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Labour List has just published an e-book titled “One Nation Labour – debating the future”. You can find some background about this project here, whilst it’s currently downloadable in .pdf format here.

Whilst I was looking at some of the document this evening, I half-glanced at Twitter and found my mind caught up by the following thought:

We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over, and expect a different result. #SmallBiz #StartUps #Entrepreneurs

I don’t know exactly what the context of this tweet was – and it’s clear from its hashtags that it’s not directly related to political endeavour either. But it did serve, as I continued, to inform some of my reading of the Labour List content. In particular, a postscript by Jon Wilson. In it, he describes how the concept and practice of leadership and led might be tweaked for a 21st century audience (the bold is mine):

Second, we need a renewal of authority within our institutions. It isn’t about everyone being able to decide everything. We need to be able to trust the people in charge. But authority isn’t just the power to regulate or command. It comes from a leaders’ obligation towards the people they lead, on recognizing the important role of workers and users in providing challenge.

And this is when my warning klaxon began to sound: especially that last sentence, which firmly serves to re-establish time-honoured hierarchies in a sadly unquestioning way. It doesn’t get better, either (again, the bold is mine):

We need to nurture a form of leadership that is more democratic. That might mean public events where leaders are asked to account for themselves before the public whose lives are affected by their decisions; something like London Citizens’ accountability assemblies, for example. To be really radical, we might elect leaders head-teachers and hospital managers as well as company bosses at assemblies in which different interests are represented.

There are, of course, plenty of good phrases in this text – and I’m sure a deeper appreciation will bring them out. But the fact that in the same document, in fact in the same section, we read of the One Nation project something like …

“It starts by being more comfortable with the tensions that come when people have a say over the institutions that rule their lives. It recognizes the plurality of Britain, but has faith in the capacity of people to forge a sense of shared purpose and create the common good from the argument.”

… alongside others such as …

“Our institutions can only nurture a sense of mutual obligation if the power of Whitehall to coerce and cajole is limited. Yes, government needs to set standards and impose rules.”

… clearly indicates that the tensions between citizen government and traditional politics already alluded to are manifesting themselves right at the very heart of that very same project.

And not necessarily in a constructive or honest sense.

In truth, One Nation Labour, for all the fair intentions I perceive in its proponents, can’t rid itself of its unerringly centralising instincts as a definer of political narrative quite before it is a liberating treatise of 21st century virtues. Whilst the contribution I quote from above is possibly an unreasonably unrepresentative sample, it was the first page of this e-book I opened at random – and for the moment, therefore, I can only assume that equivalent tensions will also infuse the rest.

One Nation Labour may be as Mark Ferguson asserts:

It has the ability to build on the modern, passionate, progressive nationalism of the Olympic Games. It could be a way of articulating Labour values in a way that appeals to the south as well as the north. It could – if done right – secure a position for Labour as the de-facto party of British government.

But such sentiments, obviously and understandably seen by Mark and many other loyal Party members as undeniable positives, can just as easily be interpreted as a kind of political whitewash, designed to redirect and channel the march of British politics back into previous ages and mindsets which the professional politicians – always in thrall to their history – will always feel more comfortable with.

One more tweet to finish today – this time from yours truly, and mirroring the one we started out with:

If politicos of all parties feel obliged to reform society from without, why do they reserve the right to reform politics from within?

And it’s true, if you think about it. Politicians everywhere believe they know best: they know more about education than teachers; they know more about law than lawyers; they know more about social care than carers; they know more about health than doctors. Yet when it comes to changing politics itself, when it’s time to re-engineer democracy, they revert to believing that only the professionals in the matter should define, mark and voice an opinion. And where the amateurs in the equation – that is to say, the voters themselves – do get the option to intervene, it’s always in a cagily couched “listening exercise” which serves to keep them well under control, at bay and – ultimately – hugely and passively perplexed.

In one thing Mark is right: One Nation Labour has potential. But I fear that this will be a potential which will end up squandered on the altar of resisting other more sincere movements to independent and regional governance.

In the end, One Nation Labour may manage to paper over its cracks in order to win an election most will admit needs winning – but the depth of those imperfections, at least in the light of the tensions I perceive in today’s publication, will only serve a posteriori to fatally damage any long-term governmental coherence we might have expected – or, at the very least, hoped for.

Correct me if I’m wrong but before local council employees can work in local government, they have to sign confidentiality notices which restrict their ability to talk about what they do as well as limit – to a perhaps excessive degree – their freedom of movement to participate in wider actions of local democracy.

I may be wrong on the detail but I think – in general – this is true.

Certainly, where I work (which is not local government) we are absolutely not allowed to talk to local or national media, even when approached.

Meanwhile, if there is currently no overt policy on social media in many large companies, it is because the twenty-five million British Facebook users have taken the Human Resources policy-development departments by storm – and left them utterly discombobulated. What is clearly now a truism and a cliché of our current social and cultural construct is that a modern democracy that does not contemplate the right to participate actively using social media is simply not an option any more.

So communication is becoming evermore osmotic and people are being evermore open – whether we are talking about local government, private sector corporations or, indeed, the higher echelons of government.

Where do these double standards I mention kick in then?

The truth of the matter is that local council employees are not allowed to even tweet about their daily working conditions and experiences, never mind spill the beans in kiss-and-tell-all memoirs.

Yet a high-level actor like Tony Blair or Alastair Campbell is encouraged to make no secret of the fact that – even whilst in government – diaries are being written with an eye to future publication and notoriety. This, to me, seems entirely wrong.

Openness in a 21st century democracy – with any number of newly virtual bells and whistles tagged on the end – is an absolutely admirable virtue. But an openness which is tainted with the dual yardsticks of, on the one hand, famous people who can make money out of their public service and, on the other, those rather less notable souls who must never talk about their daily eight-hour shifts of lowly endeavour is not an openness we should crave after or, indeed, welcome.

I’m all for opening up workplaces to outer inspection and understanding. Long-term, openness is our only guarantee against abuse, petty bullying and simple inefficiency on the part of middle- and upper-management.

But let it not just be the Campbells and Blairs of this world who have that democratic right to kiss and tell. Let us move to a different world where openness at all levels becomes the norm.

A possibly cynical set of observations to follow.

My wife, in her capacity as an employee of our local borough council, recently received a 52-page booklet in full colour from the aforesaid employer, packed full of substantial discounts of all kinds. I haven’t counted them all up but if we say for argument’s sake that there are five to a page, that’s a total of at least 250 substantive ways of saving money in the high street; with the utilities; on health and wellbeing … and both online and offline it has to be underlined.

Now let’s take all those apparently spurious calculations and recalculations people are apparently making at the moment in relation to regressive budgets which are actually progressive readjustments in-the-making (pie-in-the-sky also comes to mind as such promises to eventually do right by the poor fall on deservedly stony political ground), and then multiply by a million that attractive little booklet which I mentioned at the start of this post. In the light of such benefits so freely and easily given to people like my wife, being gainfully employed is a clearly virtuous circle where seven to twenty-five percent discounts -and far far more – serve to far outweigh any VAT increases this pro(fessionally)(re)gressive government cares to impose.

For – that is – those who are gainfully employed.

For the gainfully employed in exclusive.

So what do we really have here then? Well. I know, in my current sadly cynical state, what I think we have. It’s a complex of interests which serves only to exacerbate the impoverishment of the already poor. And even more than we thought up to now.

A complex of interests where shoppers with jobs and governments with shop-owners give back to those who already have so much what is taken away in VAT and other “fiscal measures” from those who have so little: from those who find themselves wrapped up in the vicious circle of unemployment … or – what’s even worse – that woefully immoral state of living from hand-to-mouth that is the grand achievement of the minimum wage.

A state of mind which stands as one of the undeniable bulwarks against poverty of New Labourism – and, as such, finds itself inevitably in the cross-hairs of these resentful millionaires who can’t wait to apply the conditional relationships of their blessed high street to all human intercourse and experience.

For they begrudge the poor even this morally bankrupt bulwark of minimalist economics.

I suppose if all this story was about was the relationship between a giant corporation and its employees, I would hardly think it worth posting at all. But it’s not about a giant corporation – it’s about local government. There are other far more serious issues to hand here as this Coalition government claims to aim to reduce the size of the state and – by implication or inference (these days I really don’t know where the reality of the dialogue lies) – improve both the utilisation of resources and the delivery of services.

What, then, is my gripe exactly?

(Now there’s a fine Northern-sounding word to be getting on with, if there ever was one.)

Well this is how it goes: that my local council should choose to reduce its size and so change the nature of how local government attends to its citizens seems an unhappy but – in principle – equitable decision. “Let us all suffer together” may therefore be our mantra.

But that my local council should choose to reduce its size, follow the example of those giant corporations I spoke of above, and inequitably distribute via freebies to its employees the results of such a re-engineering of wealth – in such a way that those who have no jobs will have zero access to such substantive offers and will, therefore, find themselves in the future even more relatively impoverished than we had thought might be the case to date – is a rank injustice of monumental proportions.

The military-industrial complexes that run the underbellies of so many countries are nothing compared to this set of circumstances - in the sense that, at the very least, the military-industrial complexes tend to end up providing jobs for us all. The ConDem-millionaire complex that is now beginning to get its hands on democracy here in Britain, however, only seems to want to provide jobs – and freebies – for the boys.

And when I say the boys, I think I generally mean the boys.

One nation Conservatives? This lot wouldn’t even know where to start.

I wonder why we can’t simply assign each party its MPs based entirely on the simple percentages of popular vote they achieve – and, in the absence of clear local ties for the MPs as individuals that such a system would lead to, we could simply strengthen and empower the local responsibilities of councils and their representatives. In this way, MPs would spend their time in London dealing with national and international issues (which is what they seem to prefer to do anyway) and local issues would be dealt with at a local level.

There would, of course, have to be some regular interface between national and local representatives – but such forums would not be difficult to organise.

Or am I now falling into the trap of spouting Tory libertarian “Big Society” doublespeak? Not out of a desire to confuse or distract, I assure you. Not in my case. I’m not saying it to cut back on the state’s involvement in people’s wellbeing. I’m saying it – I think – to improve that involvement.

Am I just following a misguided line of thought then?

So is anyone able to tell me why the above would be such a bad idea?
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Update to this post: Paul’s just posted some wishful thinking over at Never Trust a Hippy. Nice ideas.