Anyone want a political party which allows its members a sincere public voice?

 Eddie Izzard, in a hole, London, marketing-speak, political marketing, politicians, politics  No Responses »
Apr 142012
 

Compare this video …


http://youtu.be/DpZaEVgNyDQ

… with this video …


http://youtu.be/7CZf05a44e0

Relatively unmediated expressions of what people think – even if still run through the professional mill (a comment to this post, and some of the video’s own content, suggest that Eddie Izzard may have had a hand in the second film) – are more likely to give you a truth which the prepackaged marketing-speak modern politicians place so much of their faith in generally fails to communicate.

Fortunately, I don’t have to make a decision on who to vote for in this election.  But on the strength of the second video, and if a Londoner born and bred, I might be inclined to allow my emotions to sway me where common sense – and the register used in the first video – would have vigorously encouraged me to say “Abstain!”.

Amazing how money and politics always manage to undermine the message, though.  That imbecile-like hullabaloo surrounding the making of an election broadcast, whilst fascinating for media types and journalists everywhere, only serves to underline the need to separate political parties, marketing advisers and voters from contaminating contact.

The slogan we should pay attention to being: “Grassroots!  Grassroots!  Grassroots!”

Anyone anywhere want to construct a political party which goes even further than the second video – which, in its structures and constitution, actually allows its own members an unmediated public voice and control?  For if these two videos had any bearing on the matter, there’d be little to lose and plenty more to gain by releasing all that sincerity which currently appears to be bound.

Evidence-based politics – the 21st century challenge

 evidence-based professionals, Internet, on a high, political innovation, political parties, politics, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 122012
 

I suppose, from a voter’s point of view, these may (though maybe ought not to) be the purposes of politics, in order of priority:

  1. make life better
  2. shape policies which achieve the first priority
  3. create tools which allow the shaping of policies which achieve the first priority

And I suppose, from a politician’s point of view, these may (though maybe ought not to) be the purposes of politics, in order of priority:

  1. win elections
  2. elect leaders who achieve the first priority
  3. create tools which allow the election of leaders who achieve the first priority

As can be seen from perhaps this slightly cynical description of where voters and politicians might not exactly coincide, whilst the politicians are mainly interested in everything that leads up to winning power, the voters are essentially interested in everything that happens as a consequence of their representatives achieving their goal.

No wonder we as voters are fed up to the back teeth of our politics.  The purpose of politics as understood by the “top-flight” politicos has very little overlap with the expectations of voters.  No amount of listening, conservations or dialogues can cover over the implications of the above: in the end, most voters and most politicians who get to mean anything on the national stage end up having totally different interests, to the extent that they are most engaged by completely separate stages in the process of politicking.

And the solution to this manifest misfit of goals?  Perhaps we need to change the landscape politics operates in.  In an Internet world, where constitutions are now written by citizens, maybe we could begin to leave votes and referendums more to the tranquil and leisurely pursuit of people behaving as empowered and energetic citizens than to the personality-ridden contexts of modern politics.  In such a way, we would be able to click and express preferences on proposed policies – but in a resourceful manner which, as we searched them out for ourselves (or with the aid of appropriately indicating algorithms), would be akin to skimming and surfing through a political Wikipedia. We would thus be able to leave behind all that swaying-of-the-emotions stuff which leads us to periodical dismay.

Meanwhile, the election of leaders could be left to an analogous process of public analysis of strengths and weaknesses, but in this case using any proven HR system for choosing job candidates.

We could – as a nation of engaged voters (or even to start with at simple party level) – work in groups to define the qualities we would want of our leaders before submitting our requirements to an automated system which would draw on a series of ready-made questions and objectively useful challenges.  As a result then of such a competition of abilities, we as a nation (or party) could vote in accordance with a much clearer idea of how someone might behave under all kinds of extreme but usefully predictable situations.

If we must stick with a system that delegates a relatively unlimited power to hardly self-limiting politicians, at least give us more objective information to make that decision with a little bit of intelligence and sensibility.

And maybe – you really never know – we might one day get the evidence-based politics I’d argue we deserve.

Why we might have a right to snoop on our politicians

 copyright, copyright madness, Lawrence Lessig, on a high, open government, politicians, politics, public domain, public interest, publishing, science  No Responses »
Apr 112012
 

Whilst I did a piece recently on the real origins of content “piracy”, Paul currently has a lovely piece over at Never Trust a Hippy on the real origins of copyright.  Interestingly, a commenter responds thus:

Another example of ideas being far older than one thought

And here, in far fewer words than I could ever manage, is the prime justification for there existing a public domain into which all thought finally ends up residing.

This is what I recently had to say on the subject:

[...] I appreciate the need for reasonable periods of copyright, but before we support “original works” we have to understand the process that leads to their creation – and recognise what any creator owes to a previous generation of creators. There is now a massive hole in the public domain, absolutely unheard of in previous times, where nothing but nothing can legally be done to have a creative conversation with, for example, the film industry – an industry which has appropriated with every moral and legal right to do so public domain works from the 19th century for its own wonderful purposes but has refused to return its own property created thus back to the public domains of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And whilst those who are unhappy with related Google-like dynamics may indeed have a complex case to answer, we shouldn’t mix what are essentially issues of trademark and/or copyright law with matters that relate to the almost social contract that is the public domain.

I read an interesting piece in the Guardian yesterday whilst waiting for a train at Oxenholme in the Lake District.  It was arguing that the research of publicly-funded scientists should end up – as soon as practicable – in the public domain via the legal figure of open access.  As the scientific journals and their publishers added very little real value to the scientific process, and in the meantime through their paywalls made access to new ideas evermore expensive and distant (I remember a calculation made by Lawrence Lessig recently which had him hunting down online documents to allow him to understand a family member’s illness better – if he hadn’t have been a top scholar at a US university, it would have cost him over $400 to access the information), so the argument in terms of a societal benefit to automatically place in the public domain such publicly-funded data has become considerably stronger.

But I’d go even further – as you jolly well might expect.  I’d argue that such principles should not only be applied to publicly-funded scientists but also to all elected figures who reach positions of prominence or otherwise on the backs of the voters.  Without the voters and their desire to delegate responsibility, a prime minister or secretary of state would be absolutely nothing politically speaking.  When politicians give exclusive interviews to national newspapers and other media, such organisations hug very close to themselves the content thus generated.  But, in reality, they have no right to at all: arguably the words and thoughts and ideas of our politicians already belong, in very strict measure, to ourselves:

David Cameron wants to snoop into your emails, SMS text messages and telephone calls. He is bringing forward powers to enhance the big brother state in exactly the opposite way he said he would do when he was opposition leader. But guess what, I have news for Mr Cameron. In 3 days time, I discover whether or not I will be given the right to snoop into his SMS text messaging. [...]

This does, of course, have implications for open government movements across the world.  But it is only the application of a very simple and fair principle: what you get out of the system, at some in the (near and reasonable) future you put back in.

As they say: what goes around, comes around.

So why should copyright, scientists, public figures and the public domain be any different?

#PICamp, gaming and how we might put pissed-off voters in the driving seat

 gaming, on a high, Paul Evans, political innovation, politicians, politicking, politics, sorted, www.politicalinnovation.org  No Responses »
Apr 042012
 

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of many clever and interesting people, most of whom seemed to want to act in the kind of good faith modern politicking seems to sorely lack.  There did seem to be, it has to be said, far more individuals from the the gaming-oriented community than the political at #PICamp’s session on “What Policy-Makers Can Learn from Gaming”.  Perhaps the former – the manifest good faith – was a result of the latter.  These were, in the main, evidence-based professionals in a society where evidence-based professionals are vigorously ignored by their government (recent and notable examples being the submissions from doctors in relation to the NHS Bill, now Act; and submissions from lawyers on the subject of the Legal Aid Bill still going through Parliament).

No wonder, then, the expressions of unhappiness, communicated by many of those present, into the way that government appears to be run in the progressive absence of clear reference to even available datasets – and, what’s more, where stats are used, with a tendency to pigeonhole on the basis of prejudice, politics, ideology or an explosive combination of all three.

I started out the evening by writing down a series of words and concepts which came to mind in a crossover way in relation to the concepts of both politics and gaming:

  • levels
  • achievement
  • goals
  • participation
  • labelling
  • environment
  • “voters”
  • hierarchy
  • constitution
  • process and procedure
  • command and control
  • “marketing”
  • codes
  • symbols
  • tribes
  • identities
  • friends
  • enemies

I also wrote down the following words:

Gaming, however, is far more successful at gaining empowered adepts – maybe because it empowers.  Politics only empowers the already empowered.  Politics shrinks its base.  Gaming expands *and* renews it.

In her keynote presentation, Jude, from PlayMob, showed us just that:

Seven billion hours per week are spent playing games. The average age of the social gamer is 43 and more women play social games than men. 1/3 of the global population play games.

And that figure of seven billion hours per week is apparently up from three billion the year before.

It’s clear that whilst empowerment is a buzzword in modern political practice, most politicians would seem not to be in favour of giving up the landgrab of power their traditional way of engaging with voters tends to imply.  Meanwhile, in the software constitutions of modern online and console-gaming, you live or die – in a question of maybe a weekend’s launch window – by the virally communicated opinion of the “voters” you are attempting to hook up with.

There is nothing more democratic or transparent than the opinion a gaming community may have of a game.  It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on marketing: the crowdsourced million eyes of communal intelligences will just as easily damn your new baby with trolling of the very worst sort as the mainstream reviewers will similarly do with a more traditionally self-interested faint praise.

The result is the same: your gaming “manifesto” in the rubbish bin – and an expensive reboot and starting from scratch.  Just like losing an election by a landslide in fact.

So what can policy-makers learn from gaming?  Jude made much of crossover opportunities between shoot-em-up environments and the more educative approaches that NGOs and other organisations could promote.  In the roundtable Q&A session held after her presentation, one of the ideas which arose was how to couch gaming – clearly, at its best, a successful exponent of constitutional development and empowerment – in the kind of language which might appeal to policy-makers and politicians.  You clearly have a barrier if you use a linguistic code which smacks of jargon and specialisms, and this will generate resistance to new ideas from your target audience.  Also, many policy-makers, or at least many politicians, prefer to make and tend towards grand statements when launching ideas on the general public: far better to declaim that the government is going to invest in a million brand new iPads for schools across the land than use a pedagogically valid strategy of getting students in multilevel learning paths to use in common classroom environments their own Blackberries, iPhones, textbooks and tools of choice in general.  Hardly the evidence-based approach you’re looking for.

I’d be inclined to believe – and this came up in the debate – that society has already become gamified to a certain extent; and not just within the context of gaming as we understand it.  Levels, objectives, ovearching targets, learning environments, multilevel learning paths and reward systems of all kinds have been used since time immemorial – and certainly as long ago as New Labour’s centralising instincts.  I noted, in fact, how I saw my own children working quite happily with such quantitative systems of measuring progress where I, if now at school or university, would have found them most disagreeable.

I’m am not of the gaming generation.  They are.  But I do wonder, as early photography influenced how painting developed and new ways of painting influenced how photography progressed, if it’s been gaming which has brought about the revolution or if gaming has simply benefited from a revolution which has been brought about by other strands of understanding in our civilisation.

Whether gaming is the cause or has taken massive advantage of all these changes, the truth of the matter is that it would seem modern communication, at least between individual citizens, takes place in widely gamified environments.

Just as 140-character tweets become the envelope within which we may conduct meetings, so gaming defines our ecosystems of productivity and how we should interact with others.

In gaming at least.

And perhaps, at the level of “what”, in politics too.  But still we must make that final step towards the “how” of empowerment.  And that step it would seem professional policy-makers, as well as politicians more widely, are highly reluctant to take.

Perhaps what we really need is a massive online experience which aims to grab from the professional politicians their current rights and responsibilities and create an alternative system of governance.

A massive online experience which allows us to occupy all the organs of state, understand and even input into the whys and wherefores of modern politicking.

A training-ground, in fact, which prepares us – Lara Croft-like – for the challenges ahead.

In a sense, as Twitter seeps into the traditional political consciousness, and as MPs, councillors, businesspeople and other players in our latterday societal patchwork dare to sign up to its attractions, perhaps this online experience is already beginning to create itself.  All it needs is someone like Jude and PlayMob to put an eye-watering interface on the front and a delivery system behind.  To virtualise the real world, make real the virtual – and then allow the connections to begin generating themselves.

Watch indeed, amazed as perhaps we might all end up finding ourselves, as the primary motivation – get rid of your careerist MPs and replace them with real people’s thoughts and ideas! – begins to drive adhesion to the proposal on the table.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Especially as the market of potentially interested and sufficiently pissed-off voters is growing.

Improve politics by all means – but don’t confuse authenticity with opportunism

 in a hole, political chicanery, political dissonance, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, shackles of democracy, Telegraph  2 Responses »
Mar 312012
 

Charles Moore has an interesting piece over at the Telegraph today.  His final paragraph defines the current political situation thus:

We have too much debt. We pay too-high taxes. We build too few houses. We are losing old jobs and costs prevent us creating new ones. We are having a bad time, and we want the people who rule us to lead us out of that, and think of little else. It is simple, but not easy.

And whilst I don’t agree with everything he says – I’m not sure it’s costs that are really preventing us from creating new jobs, for example – much as one might sign up with a slightly heavy heart to a manifesto (ie not agreeing with everything you found in it and yet even so agreeing enough), so I am inclined to say: “Yes, in this case, I agree with practically everything you argue.”

As regular readers of this blog will note, I suggested the other day that the Coalition was far cleverer than its public performance might suggest – that, indeed, its public performance might even be a deliberate case of discombobulation.  in fact, evidence that this latter scenario might be the case is included in Moore’s article:

[...] now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency associations by MPs, I begin to feel angry.

The private message is as follows. “This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.”

Moore talks about the difference between Thatcher and these lot by suggesting Thatcher did what she did in the weeks prior to the miners’ strike without inconveniencing very much the public.  (Yesterday, meanwhile, it would appear that at least one member of the public was severely inconvenienced by taking the original government advice too literally.)

But where I agree one hundred percent with Moore’s thesis is when he talks about the public’s yearning for authenticity.  From Thatcher to Blair, authenticity was clearly the prime driver in a wider public’s acceptance and embracing of powerful figures who obviously had their own minds.  You didn’t have to agree with everything they did – you did, however, need to agree with where they were coming from.

And as Moore also suggests, the deception left behind, after Blair’s own breaking of the contract he once forged so strongly with the British voters, is “hanging over British politics like smog”.

Quite rightly too.

Moore also refers to Galloway, though, as an example of authenticity.  Here, I think, he gets it wrong.  Galloway isn’t a careerist; isn’t a celebrity; isn’t authentic in the least.  Galloway, quite simply, is an opportunist who will say what he must.  If anti-Semitism is necessary to win an election, anti-Semitism it will be.

With such opportunism, no one should have any truck.  Nor confuse it with the authenticity which we may yet yearn for in the future.

Here’s a suggestion, in the meantime, as to where we might attempt to go instead: Ed Miliband started his leadership with an apparently unfocussed keynote speech at Labour Party Conference.  This is what I said of it at the time:

Now I’m not saying Ed Miliband has succeeded where Hitchcock did decades before: transgression is not quite where most British politicians are to be found these days.  But I do think, in an analogous way, that – in his recent speech at Party Conference – Ed Miliband was at least attempting to break certain moulds in quite a courageous manner.  The very fact that many people felt obliged to criticise his delivery – and not see his register as conversational rather than traditionally declamatory – does make me wonder if this poor man doesn’t have the hardest job in politics: to sell grassroots collaboration to a political party wary of, and thus resistant to, all such similar promises.

A political party which claims to be the very essence of grassroots politics – and then consistently finds itself in search of yet another charismatic group of fixers.

A political party which could be perfectly positioned to create a new kind of political, social and business environment (as, indeed, Miliband in his speech promised to fight on behalf of) – and yet which generally finds itself dodging and fudging the most insistent contradictions and incongruences inhabiting its core.

Is Ed Miliband’s speech going to be a Hitchcockian achievement?  Misunderstood on its first outing by those who claim to know – yet generally, in the future, to be well received by those who can only vote?  Battling against those “vested interests” which make economies in their own image and for their own purposes is an issue he is courageous to raise.  In a sense, then, perhaps we could say – with his conversation – that Miliband proposes nothing more nor less than that neo-New Labour I was unhappy with the other day: but in a better and far more constructive register; that is to say, all the unfinished business which New Labour was never brave enough to get round to effecting.

Could this, then, be a way of tying the authenticity of New Labour’s legacy of top-down delivery into a 21st century grassroots approach to devolved empowerment?  A way, precisely, of not confusing authenticity with opportunism but – rather – transposing the former to the real people who need supporting.  For as Moore quite rightly points out of the Coalition and its leaders:

[...] You are asserting privilege, when you should be dressing your best because you represent your country. You are acting as if you own the place. You don’t.

Our politicians, for far too long, have been behaving in opportunistic ways.  To describe it in terms of customer-focussed management systems, politicians’ customers (or clients if you prefer) should be external – that is to say, the voters and their families, friends and support networks – whereas of late (and not just this government either) their customers have been manifestly internal; their customers have become themselves.  Businesspeople who don’t simply have the ear of politicians but have actually – suddenly – become the political classes themselves.

Which is why it is, in fact, time to construct a register of communication for politics which does not use the language of business.

Authenticity in politics should really mean service, not ownership.  We need, in British politics, to recover that sense of service.  And whatever the politics that emerges from such a sea change, it surely cannot be as bad as the politics we now have.

Political parties 1-1, voters kind of a humungous 0

 Labour, marketing-speak, political guerilla warfare, political marketing, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, Tories, unclassifiable  2 Responses »
Mar 302012
 

Over the past two weeks we’ve had a sequence of rather silly narratives.  The Budget finally put its stamp of approval on the 50p to 45p income tax argument that whilst the rich need more money to survive, the poor need less.  Then there was the Granny Tax which apparently hit around four million middle-class pensioners.  The government followed this by jacking up the price of stamps – I guess the only people who use stamps these days are poor people with little access to the Internet – as well as the VAT on hot pasties, so prejudicing again those less well-off individuals unable to afford the exorbitant price of meat these days.

The government also succeeded in turning a potential petrol tanker strike on the subject of terms, conditions, health and safety – a potential strike which was, in fact, still being negotiated at ACAS – into a nationwide panic-buying disaster of monumentally foolish proportions, simply by encouraging ministers to be filmed on TV urging the wider populace to fill up their jerrycans and store them – possibly illegally – in their garages!

We should of course neither forget that at the weekend the Tory Party co-treasurer had to resign because he’d been caught offering access to Cameron’s dinner parties for a quarter of a million pounds a throw.

But in the grand scheme of things, this latter fact appears now to be pretty irrelevant.

So now do you believe me when I suggest this government is using NLP?

*

Today, however, we awaken to the fact that George Galloway has just won from Labour the Bradford West by-election with a massive swing and by 10,100 votes.

This curious event, even where judged by the BBC‘s Nick Robinson as a “one-off political coup by a political one-off”, should surely convince the marketing-led political busybodies who occupy the higher echelons of number-crunching political parties that the demagogic approach will have its day if the disconnect between what politicians say and what politicians do remains.

The result of all the above is very clear: whilst before this morning the past two weeks looked like a clear political win for Labour – even as it depended more on the government’s own furiously shocking lack of an ability to manage news than its own essential virtues – right now it would seem that Tories and Labour are pretty much drawn equal.

The voters meanwhile?  A humungous 0 is my opinion.

Until politics becomes more about the voters than the politicians, until the real client is the non-professional in the equation and not the careerist who makes a job of it, the Galloways of this world will always have their opportunities.

I’m not saying we don’t need careerists.  We couldn’t do without them.

All I’m saying is that we need them to understand that their interests are much less important than the voters’.

Instead of, right now, quite the other way round.

How can you stop secret lobbying if it’s secret?

 commerce, Donald Rumsfeld, government, journalism, Labour, lobbyists, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Mar 262012
 

I am minded to have this thought – it’s obvious when you think about it.  We are, in fact, in Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” territory.

If all the bad things we wish to stop are secret, how can we possibly get the information to stop them from happening?  If the lobbying that really damages our political and societal life is the stuff very few people ever get to hear of, who on earth is going to be able to do anything about it?  In a sense, in fact, the recent quarter-of-a-million-pound “Premier League” revelations are almost certainly the least of it.  Especially as one Tory politician apparently argued this evening that £50,000 was a quantity of very little consequence.

In the grand scheme of things, that underbelly none of us ordinary people ever get to see, it probably is indeed a quantity of very little consequence.

The truth of the matter is that whilst the Tories have been caught red-handed on this occasion, a million other occasions in all political parties and business transactions will not only have been missed over the decades but will also continue to be missed in the future.

For understandable political reasons, Labour needs to take advantage of these circumstances – and the tribal man in me can accept this.  But the grassroots idealist side of my political make-up sees nothing to enjoy in Cameron’s predicament:

  1. firstly, because if Labour generates the political capital I think it might be able to, it will encourage its leaders to enable a process whereby the hierarchical and pyramidal politics of the Tories are simply and smoothly replaced by what’ll amount to a Tony Blair II – the progressive grassroots will then once again be swept up in a wave of emotional attachment and the same old cycle of unsustainable politics will repeat itself once more;
  2. secondly, the rules and regulations that honest and well-meaning organisations such as 38 Degrees want us to sign up to will not deal with the “unknown unknowns” which I mentioned at the top of this post – and which really do the serious damage to our ship of state’s waterline;

Either secret lobbying is really secret, in which case there is nothing to be done; or it is actually known, in which case what must be happening is that a culture of self-interest amongst politicians, businesspeople, journalists and others in the know is insider-trading on information it prefers to maintain as quite privileged.

That is the real issue: that culture of insider trading; those estates which should review their respective behaviours but are now simply feeding parasitically off each other – using each other’s knowhow and intelligence to enrich their pockets rather than a wider intellect.

That is what we need to sweep away – the creeping commercialisation and financialisation of more and more public and private transactions on the planet.

Money, then, at the root of this particular challenge?

Who’d have known it?

And there’s me wondering where I’ve heard that one before …

“The Apprentice 2″ perhaps?

 corporate lobbies, corruption, in a hole, lobbyists, political chicanery, political innovation, politicians, politicking, politics, pork-barrel politics  No Responses »
Mar 262012
 

I’ve just received an email from 38 Degrees called “Dinner with David Cameron”.  For a bizarre moment, I thought it was an invite to yours truly, an old almost-Witney boy himself, to cuddle up to the flavour of the political month.

It wasn’t though.

The email itself, amongst other things, pointed out the following:

Dear Miljenko,

Yesterday, we got yet another glimpse of how corrupt our political system is. The co-treasurer of the Conservatives was filmed giving a rare honest account of how lobbying can work. Donate enough money and you get to have dinner with the Prime Minister.[1]

That’s probably not most people’s idea of a great night out, but the Tory treasurer was in no doubt it would pay off. “It’ll be awesome for your business”, he said.

A ban on secret lobbying would help weed out this kind of sleaze. New rules could force politicians to reveal who they’re meeting and what they talked about. That’s why 38 Degrees members have been campaigning to bring in these rules for ages.

After the MP expenses scandal, public pressure pushed all the parties to make big promises about tackling lobbying. But now it’s time to write the new rules, Cameron has come up with weak rules that won’t solve the problem.[2]

If we speak up together now, we can push him to go much further and bring in a real ban, not just a token gesture. Can you take 30 seconds to sign a petition demanding a ban on secret lobbying?

I think they’ve all got it wrong, though.  In fact, I think the Tories got it wrong when Francis Maude was made a sacrificial lamb to their cause.  They should have called on Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Workfare and Old-Aged Misery – I’m sure it would have been easier for him to argue the whole wretched affair was a wizard wheeze to give practical experience in entrepreneurship to those who might need it.

The truth of the matter – and here, I’m going to be absolutely even-handed – is that entrepreneurship and politics really should not be mixed.  As I pointed out recently, in Roosevelt’s opinion doing precisely this was tantamount to the creation of a fascist state.  An accusation which, in the context of 20th century history, we should not be inclined to make lightly.

In reality, the problem is neither party funding nor corrupt politicians.  The problem is that our politicians and our businesspeople are now indistinguishable the one from the other.  Anyone who is placed in the condition of judge and jury both – of prosecution and defence, one might say – is bound to find it difficult to understand the markers in the sand.

Which is why I am inclined to appeal to anyone who cares to listen:

  • if you’re a politician, please consider your bounden and lifetime duty to be limited to enabling the correct functioning of our body politic;
  • and if you’re a businessperson, please consider your bounden and lifetime duty to be limited to enabling the correct functioning of our competitive marketplace and your place in it;

This should not be a question of passing discrete rules which those in power who have the power will inevitably sideslip.  No.  We need much much more than another set of spurious regulations: we need for people, for real individuals and their colleagues, to want to create and fashion an entirely brand new culture of behaviours.

It’s our culture that has collapsed around us – not our legislative instincts.  You cannot simply force the kind of casual corruption which is contaminating our politicking and business out of existence: once implanted, it’s generally a cancer which escapes all clean excision.

Rather, we need a twofold process of education coupled with that aforementioned hygiene: only then can we revert to a set of relationships which, long-term, might serve to benefit not only democratic discourse but also the sustainability of business behaviours.  What might be good for our democracy might, after all, conceivably be good for our economy.

In a 21st century environment where collaboration is becoming just as important as competition, our instincts should lead us just as much to a re-education of society’s members as a very 19th century dispatching of summary excommunication.

I’m not looking for a witch hunt here but, instead, a process whereby understanding is reached around how we might generate a broader society of constructive instincts; an environment or ecosystem of adult relationships.

Is this too much to ask of this interface between politics and business?

I sincerely hope it might not be.

Idealism as the realm of politics (or what we’ve all gone and lost)

 economic democracy, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, ideas, ideology, on a high, politicians, politicking, politics, undemocracy, uneconomics  No Responses »
Mar 222012
 

Frances Coppola – she of ex-bankers fame – makes a lovely point in relation to how politics and economics should approach each other:

@peterpannier I think idealism is properly the realm of politics. Work to change the ethical stance of policy, and economics will follow

Here I do feel we see a mindset which comes from massive corporate organisation: for anything to work, there needs to be a very specific and particular set of shared values.  Get the ethical stance right – which the vast majority of corporations in a competitive rather than collaborative world only ever manage to pay HR lip service to – and the rest will sort itself out.

I think she’s right, of course.  Which is why revolving doors (more here) are so particularly damaging.  They strip away all opportunity for ethical stances as deliberately entailed conflicts of interest sweep away all moral behaviours.

And I don’t mean moral as in morality itself: just what’s proper and fit when you take on the responsibility of representing others.  If in loco parentis means we can trust our teachers to do as we would do, in loco voteris – as a concept and philosophy (don’t hold me to the Latin, mind!) – would encourage our representatives to see us as their clients and customers and therefore, with the appropriate sensitivity, act accordingly.

Idealism as the realm of politics?  Yes.  That’s what’s missing in modern politicking.  The lines between politics and socioeconomic theory have become so blurred that the ability to dream a better world is lost to current society.  We have become so terribly unambitious in what we imagine for ourselves that what we do is now reduced to administering rank inequality.

We need dreamers again to predict the future.  Not nightmares which force us only to survive in the present.

____________________

Further reading: James Firth has just brought this excellent post of his to my attention on the subject of societal trust and confidence and their relationships to a wider prosperity.  Well worth your time.

Was Communism the only thing which kept all us capitalists onside?

 capitalism, Communism, George Osborne, in a hole, political beliefs, politics  8 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

I wonder if capitalism’s evident recent decline was actually postponed by the existence, for so many years, of a counterweight of ideological evil such as that which Communism represented.  And in such a counterweight, perhaps it was inevitable that it might have ended up a mirror image of its accursed and damned opponent.

I have often been struck by how similar centrally planned capitalism appears to be to the traditional welfare state; even, to the centrally planned Communist economies of yore.  The overarching need for overwhelming governance does stultify all initiative – there’s no doubt about that.  But modern transnational capitalism, whilst apparently lobbying in favour of entrepreneurial spirit and proactive mindsets, needs a dependent, compliant and meek population just as much as – if not more than – a) the welfare state, the costs of which it so often protests against, and b) the Communist state, which was once such an anathema to its every conceptual fibre.

Transnational capitalism, the kind which has now bought itself into the famous Coalition government of 23 millionaires, cannot function effectively without cheap labour.  If everyone truly exhibited proactive and entrepreneurial behaviours in a company, the HR department would get turnover hysteria as newly trained staff upped and went on a basis so regular as to make the trots a national pastime.  Capitalism of the sort which has ingrained itself in our society, in the shadow as already argued of that deathly Communism of recent times, can only pretend to believe in empowerment for all.  In reality, it only empowers the already empowered.

That is to say, the already wealthy.

In fact, they’re the only ones it can afford to empower.

This is truer today than ever: especially in the light of today’s budget here in Britain, where the Chancellor of the Exchequer has effectively mugged middle-class pensioners in order to give 14,000 millionaires an annual tax rebate of more than £40,000 each.

The reactions have been swift and telling – as they should have been – and I can’t help feeling this budget will be a marker in the sand.  This is not the kind of capitalism we all signed up to when we all took sides in the Cold War.  This is not what kept us all onside in our professed condition of resilient and freedom-loving capitalists.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall showed us exactly how puff-pastry politics works: apparently rigid on the outside, even maintaining a state of consistent staleness for interminable years, a simple poke and punt can lead to a whole conceptual edifice suddenly crumbling and collapsing.

Today, Osborne – just as simply – has casually gone ahead and poked and punted.

The vacuum that exists right now is being filled by protest movements across the globe.  And perhaps more people than myself might soon begin to realise that the only reason that there was to be a capitalist as we were was because in front of us and across the negotiating table there was that Communism as it was.

The only question that remains is whether we can rescue capitalism from the sorry clutches of those who grew up in Communism’s shadow – individuals and organisations which necessarily reflect, even nowadays, its centralising and brutalising instincts – or whether we need to fashion quite another way of organising economic endeavour.

To that question, of course, I have as yet no real answer.  But, with your permission, I’ll pursue this train of thought for as long as we judge collectively necessary.

Representative Democracy and the impact of Information Obesity

 a con, Louis Suárez-Potts, Paul Evans, politicians, politicking, politics, professional politicos, representative democracy  No Responses »
Mar 132012
 

We’re all getting fat, cardiac attack-ridden  and cancerous, I see.  The latest news from the US this morning indicates those who eat red meat and sausages have an increased chance of suffering from the aforementioned ailments.

Yet the obesity I really fear is the one that Louis highlights:

Just as with food: too much made for too few, too much consumed. Information obesity is about the glut of stuff that passes as information, that masquerades as good-for-you info, and that isn’t; that ends up bloating your day with distended periods of nothing doing but consuming the Tweets by twits, the blogs by bores, the stuff not that dreams are made of but killed by.

And I wonder if the destruction of that ideal of representative democracy Paul so seems to miss has not a little to do with Louis’s information obesity:

At a recent public meeting I watched the Council leader, beetroot-faced, being forced to stand in front of a room full of angry local traders with only one line of response: that there was no way the council were going to change any significant part of their parking policy unless a judge forced them to. The budget was set, and that’s that.

Similarly, the Coalition announced some obligation on Parliament to make time for a debate if 100,000 signatures told them to do so. Or, more accurately, this is what the media reported them as doing. The truth is more fuzzy and equally boring and irrelevant, because Parliament can ignore this obligation if it chooses to, as it did recently with 38 Degrees’ petition.

It’s all such a load of rubbish, isn’t it? [...]

I wrote about it recently.  In the end, we may become so absolutely fed up of how unrepresentative our democracy really is that we will simply decide to go elsewhere for our democratic fixes.  Politics is rapidly making itself entirely irrelevant to our needs, precisely because it’s so transparently ineffectual.  It so often says what it really doesn’t mean that even when it means what it says, we cannot believe.  Paul once again:

[...] It’s a downward spiral:

  1. You sense that the public have a lack of faith in Representative Democracy
  2. You introduce a process that allows people to have more of a say in Representative Democracy
  3. The public use it to demand something that elected representatives are not prepared or able to deliver on
  4. The petition is spiked, or paid lip-service to (i.e. perfunctory debate, status quo-ante retained)
  5. Quick assessment to see if this has improved or damaged the reputation of Representative Democracy

The offer of a petition is a typical politicians answer. It should be treated with contempt.

Maybe, in order to resolve the matter, we need to examine not the nuts and bolts of the political machine, processes and procedures but – rather – how the voting public is awash with that information which makes it absolutely impossible for ordinary people to filter and therefore properly understand our reality.

Time for a real movement to accessible open data for everyone.

Not just that hierarchy of power which prioritises the right of our politicos to know before anyone else manages to find out.

We stop insider trading – or at least attempt to – on the stock market: why should our politicians, who currently live and breathe the thrills of political gossip and insider knowledge, be allowed to demand to be treated any differently?

Creative tension and politics – does Labour still not get it?

 Coalition, creativity, cultural dissonance, cultural rub, Labour, Lib Dems, LibDemVoice.org, multiculturalism, politics, the future, the past, Tories, unclassifiable  1 Response »
Mar 042012
 

I’ve been pointing out recently how top-down traditional politics isn’t the only way into democracy – nor, even, can it now fairly represent the splintering nature of our society.  You can find these pieces here, here and here.

I then read a short piece from Lib Dem Voice, highlighting a recent article in New Statesman.  One line in particular from the Lib Dem Voice post caught my attention (the bold is mine):

Yet the Lib Dem / Conservative Coalition is exerting quite the opposite effect on Labour:
The Labour benches generally feel frozen with caution. The two Eds, Miliband and Balls, advance the party line in increments and then invite the party to toe it without a fraction of deviation. As a result, anything anyone in Labour says that might be decoded as new or interesting causes a sensation, which only reinforces the leadership’s fear of saying anything – or allowing underlings to say anything – egregious*.

Ironically, therefore, it’s the governing parties which feel free to explore new ideas through the creative tension of Coalition. In contrast, HM’s Official Opposition has become scared of its own shadow.

Creative rub and cultural dissonance have always been the two grandest virtues of multicultural and multilingual societies.  Is it possible, then, that what we have here in this case is a Labour Party which – in its dynamics of discourse – is heavily anchored in a former “One Nation Britain” approach to politicking, whilst it’s the Coalition government, forced as it is – quite despite its individual party political instincts – into the cauldron of creative tension, that is actually acting out the theory behind modern multicultural and multilingual groupings?

The results, of course, are never going to be guaranteed.  That they preach multicultural and act out mono-cultural is always going to be a possibility.  So I’m not saying the policies themselves that come out of such a process are properly reflecting the dynamics in play.

But if Labour wants to be a radical party and yet also expects us to believe in the past (its ways of seeing and doing, its dynamics of decision-making and implementation) in order to achieve such radicalism, how can it possibly square such conceptual circles and convince us that any of these contradictions are actually going to make any sense? 

That is to say, how can you possibly sell the idea of a content of multiplicity and diversity if the process for arriving at and sustaining such conclusions is so very very one-dimensional?

Wasn’t honest disagreement always a hallmark of the left?

And are we now saying the right have also stolen, from under our very political noses, even this badge of dialectic courage?

Society has already splintered – why shouldn’t the Lib Dems split?

 38 Degrees, Avaaz.org, choice, Legal Aid, Lib Dems, McMenu, NHS, on a high, politics, single-issue campaigning, Splinternet, Tories, welfare  No Responses »
Mar 012012
 

Labour List had an interesting post yesterday from the always attuned Mark Ferguson.  In it, he suggested there was serious evidence the Lib Dems would be splitting after the 2015 general election.  I hardly think this is surprising.  Society, after all, began to splinter quite a while ago.

And I don’t mean this is a negative way: this is not broken-backed Britain we’re dealing with but a simple recognition that the united society of yore was actually, probably, in reality, a bit of a lie anyway.  The media have always loved to create perceptions which hardly correspond to ordinary people’s lives.  Journalists have deadlines to meet – and a startling angle, however inaccurate it may be, makes their jobs, editors’ jobs and newsagents’ jobs so much easier to do.

On the occasion of the recent Netroots North West event, I came to the following conclusion:

[...] Coordinating the actions of thinking people never predisposed to singular mindspeaks was never going to be an easy objective to achieve.  We are on the left precisely because we often disagree with each other.  So are we prepared, after two years of Coalition ideology, to take our principles in our hands once more and entirely trust a political party?  Or is the way forward some other different (and splintered) approach far more suited to the instincts of the 21st century?

I don’t know.

But I am inclined – if you ask me to bet on the future – that the answer for the progressive left will lie one day far more in the latter than it ever could any longer lie in the former.

So what should we do in the face of Lib Dem initiatives such as these?  Is it our responsibility to circle like vultures, looking to take advantage of easy pickings?  I think quite roundly not.  The rumblings in the Lib Dems could quite easily be interpreted as being entirely due to the strains of Coalition government.  But it would be simplistic to come to such conclusions.  Society, far more widely, for far longer, has become far more discrete and disintegrated than ever before in recent British sociocultural history.

From the strains on the Union and those calls for Scottish independence to the very fact that the Tories were quite unable to win the last general election, the vultures – if we must see them that way – which are gathering round the British body politic should not be traditional political parties looking to carve up the pie that is the British electorate.  The success of single-issue campaigning – from organisations like Avaaz.org and 38 Degrees to the recent social media-engendered movements against the Welfare, NHS and Legal Aid bills currently going through Parliament – just goes to show that getting people involved isn’t, in the future, going to be simply the old trick of putting them all in the same leaflet-delivering sack.  The old political parties will still be needed – but just like the content industries struggling to understand the Internet, they will have to change their business models, downsize their reach and learn how to work with hundreds of different interests.

Interests, incidentally, they will not be able to control in the managerialist ways they have been used to.

If the Lib Dems do split, then, it will be a sign all the other parties should take note of.  To interpret it as a weakness of Lib Dem structure would be to sadly – as well as dangerously – mistake the effect for a cause.  All parties, however well led, will soon have to face the (for them) sickening reality that there are far more ways of getting involved in politics and democracy these days than either joining or even simply supporting one of the existing political groupings.

McMenu comes to politics?  Don’t knock it.  At least, not before you properly understand its implications.

Choice is a powerful harbinger of change.  And change, from now on, is what it’s all going to be about.

Paranoia, convergent evolution and politics

 Chris Grayling, Coalition, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, convergent evolution, high street closures, in a hole, paranoia, politics, schizophrenia  No Responses »
Feb 252012
 

Carl over at Though Cowards Flinch clearly identifies the issue (the bold is Carl’s):

“Let me give you an example, my own e-mail address was hacked by this organisation and used to lodge a complaint with Tesco so I don’t accept the scale of the campaign is very large. It’s a small number of activists who are deliberately targeting these companies and are trying to destabilised them.”

The organisation in question being the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the allegedly “hacked” complainant being the Coalition’s Chris Grayling.  As Carl goes on to point out:

The SWP wouldn’t know a computer from a hobby horse. I remember a time when they were reluctant to have a website, then a Twitter account, the thought of them hacking computers is laughable.

But the situation is a little more worrying than simple accusations of hacking, which in any case Grayling then had to backtrack on.  Whilst Carl begins to wonder whether a kind of “brushing all socialists with a broad McCarthyite brush” isn’t really what’s behind Grayling’s attack, I’m beginning to wonder if a kind of paranoia isn’t seeping into this embattled government’s perceptions:

“We’ve got a lot of companies who are very jumpy,” he told Evan Davis.

“The High Street retail sector is going through a tough time at the moment – if you’re running a company and you’re getting streams of emails attacking you it’s very unsettling.

“It’s a false campaign.

Apart from the fact that he refuses to recognise that the “tough time” he mentions is now mainly due to Coalition economics, the truth of the matter is that in moments when psychotic relationships with reality begin to creep in on one, it’s very easy to confuse what is really convergent evolution with the impressions that paranoia engender.  The fact that millions of people suddenly turn on their governors doesn’t necessarily mean there is an evil conspiracy behind it.  The behaviour of flocking in birds, for example, can exhibit structure without such structure being malignant.

It does, however, become a broader problem for us all when a government starts along the road of awful paranoia.  In fact, in its early days – whilst still in charge and gloating – it may be a far safer deal than when it begins to perceive it is losing control of popular opinion.  An enemy is never more dangerous than when wounded.

And this government is wounded.

So expect far more of these errors of judgement and perception which confuse convergent evolution with the psychosis born of a disconnection from reality – Grayling is but the first example of what will soon assail us en masse:

Paranoia [ˌpar.rəˈnoɪ.ə] (adjective: paranoid [ˈpar.rə.noɪd]) is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself. [...]

As the definition goes on to suggest:

Making false accusations and the general distrust of others also frequently accompany paranoia. For example, an incident most people would view as an accident, a paranoid person might make an accusation that it was intentional. 

Ring any bells?  Does for me, anyhow.  And – for me – this is clearly an example of a government going dangerously dysfunctional.

Question really is whether it’s part and parcel of wider behaviours in politics – in which case we should be very worried – or just a passing sequence of actions which might serve to inconvenience a generation of what may become the lost.

In which case our worry can become focussed.

But if the latter is the case, and our societal attention does concentrate itself thus, won’t we simply end up feeding the paranoid thoughts of an evermore schizophrenic Coalition?

Just because you think people are after you doesn’t, after all, mean they aren’t.

Big business vs political parties – who are the real professionals these days?

 big business, Big Capitalism, Big Society, Big State, democracy, democratic deficit, in a hole, politics, professional politicos  No Responses »
Feb 202012
 

I mentioned my discomfort with the spreading tentacles of our democracy in a previous post.  The evidence clearly points to an unhappy reality: big business influences who wins elections these days much more than the discrete decisions of individuals.  Whether these individuals occupy posts of responsibility in political parties or simply carry out their civic duty on polling day, the final outcomes depend far more on the decisions taken in boardrooms than the minds made up in sitting-rooms.

Which is why I underline my dissatisfaction and fear of a further “democratisation” of our political system via localism agendas, referendums and other tools of the blessed Big Society (more here) – until and if we are able to remove from the equation the overwhelmingly concentrated lobbying resources of that nexus which is Big Capitalism and the Big State everywhere.

For the more of this kind of democracy we have, the worse our democratic deficit will get.

The truth of the matter being that big business has now become much more adept at politics than even our professional politicians.

And we, meanwhile, are caught in the latent crossfire.

How to love Labour

 Labour, left, neoliberalism, on a high, Paul Evans, politics, professional politicos  No Responses »
Feb 192012
 

Paul says the following today:

Labour should be a boring party that chases votes around the centre ground.

He then goes on to underline his point thus (the bold is mine):

The job of the left is to drag that centre-ground leftwards. The big unions that finance Labour waste so much money paying for office space when they could be running campaigns that no politician can ignore.

So can you live with this as a definition of what our relationship to Labour should be?

I think I can.

And I think I might.

For the contrary – that is to say, dragging the centre-ground rightwards – is exactly what the mirror image of the left has successfully been doing for decades now.

Paul either accidentally or unerringly has stumbled across a formula – a magic bullet, if you like, of political positioning – which might finally allow us to learn to love Labour in very many of its manifestations.

At least enough to be able to work with it constructively without rejecting our principles in consonance with its less principled instincts.

Two open fronts then?

Why not?

The more, the healthier …

Perhaps we can’t consolidate our many disparate voices around reinventing a party which attracts a winning combination of voting constituencies.  Perhaps that does need to be left in the hands of the practised and practising professionals.  But what we can do, if we so choose, through our many and varied individual actions on the ground, is fight in as structured and organised a way as we are comfortable with – in order to re-engineer where that centre begins to naturally settle.

It will probably take a whole generation – but if we can let it be known it is our long-term objective, the practised and practising professionals may discover that sooner or later some of the pressure they are under to conform with right-wing ideologies begins to become less of an urgency than it might have been.

If we are prepared to let them massage the message and they are prepared to notice, understand and take advantage of our efforts to move the centre leftwards once more, then perhaps a movement built around Labour will one day be just as equally possible all over again.

It does of course depend on whether our politicos are prepared to enter a new kind of contract with what in traditional terms could be seen as a splintering progressive community.

Anyone with real power out there who understands what I’m trying to get at?

And who doesn’t actually believe in all this neoliberal obfuscation?

I wonder.

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