, interesting, comfortable lives away from the tyranny of landlords and employers."

That is indeed what I said, among other things about the decline of the middle classes, relating to my book Broke – and the peculiar upside down notion of kick-starting the economy with Help to Buy.  A bit like looking after today by devouring your children.

A couple of people came up to me afterwards to ask me why I was so optimistic that change was coming, given that politics has become so stuck.

The answer is, I suppose, that I believe in human ingenuity. My reason for believing that new economic solutions are emerging is partly because I can see them – the emerging entrepreneurial energy, the rise of the employee mutuals, the growing understanding that the current banking dispensation is actively corroding our wealth.

It is also partly the opposite. Conventional economic thinking is so disconnected from the real world, so devoid of purpose, so empty of demonstrable success; the idea that wealth will trickle down rather than hoover up is so bereft of evidence.

Even the most conventional policy-makers will find that it sticks in their throats.

The third reason why I’m optimistic is that the middle classes are waking from their long dream, understanding that the economic destruction visited on the working classes is now in store for them – understanding the futures their children face: 25 years indentured servitude to their mortgage provider, in jobs they loathe, paying out such vast sums to tyrannical landlords in the interim that they can't quite manage to bring up families of their own.

What the middle classes want, they will eventually get. When they understand the dark future ahead – and the slow corrosion of UK life as our lives become unaffordable – they will create a political force capable of tackling it.

Every generation or so, UK politics generates a radical shift. It did so in 1906, in 1940, in 1979. It is now 34 years since the last one and we are due another. It will happen sooner than we think.

Will we get the first Liberal saint?

[image error] Some weeks have gone by since the strange news that the Roman Catholic Church is thinking of canonising G. K. Chesterton, author of ‘The Rolling English Road’ and other ditties.

It felt like a silly season story, but the time has gone by and it still seems to be true.

I’m sure it won’t happen. Chesterton was an early critic of Hitler, naming him for what he was before most of the commentariat, but his fatal admiration for Franco and Mussolini probably puts him beyond sainthood these days.

These issues were more complicated then than they seem now. Much of the staff of G.K’s Weekly, Chesterton’s newspaper in the 1930s, were followers of Mosley largely – it seems to me – because of the element of romanticism that Mosley retained when other political parties lost it.

But here is the irony. Chesterton was a committed Liberal for the first half of his life, falling out with the party over the Marconi affair along with his friend Hilaire Belloc, a Liberal MP.

If he was to be canonised, he would be – as far as I know – the first former member of the Liberal Party to be made a saint.

Instead, Chesterton launched and inspired his own political movement in the 1920s, which he called Distributism. It is a Liberal ‘heresy’ but one which attracts me enormously, because of the insight that economic independence for poor people was the basis of human liberty.

Small-scale ownership – emphatically not corporate or plutocratic ownership – of a home and piece of land, was at the heart of it. Belloc borrowed the idea in 1912 from Catholic social doctrine as the only possible inoculation against tyranny from big business or big bureaucracies.

It was also a kind of Liberalism without Fabianism, and Chesterton and the great Fabian George Bernard Shaw used to slug it out in a series of public debates in Holborn, into the 1930s.

Belloc borrowed the idea from Catholic social doctrine as promulgated by Pope Leo XIII, and drafted by Cardinal Manning, who borrowed it partly – you guessed it – from his great friend, William Ewart Gladstone.

So there are links. And they are made explicit in the 1938 Liberal policy on ownership, written by Elliot Dodds, the Huddersfield journalist who was so influential on Liberal thinking in the Grimond years.

"Tribute must be paid to the work of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton who, though they fell foul of the Liberal Party, were such doughty fighters for Liberal values," wrote Dodds in the acknowledgements, "and whose 'Distributist' crusade inspired so many (including the present writer) with the ideal of ownership for all."

There are also clear links between Distributism and mutualism, as long as the mutualism enables individual ownership – for Distributists, ownership which is entirely collective or theoretical (like the way we used to own building societies) was meaningless.

In that respect, St Gilbert Keith Chesterton remained a Liberal, and his Distributist call to arms in 1926 urged the defence of those economic units which were most threatened – and which provided a buttress for individual liberty. It still rings true today:

“Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the work of capitalist combination. Do anything that will even delay that completion. Save one shop out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out of a hundred crofts. Keep open one door out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison.”

It’s good stuff, and I agree with it. But I’m not sure it will lead to canonisation.

Middle class tolerance - and the threat to it

I have just taken two very long train journeys, one to Devon and one to Edinburgh, and it has given me an unprecedented chance to listen in to middle class conversations with their children.

It has convinced me that I was right in my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?   I suggested that – far from the heady days of Mr Curry and Hyacinth Bucket, and the curtain-twitching disapproval of suburban life – the middle classes have been the driving force behind the unprecedented tolerance of UK society.

I know this isn’t a popular point of view, but as I listen to a crash just up the aisle from me, and an obviously middle class father saying: “Oh really, darling; you are not being helpful” – when she was being quite the opposite of helpful – I realise it is in fact the case.

No more are they the disapproving snobs of English life. The middle classes have actually presided over a period of unprecedented tolerance in society, embracing a community that – despite the difficulties – is more and more diverse and multiracial, more and more tolerant of the peculiar way that people live, if they are not harming anyone else.

And if this wasn’t led by the middle classes, who was it led by?

That is one major reason why we need the middle classes. More of this in my book.

But I have also wondered whether things have gone too far, especially among what you might call the public sector middle classes.

My youngest comes home from school these days, informing me in a very serious and concerned voice that “Jason didn’t make the right choices today”. Clearly, behaviour is now described in terms of ‘choices’ these days. I’m not sure it means much.

And when I hear another mother on the train to Scotland telling her children off because they are “behaving inappropriately”, I must admit I cringe at the new mind-control which appears to be descending on the middle classes at the same time as this tolerance.

I’m not sure that 'appropriateness' is a concept that will foster tolerance at all.  It seems more like the old curtain-twitching conformity to me.

I may be defending the middle classes these days, but I am still enough of a bohemian to want to behave ‘inappropriately’ if I possibly can.

Who wants to have on their tombstone – ‘He behaved appropriately’? Not me.

No, these jobs are really pointless

I've just heard David Nobbs, on Radio 4, restating the advertising slogan from Reginald Perrin's chain of shops called Grot: 'All objects for sale in this shop are guaranteed useless'.  It is extraordinary how the modern economy thrives on making a success of the useless.

The anthropologist David Graeber, who wrote an important book recently about money - challenging the mistaken claims of economists about its origin - has been writing about what he calls 'bullshit jobs'.  This is what he says:

"Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish."

This is not quite fair, nor is it intended to be - I know exactly what would happen without actuaries or bailiffs.  The pensions industry would collapse and nobody would pay their debts.  But there is an important message here about the way the modern world creates pointless jobs which gives people incomes but little satisfaction.

I remember Douglas Adams, struggling to come up with the most pointless job of all, for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, came up with telephone sanitisers.
Graeber's point is that this explains the attitude of some Republican types about jobs: if you are a nurse or a car-worker you have the satisfaction of a 'real' job - why should you want a pension too?
It is certainly bizarre the way the pointless jobs tend to be paid more than the useful ones, but there are two other categories of pointless jobs which Graeber misses or skates over entirely.
One is the category of jobs created by peculiar bureaucratic institutions, like NHS markets.  I would like to be paid £1,000 a day as an NHS coder, challenging the codings by which foundation trust hospitals bill their local commissioners - and vice versa of course.  But could I live with myself doing something so utterly pointless?
But even this misses the point. The American reform writer, David Osborne, a trenchant critic of command-and-control, estimated that 20 per cent of American government spending was devoted to controlling the other 80 per cent, via armies of auditors and inspectors. When Vice-President Al Gore led the National Performance Review in 1993, they found that one in three federal employees were there to oversee, control, audit or investigate the other two. 
 If you take some estimates that ten per cent of public spending goes on auditing, then it might come to around £50 billion in the UK. There is some confirmation of this because, if you work it out according to Osborne’s formula, it comes to somewhere around the same figure. By the end of the New Labour years in 2010, the wage bill for one in five of UK public sector staff was around £48 billion.

More on the way the UK public service system was built - to check on process rather than make things happen - in my book The Human Element.
But the other bullshit jobs missing from the list are truly pointless. These are the drones, often in Far East call centres and 'factories', which are manufacturing virtual realities, like Facebook 'likes'.  It takes time to manufacture Facebook people who can do the liking, and that is what they are paid to do.
Chinese factories are paying semi-slave rates to do online gaming – creating online ‘gold’ that can be sold to rich American gamers (there are supposed to be 400,000 of these, and that was years ago, doing what is known as 'gold-farming').

Here is the peculiar paradox of the modern economic system.  It is supposed to be so efficient, but it is paying people to do useless, inconsequential things, while it can't afford to pay people to do many of the useful things - teaching children, looking after old people.
Strange but true.  So don't please tell me that the economy is efficient.  It is busily creating pointless work in the hope that little bits of the proceeds will filter down to do useful things.  

London's inhuman towers on the way out?

There I was trying to work in a Pret-a-Manger underneath the London Shroud on Friday (sorry, that should read Shard), and this conversation next to me kept butting in.

"I look at myself in the mirror and I don't recognise myself any more.  I should have stayed 34."

This was a conversation between an older man and a younger one, who must have been, say, 34.

"You're at the perfect age, you know."

"I don't know about that," said the younger one.  "I wish I was 18 again."

I thought about this conversation later, partly because it seemed to conceal a truth I could learn from (I will never see 34 or 18 again), and partly because of what came next.  "You know I look at all this new development round here," said the older man - and there certainly is a lot of it: hideous, glitzy, inhuman...

"And I think to myself: 'Who is all this for?'  It certainly isn't for me."

This seems to be rather an important thought, especially at the south end of London Bridge, once the venue for the heads of traitors, which is now facing development pressure from the City one way and the South Bank the other, with more from Bermondsey of all places.  But there is precious little for most of us: speculative flats for sale in the Far East, inhuman office blocks fated to lie empty.

London's new towers are so brutal in their joky design that they almost overshadow the smaller concrete monstrosities, equally inhuman in their own way, of a generation ago.

I say fated to lie empty because of the news today that the owners of the Gherkin are now seeking protection from creditors in the German courts.

Those of us who have written about the Twelfth Century (see my book Blondel's Song ) will know that the era of tower blocks in the Italian city states came to an end and they were all pulled down.  I am looking forward to something similar happening here.

Which brings me to London's mayor Boris Johnson.  When he stood for the post back in 2008, he campaigned on a policy of reining in the towers, which had been promoted by his predecessor.  He was convincing enough for me to vote for him on that basis in the second round, after the Lib Dem had been excluded.

Well, there is a lesson there.  Boris is busily giving permission to as many towers, which will loom over London giving a sense of inhumanity - sponsored by semi-slave states and in the international style so beloved of financiers and architects - as Ken did.  The whole campaign appears to have been about positioning a political campaign which had almost nothing to say, and as a result nothing much to do.

I will not be making that kind of mistake about Boris again - and I hope nobody else will either.

Total surveillance: a false sense of security

I have to confess that I have drifted away from traditional Liberal issues in the search for non-traditional ones, like the new Liberal economy that we Liberals never quite articulated.

But reading Alan Rusbridger's editorial in the Guardian has reminded me how little you can trust a state with too much power, and how important this is.  This is what he wrote:

"The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like 'when'..."

These issues are tremendously important, especially after the New York Times story this morning about new systems of facial recognition which adds another dimension to total surveillance.
First, we reacted with horror to the idea of 'total surveillance' as carried out in East Germany by the Stasi, in the days before IT made these things easier.  Just because you no longer need armies of internal security personnel, it does not make total surveillance any less dangerous.  Because when you give governments that kind of power, it will be abused.  It always is - and their right to abuse it is always interpreted as a security issue.
Second, with governments like ours, it will be a substitute for proper security.  This becomes an item of belief by ministers and officials who have come to think that appearances really are more important than reality. 
What other interpretation can you put on the official efforts to destroy the Guardian hard-drive copy of Edward Snowden's material, when they knew perfectly well that they had access to at least two other copies on the other side of the Atlantic?
But the third is most worrying.  Total surveillance does not work.  It is part of the same IT fantasy pedalled by the IT consultants.  Real security requires human intelligence and interpretation - it can't be done by a vast database listening to everything we say and recognising all our faces in the street.  Yet once the investment is made, that is what security officials come to believe.
After 9/11, it transpired that key CIA personnel with responsibility for al-Qaeda spoke no Arabic, and had been relying entirely on software and virtual intelligence systems.
That is why the obsession with what Rusbridger calls 'total surveillance' tends to get in the way of real security.  It helps terrorists but hinders everyone else.  It shouldn't do in theory, but in practice it does.  It forces security to look in the wrong places.  It shifts security resources in pointless directions.  It also deludes those responsible for such things by lulling them into a false sense of security...

Unheard, Unseen ebook free download today

I was brought up on submarine films.  The captains were always played by John Mills; sometimes they come to the surface, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they are set in the Second World War, sometimes the Cold War.

In fact, John Mills cut his film-acting teeth in a 1935 naval film called Brown on Resolution, where the captain was played by Henry Stoker, who had actually commanded the Australian submarine AE2 when she slipped through the Dardanelles in 1915.  Perhaps he learned the style from Stoker himself.

All of which is a way of asking: why are there no submarine films about the First World War?  Why don't we celebrate those pioneering exploits, on both sides, where there were still no bunks (except for the officers) and often no lavatories, and no hearing equipment when you were submerged?

I have therefore written a celebration, at least of E14 - which provided a VC for both its commanding officers, and the wreck of which was discovered in the Dardanelles only last year.  It is now published as an ebook called Unheard, Unseen, which allowed me to tell the strange story of the first submariners, the huge strain, the alcoholism, the constipation and the damp and dirt.

The main hardship was not so much lack of sleep as lack of fresh water. It could have been E14 which provided one true story in 1916, when the commanding officer showed a lady around his submarine in Malta, and was asked how they could wash their shirts if they had so little water. The captain, whoever it was, explained that they turned the shirt inside out at the end of the week.

What about the next week, the lady asked? “Oh, by that time,” he said, “the old inside is sufficiently aired to resume duty."

The behind the scenes First World War story is largely untold, and the first book to concentrate on E14 (commanding officer: Lt Cdr Courtney Boyle) and I found it fascinating to research (thank you, RN Submarine Museum).

My reason for mentioning it here is that it will be available today and tomorrow as a free Kindle download from Amazon (though you can also download it onto PCs).  Go ahead, make my day (as they say).  Here is the link:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unheard-Unseen-Submarine-Dardanelles-ebook/dp/B00DY6Q39E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376945582&sr=8-1&keywords=unheard+unseen