Partisan Mil at Chester’s Labour Live event

 Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour, sorted  1 Response »
May 182013
 

I must admit I hadn’t been to a Labour Party event for quite a while.  The local parliamentary candidate selection process did bring me temporarily back into the fold, and I had this to say about it most recently.  However, a certain Richard Beacham and helpers various appear to be creating an amazing buzz around what I had long felt to be a CLP hitting way below its potential.

So it was I went to what I believe is the first Labour Live event in Chester.  And in five short tweets from last night, here you can see my reaction to the whole affair:

At the Chester Labour Live event. Brilliant first act. Young singer-songwriter from New Brighton. Class young woman. Great songs and voice.

A folk version of Dancing Queen? With audience participation too? Now that is One Nation Labour! :-) Great stuff.

Stuck In The Middle With You plus iPad and stomping local brothers. Now if all GCs were like this …

You Can Call Me Al … or is that Arnie? Can politics really be this much fun?

Not so much Twist And Shout as twist and get them out. You could seriously win elections with such engagement.

And as I added, once back home:

@CllrSDixon ‘Twas an excellent show, wasn’t it? Never been to a GC like that in my life. ;-) @cwaclabour @cllrben

What a contrast to traditional Party occasions.  Yes, of course it involves allowing oneself to give oneself up to one’s emotions for a time, but the music was good, the conversation enthusing and I simply had a jolly good time.  No, I’m not the selfless kind who loves pushing leaflets through letterboxes; I much prefer to push words into the ether.  But I can feel much more positive about the Party more widely by getting out from behind my weapon of choice for the kind of show that Chester Labour put on last night.

There is a lesson in all of this: there is a moment in politics when desperate measures may be called for.  And those desperate measures may mean appealing occasionally to our less rational and thinking sides.  Democratic socialism of the kind I experienced last night – a local community opening its doors to culture and art in the good long-term cause of winning back government from one of the most incompetent administrations in recent times – is the sort of process and ideology we need to promote and develop.

Political parties as enablers rather than leaders; political parties which know how to bring different strands of protest together; political parties which know how to embed themselves in communities in a symbiotic and not parasitical way.

Whilst Pope Francis condemns the cult of money, MPs decide Google & Co do evil after all, modern life – and in particular politics – ignores the essence of ordinary people’s home and work experiences, and even I remember arguing that privatising intimacy was the ultimate privatisation of all, we see that overlording all of the above is an almost certainly deliberate process whereby serious centres of latterday power look to make of us all much more selfish beings.  And yet countering all the previous, surely more and more community acts of creative solidarity such as Chester’s Labour Live event last night can serve to re-establish a natural equilibrium in the way we see those around us.

Where powerful transnational processes have taught us to think only about maximising our individual and familial outcomes, the kind of political party which Labour may be transmuting into can surely, just as deliberately, re-educate us into looking to maximise societal outcomes too.

If Labour can truly learn to give to its potential voters as much as it needs to ask of them – and in that sequence and order in the grander hierarchy of relationships – then perhaps all is not lost to the selfishness that modern capitalism has ingrained in us.

So this afternoon, this is why you read Partisan Mil arguing that a future of human relationships still exists; is still salvageable; is still within our reach.

Don’t believe the Tories; don’t believe their corporate sponsors; don’t believe that money must rule our every transaction.

Live encounters; real events; natural extensions of hopes, fears, ambitions and futures.  All of this and more can be found in a Labour Live performance.

And hopefully, pretty soon, in a Labour Live political party …

Why we need to recover a face-to-face society

 social links, social media, social networks, social organisation, sorted, Spain  No Responses »
May 012013
 

This morning, I was talking about the current situation in Spain with some of my students of Spanish.  We were discussing what I had been tweeting on Twitter the night before with a dear follower from Spain, Monica Lalanda.  Monica was feeling sad about her country, arguing that it felt as if it were a country of losers.  I suggested that history had shown the Spanish (all its nationalities) were much more a country of survivors than losers.

As I related the exchange to my students this morning, I realised exactly how much emotion I have invested in Spain.  For a touch-and-go moment, I had to fight back the tears.

I also told my students my experience as a language-training provider for the car components industry in Spain.  This was when I discovered how clever, creative and competent the Spanish at their best really are.  They characterise themselves often as brilliant improvisers and whilst to a certain degree this is true, they are also undeniably brilliant implementers.  You can’t be otherwise in such a competitive and continuously improving sector.

And then one of my students described an experience she’d had as a project manager, working simultaneously with both Swiss and Spanish workforces.  Here, she compared the straightforward Swiss to the brilliantly enthusiastic and colourful Spanish: the documentation produced by each group of workers reflected these differing national characteristics.  She also described how the Spanish wouldn’t stop nattering whilst they worked.  It was clear that the Spanish weren’t only good at continuous improvement, they were also sharp and ingenious at what we could term continuous communication.

Which is when I realised this is indeed what distinguishes the Spanish from other workforces I’ve come up against.  For example, the English will shut down as the 5 o’clock deadline approaches; maintaining a relationship with one’s fellow men and women becomes far less important than finishing the job on time.  Yet communication is the glue of everything business, politics and society does well.  No wonder the Spanish have achieved so many great things in their history: they understand, they fully comprehend, the significance of “wasting” time on relating to each other.

At least in the sector under discussion, and I’m sure in many other areas of endeavour, they won’t sacrifice their right and obligation to speak amongst themselves, simply in order that they might get home on time.

The Spanish are survivors – not losers at all – precisely because they reserve the right to question each other; even at work.  Even amongst hierarchy, they maintain their creative habits of grumbling: this “rechistar” they convincingly sustain which often leads to pragmatic solution.  And competent hierarchy knows all too well they will inevitably be like this – and so competent hierarchy, at least that competent hierarchy you find in certain big businesses, knows you have to take them along with you.

You can’t pull the wool over Spanish eyes, that’s for sure.  You have to convince them up as close as it gets: you have to convince them face-to-face.

So we come finally to the point of this post.  Here we have a New York Times article from last year as one piece of evidence:

[...] We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial. And it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.

The interesting bit comes, however, when detailed explanations are finally made:

[...] The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior. In one of our experiments, for example, after attempting to explain how various policy ideas would actually work, people became less likely to donate to organizations that supported the positions they had initially favored.

With the Spanish experience in mind – that is to say, with their ability to continuously communicate and thus moderate their actions (the only explanation I can encounter as they proceed to put up with soaring unemployment rates of 27 percent) – I am minded to remember my own experience whilst I was a co-opted parish councillor in the place in which I still find myself living.  I had by then set up what I intended to be a local blogsite which would combine photos of the area with pithy comment.  But, in the event, I found it extraordinarily difficult to say any productive or useful word about my experiences.  Simply knowing the potential audience was people I lived cheek-and-jowl next to terrified me into a counter-productive silence.

Or perhaps the silence was not as counter-productive as I thought.  It seems to me, in the light of the findings recounted in the New York Times, that what I was experiencing was actually a virtual equivalent of that highly constructive and continuous communication of the Spanish: I was being forced to explain myself to people I knew I’d bump into – and thus was having to question far more fiercely my own neat and perfectly-formed prejudices.

In truth, it seems to me that if we are to survive the next decade or so with any degree of kindness, humility or accuracy – if England, the UK and a wider Western democracy is to perpetuate its better aspects in any convincing way – we will need to recover a face-to-face society which broadcast politics, social media, online communication and other latterday technologies have almost battered into non-existence.

It might yet be possible too.  This statistic could be telling:

The poll also asked respondents: “Thinking about any local newspapers published in your home town or county, do you think they are on balance a positive or a negative force in your local community?” The majority,  53.3 per cent, said they were positive, 8.3 per cent said they were negative and 32.7 per cent said they were neutral.

I don’t have the data to hand, of course, but I would be happy to assume that local radio, TV and newspapers are generally less aggressively overbearing in their behaviours than the more cocooned and distant national media.  More middle-of-the-road, less extreme in their posturing.  Inevitably so, when your neighbours get to know who you are and where you live.

Hardly counter-intuitive, anyhow.

It may of course be that the distancing effect of social media and networks is something we in Anglo-Saxon countries are actively pursuing.  Who’s to say, after all, that we would like to continuously communicate like the Spanish seem to want to?  But I bet my very last peseta that if you ever properly got the opportunity to find out what it was like, then to live and work in an environment of friendly and intelligent “relationship professionals” would be far more finally fun and productive than in a landscape of pesky “time-keeping trolls”.

As well as leading to a far less destructively cruel, inefficient and partisan politics.

On enabling a way out for UK politics

 empowerment, enablers, politics, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 302013
 

I’ve been tweeting with Bryn this morning.  He’s always thoughtful; always thought-provoking.  One particular exchange went as follows.  First, my idle train of thought:

In a century where so many people are so highly educated, surely we don’t need leaders – we need enablers. *That’s* what’s going wrong.

Now his response:

@eiohel I agree in principle, but then I see a UKIP poster, or a Daily Mail headline. Education isn’t the key, Community might be…

Only to further underline that:

@eiohel Need to work it out – Open communities can have oppressive, intolerant consensus. Closed societies allow corruption, crime + elitism

All of which leads me to wonder how in a modern 21st century society we have arrived at such a situation as today’s.  It seems to me that when the Nigel Farages of this world look to lead a nation out of its misery, and even more importantly when some of us believe in such a strategy, we’re misconstruing the problem to hand.  I think, in fact, I was right when I suggested, in an educated world, we need those enablers – those facilitators – I was talking about much more than we need proto-Blairs.

But, as Bryn then went on to indicate, more thought is needed to properly understand exactly what we mean when we use the term “enablers”.

I’m going to sound a little like a Daily Mail columnist now, but I do wonder if what we’re missing is the rule of law: more specifically, a respect and cognisance of its permanent implications.  Governments over the past thirty or forty years have got very used to the idea of using legislation to change nations, people, behaviours and other landscapes.  And in many cases, we could argue these were noble instincts.  But the downside for a country which has no written constitution as such is that we, the ordinary folk who just live our lives, must find it difficult to properly understand what England – or a wider UK – really stands for.

Yes.  If we had a written constitution, it might one day be the case that we would reach a state of legislative pain and conflict which the US people – always referring to this or that blessed amendment’s interpretation – currently suffer from.  That the world’s biggest democracy has an oracle of mysterious import at its very centre should be a warning to all those who believe in a neat and tidy secularism.  But we, here in Britain, have I am afraid swung to the opposite end of the pendulum.  In the absence of a proper, sensible, recognisable and easily shareable environment, our politics and democracy have become a patchwork of unconnected actions.  No wonder, in such a circumstance, that it has become so easy for the monetising corporations to fill the vacuum.  Here in the UK, and more specifically the England I live in, we really have no idea what being English is supposed to mean.

And I don’t mean this in the traditional circumscription of immigration, foreign workforces, globalising influences and outsourcing.  No.  Here I’m talking much more about how the rule of law – that unwritten constitution which is all that we have – has no clear basis, foundation or structure which appears to be at all inviolable.  It’s almost as if we were bringing up a family where the children decided when and what they had to do at every juncture in the lives of the individuals involved.

There you are, you see.  The Daily Mail in me coming out again!

Yet where the Mail would never care to return to the concept of enabling, right now that is where I go back to: as I said before, it is enablers we need far more than leadership at the moment.  But not just people who enable us; also, environments.

We need a rule of law with inviolable tenets we can always – unremittingly – rely on.

We need to feel that whatever any government decides it has a mandate to change, certain things it will never touch; certain aspects of our democratic landscape will continue as priceless touchstones of our lives.

That in a prime-ministerial parliamentary democracy it should be the case that we have felt over the past forty years the desperate and continuing need to be led by presidential figures, and that in some way or another all these leaders have failed, simply indicates to me that what we are missing from the mix is not better leadership but – rather – better and more defining frameworks.

All of us need some kind of certainty in our lives.

So let the defining certainties of future Western democracies (and in particular the ones which directly concern us) not be the transitory leaders who bully our emotions into sly submission but – instead – those aforementioned and sensitively constructed touchstones of understanding I ask for: touchstones which would allow every government, whatever its political colour, to build on common foundations that (ultimately) would allow us all to grow in permanence.

Essentially, as the peoples we want to be.

On radicals, free radicals and radicalisation

 quixotic jouster of windmills, radicalisation, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 232013
 

Chris Dillow describes himself as “An extremist, not a fanatic”.  In the definition of “radicalisation” given by Wikipedia, and by extension others out there too, I’m not sure this fine distinction between two highly relevant concepts is properly allowed for:

Radicalization (or radicalisation) is a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that (1) reject or undermine the status quo[1] or (2) reject and/or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice. For example, radicalism can originate from a broad social consensus against progressive changes in society. Radicalization can be both violent and nonviolent, although most academic literature focuses on radicalization into violent extremism (RVE).[2] There are multiple pathways that constitute the process of radicalization, which can be independent but are usually mutually reinforcing.[3][4]

To be radical is often seen as a positive thing in modern politics.  Perhaps we are still in the thrall of the times of Reaganomics and Thatcherism where language was inverted in order to evidence that what was plainly regressive and hyper-conservative could actually be interpreted as truly progressive.

That radicalisation can have its violent side is, of course, without a doubt a truth of heavy sadness.  The Guardian reports in exactly these terms in relation to the recent bombings at the Boston marathon, although I found the instinct to use Amazon wish lists in defining the nature of individual beliefs problematic in many senses to say the least.  But, as always, radicalisation is a question of point of view too.  If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look at these lines:

The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.[61]

Spoken by Margaret Thatcher in 1976, a woman who a few years before had put tiny financial savings before free milk for seven- to eleven-year-olds, I would suggest that these words clearly showed the characteristic vocabulary and tone of a radicalisation as equally bent on its own very particular agenda and as equally inflexible as any other.

That we tended to agree with the fanaticism of Margaret Thatcher as expressed thus, in the face of a horrible regime, doesn’t make any less radicalising her statements or positions.  On a spectrum, then, of political extremists and fanatics, at least in relation to the Soviet Union, I think Margaret Thatcher fairly figures up there with any other.

Now all I am trying to say with this is that the broader event of radicalisation in an individual – both violent and non-violent - can happen as a result of severe monolithic-like behaviours outside the person.  If society’s discourse is not mainly couched in collaborative terms, people little by little feel left out.  Latterday Western civilisation doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge this either: instead, it looks to increase its ability to keep the lid on things by spying on, investigating and condemning a priori and essentially criminalising as many people as it potentially can, in order that it might keep each of us on our terrified and complicit toes.

And yet imaginative thought, the kind of creative acts that bring about substantive and important change in the way we learn how to do things, is a radical act if there ever was one.  If we refuse to distinguish between what we might call radicals in opposition to the status quo from radicals who think freely about the status quo, we will lose exactly that element of being a human which distinguishes us from what it is to be an animal.

In a sense, putting all the above in the box of “radicalisation” and then creating a sequence of vigorous and unappealing laws which allow leaders to impose their will without honest or useful question – precisely in the name of protecting that now unradical, possibly even unfree, status quo - is to lose so much of what it is to be a thinking person, out of the simple fear that people will care to answer back.

Not only answer back either – also, answer back more accurately.

There must, surely, be a way for modern politics and business to finally accept that the educated populaces which now people the planet are radicalising themselves precisely because they are being given no opportunity to do meaningful stuff at their levels of competence.  This isn’t my hoary old proclamation that hierarchy is dead: this is, rather, an appeal to sense and sensibility.  Kings and queens and prime ministers and presidents existed in times of relative illiteracy.  This is manifestly no longer the case.  We need, therefore, a different way of keeping the lid on things.  And that way can only be this: by preventing the pressure building up in the first place.  Don’t simply aim to terrify or diffuse: instead, make those people you’re terrifying or distracting a true and continuing part of the solution.

Forget your hierarchies of kings and queens.  Accept that illiteracy is a thing of the past.  Understand the difference between being radical and being free radical.  And come to the realisation, where not the radicalisation, that people are a finite and perishable resource you ignore at all our perils.

How about we started arresting the banks?

 corporations, latterday capitalism, laws, on a high, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 212013
 

This story was brought to my attention by Paul Bernal on Twitter this morning.  It involves what he described as a Labour-funded think tank, IPPR, coming up with the brilliant (#irony) idea to turn unemployment benefit into a loan which would be repayable on returning to work.  You can find the story on the Observer at the moment here.

IPPR, meanwhile, is fairly transparent as think tanks go.  As per the Who Funds You? website, it gets an “A” rating – and on its own website lists current funders thus.  Quite a mixed bag, in fact: from charities and David Miliband himself to the European Commission, Serco (#hmm), Aviva, the consumer magazine Which?, a brace of Joseph Rowntree organisations and the City of London Corporation.  Hardly straightforwardly Labour-funded, then.

The news did, however, cause me to tweet in the following way:

Taxpayer bailouts; student loans; now the poor in their grasp. The real something-for-nothing scroungers are the bloody banks themselves!

And it’s true.  It seems to me that in a crisis entirely due to mismanagement in and around the financial sector – both technical and technocratic it has to be said – those who continue to pay the price for such disintegration are those hardest hit by its consequences.  So it is we reward instead of punish the banking corporations for having got it so wrong.  As money gets tighter for the poor, opportunities for the banks to make easy cash off our backs are expanded not only by the Wonga-style market forces of the desultory high street but also by the bright and bushy-tailed think-tank boffins themselves.  I can’t think of another sector in the world – or, indeed, in history – where failure was such a profitable act.

Nor, in fact, where it continues to get even more profitable.

But, on the train yesterday on the way to a Manchester policy forum, I stumbled across a solution to all our ills.  At the moment, corporations are legal figures with many of the rights and obligations of ordinary people.  This is well known and well documented and I shan’t repeat myself here.  However, what I would like to suggest is that a serious imbalance does exist as far as depriving the liberty of such corporations to act when under investigation – or, indeed, after being found guilty of certain acts.

Ordinary people, for example, quite often when arrested find themselves summarily deprived of their liberty – and no one questions the process.  Apart from the odd legal phonecall or interview or occasional family visit, their radius of action and ability to influence the result is radically reduced.  This allows for the police to carry out necessary investigations, untrammelled by the interference of too many interested – and perhaps self-promoting – parties.

This does not happen in the case of corporate entities: mostly, in cases of even quite severe misdemeanour (witness recent high-profile banking scandals around the long-term money-laundering of drug revenues by banks you’d hardly expect to exhibit such behaviours), we generally find such corporate figures – flesh-and-blood people in everything but flesh-and-blood – do not get arrested; do not need to request bail; and never get imprisoned.  Their liberty is never deprived; they continue to operate in the meantime; they proceed to make their money as before.

Sadly, of course, we often discover after the event that the potential for being fined for some act or another will have been factored into an annual budget before the crimes in question were committed.  A fine, even a large fine, even just the threat of a fine, becomes simply one more operating cost to be contemplated as the logistics of the year are calculated.

And although, on occasions, executives do find themselves accused of specific acts, the processes are so drawn out as to make any sensible adjustment to the direction of our socioeconomic fabrics impossible to engineer.  They frequently manage to stay at the top of their hierarchical games, despite the complaints of shareholders; despite the unhappiness of a wider consuming public; and despite the reputational damage this leads to.  With their battalions of legal support, these alpha men and women feel secure in their protective silos and bunkers of belief.  No wonder they behave as imperiously as they do.

In such cases, not only are the operations of the companies in question left untouched, the ability of their apparently criminal leaders to continue leading remains intact.

My suggestion, then, which came to me as I journeyed – quite appropriately – to the TUC’s founding place, is to engineer two new figures in company law:

  1. the figure of arrest without bail
  2. the figure of imprisonment

How would these work?  Well, in the case of the former, arrest without bail would mean the corporation would have to shut down all its operations immediately.  Just as a person who finds themselves under the same deprivation of liberty, whilst investigations into probable misconduct take place, so we should be able to do the same to a company.  And the mere threat of being able to do this would surely lead to a radical change in how fines and punishments for corporate maleficence were treated and assessed in the future by those who currently quite happily contemplate them.

In the case of the latter figure, the figure of imprisonment, we could suggest that a company might totally cease operations in a similar way once sentence had been passed a posteriori.  Under such circumstances, and for a certain period of time only, the company in question could not continue to occupy the marketplace, in much the same way as a person in prison must effectively cut off all connections to the outside world.

The result would be two powerful instruments to make the corporate figure far more like the human equivalent which – in so many cases – it loves to emulate.

Applied in particular to the banking corporations, it would send a hugely important message around the significance of competence, honesty and openness for our shared societies.

As well as, surely, end the terrible cycle of reward for utter failure – a cycle which appears to be the current tonic and reality of latterday capitalism.

Andy Burnham’s NHS challenge: the socialisation of health vs the medicalisation of everything else

 Andy Burnham, Labour, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 202013
 

I was in Manchester this morning, attending an NHS Policy Forum with Andy Burnham.  He gave us a fascinating lesson in political matchmaking, which clearly serves to cement his position as a tactician of considerable importance in Labour’s chances at the 2015 general election.  My objective in this post is to explain why I believe this to be the case.

Most of what he said today, and it took nigh on fifty minutes to do so, can be found here at the moment over at the Labour Party website, in a speech he gave previously to the King’s Fund in January of this year.  I suggest you read this before we continue.

Essentially, he proposes pulling together physical, mental and social care into one £120 billion integrated and unified budget.  He referred early on to the World Health Organisation definition of health, and it bears quoting again:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

The correct bibliographic citation for the definition is:

Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.

The Definition has not been amended since 1948.

In order to make this “whole person” approach work in a free-at-point-of-use dynamic, he suggests bringing together not only what we might term as the “medical” professionals and services in the three areas mentioned but also other areas of specialist support such as housing, early years’ delivery and infrastructures etc, under the umbrella of single point-of-contact access.  And in a sense, this does makes sense: anyone who’s had to live in mould-ridden poor quality housing for example, whether social or private, will have experienced having their confidence undermined; their health attacked; and their sense of autonomy diminished – all of which lead to physical, mental and broader social care challenges likely to generate costs and fracture in these latter areas.

What better way, then, to deal with an ageing population and its very special social care needs (Alzheimer’s, physical infirmity, reduced mobility, mental unhappiness and so forth) than to take the bull by the horns, make a virtue of a necessity and suggest we extend, not reduce, the reach of the National Health Service?  In essence, re-engineer its original values for a 21st century of quite different circumstances, where a care crisis of unhappy proportions is advancing on us all.

Now there was little detail, it must be said, in the proposals themselves: but that wasn’t the purpose of the process in question at this stage.  As he clearly flagged up, he was looking to provide a framework and see how Party input could then flesh out such details.  One thing he did suggest was a, say, ten percent levy (I’m sure this was a bit back-of-the-envelope, but no less interesting for that) on people’s estates to pay for that free-at-point-of-use social care late in life – and it’s not as if this isn’t already happening via the private sector, as our grandparents struggle to fund rising healthcare, accommodation and general living costs, especially as pensions and savings are hit from all sorts of economic broadsides.

In a round-table discussion, held afterwards in groups across this extremely well-attended policy forum, someone suggested Burnham was doing little more than give priority to a highly fragmented social care provision as it currently stands: given that it’s the responsibility of councils, this view of Burnham’s real drivers would argue he had identified a highly powerful constituency – the greying group of citizens we are all becoming – and was looking to prioritise the needs of such a constituency for general electoral reasons.  If this were true, of course, we’d have a politician of Mandelson-like proportions: the Machiavellian nature of this approach could hardly contrast more fiercely with the straightforward and straight-talking image Burnham has I think quite rightly acquired.

And I don’t think Burnham is only playing politics here.  Of course, he’s looking for big and bold policy to lever Labour’s return to power – and who wouldn’t?  Especially with the complex brief – at the centre of the Labour Party’s very soul, as I think he alluded to – which he is having to sustain and drive forward in a political environment clearly infused by a savage, cunning and long-planned privatisation already well in hand.

I think he truly believes in a more humanistic medicine – a more holistic national support system for all our needs, in fact.  And I think the ambition is well worth pursuing too.  I do have some initial reservations, of course:

  • a single-point-of-contact for all our “whole person” services would require the sharing of vast amounts of parallel data with the implications this might have for our data security and privacy
  • such a system of access would require a whole new level of professionals upskilled in coordinating vastly different specialisations – and in truth, throwing even more managerialism and support services at the NHS would hardly be the first thing to make you popular in the eyes of the public
  • for patients, service-users, children, parents, tenants and “customers” various to perceive the services thus delivered in a seamless way would require those delivering the services behind the scenes to acquire similar cultures – not an easy thing in times of crisis or massive change as anyone who has been through, for example, a corporate merger will bear witness to
  • homing in – as I think was also suggested – on the home as the unit of primary focus, instead of on the hospital as the significant and principle local infrastructure, could lead to the withdrawal of such community-based delivery some way down the line, where any change of political colours in local or national government took place, or when any rising political star needed to make a name for themselves: in much the same way as it’s easier to remove a bus service than it is to remove a tram, so a hospital would almost certainly remain where a fleet-of-foot “whole person” approach could simply end up dismantled by the next cohort of bushy-tailed Tories
  • finally, the NHS is hardly known for democratic accountability: putting the “whole person” budget into one massive pot would, therefore, require very careful analysis – a priori, surely – of how to ensure useful democratic oversight in a meaningful way without incurring, once again, those top-down New Labour managerialist tendencies of overarching targets and tick-box exercises at the expense of the more humane approach I think Burnham wishes to pursue

There is, in fact, a sense that the cradle-to-grave aspect of the proposal could simply reignite fears about Blair’s nanny state: inspecting the health of your children from the day they are born; inspecting the food you give your children; inspecting the schools that deliver the education judged appropriate; inspecting the degree to which you as an adult follow the rules of good personal healthcare; inspecting the degree to which you are properly housed; inspecting the moment at which you are considered worthy of preventative medicalisation; inspecting and acquiring the resource to give everyone the right to social care.

But what are the alternatives to such a proposal?  Burnham, after all, proposes nothing less than the socialisation of health: the opportunity not to be fearful of old age but to live it for as long as possible with points of familial reference in one’s own home and surroundings.  The opportunity, if you like, to die in one’s home wherever humanly possible – without being abandoned to the vagaries of lonely decay.

For it is surely clear that social care, right now, in its fragmented state, is too much a case of “malnourished users” and “minimum-waged workforces”.  And this will be the future of the NHS too, if we don’t do something now to correct the errors of the ways of too many governments past.

And if we choose not to run with this socialisation of health I perceive in Burnham’s proposals?  Then we will run the risk of the reverse happening anyway: via the corporate forces that wish to medicalise us everywhere: in everything we do, in the costly services they sell us, in the residential homes they build empires on the backs of, in the outsourcing agreements they wrench from their commissioning groups, in the tendency modern medical mindsets and infrastructures have when they make so grand and big and imposingly different the first, second, third, fourth and last ages of all our lives.

If for no other reasons than these, then, Burnham’s “whole person” approach – even with the caveats I mention above – does sincerely deserve both our attention and our time.  To make the support of our wider humanity the flagship of Labour thought over the cruel and deliberate monetisation of suffering – its turning of human beings into little more than units of profit-generating resource – is surely both a vote-winner as well as a re-establishment of key beliefs too many of us have carelessly unattended to in sad recent times.

One final thought.  Whatever you do, however you structure it, let this be the clearest clarion call Labour makes: free-at-point-of-access support for every key definer of equal opportunity in our often kindly, occasionally cruel and generally variegated lives.

We cannot completely eliminate risk from our lives – but we should do everything we can to eliminate fear.

And so that is where we’re at: a 21st century reworking of socialism itself – driven by a strikingly self-effacing top-flight politician such as Andy Burnham – which just might end up dropping into the lap of a furiously modernising Labour Party.

A Labour Party – barely five years since it showed signs of an awful creeping political amnesia – just looking for a way to prove itself healthy and fighting fit all over again.

And able to do so with a long-term strategy which just might do the same for the rest of us too.

Respect in the 21st century: you earn it, you don’t own it

 respect, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 162013
 

And so it’s quite right that they should be forcing us, obliging us, compelling us to show respect tomorrow.  That was how leadership worked in the 1980s.  By force, obligation and compulsion.

In death, in fact, as in life – that is how it must always be.

Fitting indeed.  Fitting and correct.


http://youtu.be/4LBLesi5IjM

And so this is how we are today.  Still living in the shadows of such leadership.  Still living in the shadows of governors who – even now – refuse to gain our respect; who manage, instead, to possess it by virtue of their positions.


http://youtu.be/mmJyyW2Zfug

But on Thursday, after all that, we will be firmly back in the 21st century – a century where leadership must return to being inspirational, never impositional.

Thus it is that they say property is theft.

And in this case, when the right to govern becomes the property of any woman or man, a theft of a kind is clearly consummated: that theft which involves removing our freedoms – in the name, allegedly, of giving us them back.

Not as we should wish or freely choose to have them but, instead, as they do believe is best.

Take heed, leaders from another age: respect in the 21st century is earned, no longer owned by anyone.


http://youtu.be/zHyb7ELmHbA

____________________

Update to this post, on 17th April 2013: Shuggy posted a carefully considered piece last night.  Worth a read, as is always the case over at his always thoughtful blog.

A new bottom line – the whole of humanity itself

 on a high, social economy, sorted  1 Response »
Apr 112013
 

This came my way via Jeff today.  At the bottom of this post on how we might renew our socioeconomic landscape with businesses which use profit for social objectives, we get this video on the Grameen Danone project.


http://youtu.be/0C3XQ3BTd4o

A little more background from Wikipedia before we continue:

Grameen Danone Foods, popularly known as “Grameen Danone” is a social business enterprise which, launched in 2006, has been designed to provide children with many of the key nutrients that are typically missing from their diet in rural Bangladesh. It is run on ‘No loss, No dividend’ basis. Initially, Grameen Danone agreed to create a small dividend of 1%/year to shareholders, however, in December 2009, the board of Grameen Danone agreed to waive any monetary return.[1]

The objective as follows:

Grameen Danone Foods aims to reduce poverty by creating business and employment opportunities for local people since raw materials including milk needed for production, will be sourced locally. The companies that make up Grameen Danone Foods Ltd. have agreed not to take out any of the profits out of the company. Instead they will invest these for creation of new opportunities for the welfare and development of people. Hence it is called ‘social business enterprise’.[10]

Here we see, then, an attempt to use the mechanism of profit-generating business not to concentrate further wealth in the pockets of investors but, rather, to focus on an external goal where money is made to work for a wider community.  In the broadest sense of the concept, maybe investors can become angels whose job and prime responsibility is to maximise outputs for as many disadvantaged people as possible in the shortest possible time.

That’s the theory, of course.  Many of you will still feel it’s tinkering with a socioeconomic environment way past its sell-by date.  And you may very well be right.

But we have to start somewhere, surely: somewhere which allows us in bite-sized and parallel ways to change apparently monolithic structures, without destroying everything there is or ever has been first.

The challenge clearly is to manage change better than anyone else has cared to in history.  Margaret Thatcher’s death has served to plunge the country into a recognition of the essentially divided and class-based it still is.  Change has clearly not been managed at all well.

I saw one tweet yesterday suggest we had been through a process of national therapy: I disagree.  Therapy, properly conducted, would have led to some real resolution and closure.  Instead, all we have had is the establishment closing ranks on the matter – whether accurately or not I am not qualified to say – and causing a whole set of buried attitudes to vigorously reassert themselves on both sides: on the one hand, on the Thatcher-admiring side, tremendous pride in a job well done; on the other, on the Thatcher-hating side, tremendous pain about a series of traumatic events, suffered much as one suffers in times of civil war.

In a century where trickle-down economics has shown itself inadequate to its avowed purpose, it’s time we devised a more complex system of motivating people in a free economy.  Not all of us in an age of splendiferous knowledge are primarily motivated by the idea of concentrating masses of wealth. Not all of us think that creating powerful empires of divide and rule are the neatest or coolest game on the global block.

Which is why we seriously need to adjust how we value our outcomes – and why we seriously need a new business model.  For both the needs that corporate capitalism finds itself unable to satisfy and the ways we now battle away and feel incentivised to continue working, something needs to give pretty soon: and that something is clearly the old bottom line.

Not time to do away with the idea of the bottom line as such – time, instead to change its moral focus from satisfying the wants of shareholders and a managerialist class to a much greater and more ambitious constituency than the traditional corporate capitalists ever aimed to please: that is to say, the whole of humanity itself.


http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

How business embraced 20th century Communism – and why democracy should now do the same

 Apple, Bill Gates, Communism, corporate Communism, democracy, democratic deficit, Google, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, revolution, sorted  1 Response »
Apr 042013
 

I already wrote, a while ago now, on the subject of singular ways of doing things and planned economies in general.  First this, on the Google self-driving car project:

In the face of a wider defeat of Communism, Soviet socialism initially decided to turn in on itself.  Is this now happening at the hands of Google and wider movements towards automation in the US?

I then go on to develop the idea, concluding in the following way:

This is the End of History coming back to bite us in the backside.  As Communism/one-country socialism collapsed in its grandly political structures, and for a while there was little else we could do but argue the battle was dusted and done, even so it would appear that its instincts were continuing to work away at its evermore grand and commercial manifestations.

The monolithic state which hopes to re-engineer everyone in a one-best-way mindset, whilst disparaged and in the process of being dismantled by capitalist evangelicals almost everywhere, is suddenly reappearing in Google’s corporately admirable attempts: attempts where it looks to automate dangerous processes such as the freedom to kill people with cars out of the frame of everyday living.

The American Dream without the freedom to choose between life and death?  Whatever next my friend?

Prior to this piece, and as linked to within the quote above, I also suggested we could see the iPhone as a perfect argument in favour of planned economies:

Yesterday, late at night (excuse the incongruences if they exist!), I suggested the following:

[...] I am a child of a technological society – and continuous improvement is the essence of my belief system.  I simply cannot accept that we can refine to a millionth degree a computer, an iPhone or a piece of civil engineering – and yet find ourselves unable to improve the 19th century boom-and-bust cycle of traditional economics.

A Facebook friend responded this morning by arguing in favour of planned economies.

I then went on to argue the following:

The iPhone an argument in favour of beginning to plan our economies all over again?  I think so.  And as I also pointed out in my Facebook response this morning:

[...] where before perhaps our analytical tools were not up to the job, I don’t think this is going to be the case today. [...]

If we are capable of sophisticating our manufacturing processes and consumer durables to such an extent as Apple’s iPhone, we can – where there’s a political and social will, of course – do the same with our societies and economies.

Is this a case of convergent evolution?  A case where the clearest example of 21st century corporate capitalism shows the way forward for a different kind of 21st century socialism?

A return to a sadly failed 20th century model of planned economies – only now, in the light of Apple’s experience, with the potential for a huge new lease of life.

Then more recently, in a series of posts which started with this one, I suggested we might create a parallel series of institutions, by most importantly recovering the positive values we might associate with the concept of “revolution”:

[...] Revolution is a dangerous and difficult word.  It connotes all kinds of disruption, violence and bloodshed.  From the French to the Bolsheviks to the coarsely violent recriminatory ends of the Spanish Civil War, the Balkan Conflict and even our experience with Iraq, revolution has no happy memories for history.  At least, for the history they teach us.

Yet I wonder if revolution must always be like that.  We could define revolution in a different way.  Disruptive, yes – it would have to remain so.  But not necessarily unseamless in its implementation. [...]

I go on to expand the idea thus:

Of course, any revolution of the old-style Bolshevik kind would, in a modern world, be almost certainly doomed to failure.  Modern society requires complex specialisms to function, and such complex specialisms would almost certainly not happily function under the kind of coercion a traditional revolution would require.  Too many tenuous threads of communication would break down under the brute force of full-throated change.

And yet, even so, I find myself coming back to 1950s Japan.  Within twenty years of losing a war at the final hands of two nuclear bombs, the Japanese car industry had effected a revolution of its own.  Non-violent, intellectual, process-driven and intelligent – all these things and more as per Deming’s philosophies and mindsets.

A revolution of a disruptive nature which, nevertheless, was not bloody.

And so we come to the present.  Over at El País today (in Spanish here; robot English translation here), we get a fascinating report on a Bill and Melinda Gates gathering in Seattle, where the headline idea is “‘Positive disruption’ as a driver for global change”.  This fits very nicely, at least from a conceptual – even if not institutional – point of view, with some of the ideas I’ve been mulling over above.  Though, to be honest, I think I’m looking for even more disruption when I say, as I did in my first Revolution ’13 piece, that:

[...] We could design, from the ground upwards, a parallel set of institutions which would, like the design of a Japanese car’s dashboard unit, only ever be included in a new model when entirely ready.  In so doing, and through accessible and inclusive techniques such as crowdsourcing – even where this might necessarily involve only the crowdsourced input of a hierarchy of predisposed specialists – we could avoid the biggest danger of disruptive revolution: the non-collaboration of key workers.

In such a way, key workers and process-owners who had crossed the line – and had effectively become criminals too big to jail (the money-laundering cases which have come to light in important banking communities come to mind here) – would no longer be able to hold a wider society to ransom.  The gradually more expert revolution-engendering structures would one day not only reach but outdo the efficacy of their corrupted compatriots.

At which point substitution could take place.

Either way, it’s clear that social-democratic and neoliberal evolutions have really rather had their day.  And to be honest, it’s the planned and statist Communism of the 20th century – though with a Deming-like participative twist – which has won the battles thus far.  The only difference from the 1950s is that the secrecy, fear and closed nature of its environments now find their location in transnational corporations – sometimes, psychotically fearful of each other; at other times, in consumer-prejudicing cahoots.  So it is that Orwell’s “1984″ did finally come true in one important respect – that is to say, in the sense of shifting international alliances, where histories and relationships are continually written and rewritten.  Where he went wrong was in conceptualising its happening between nation-states of a dictatorial cut.  In truth, right now, for most people out there, what corporations do with each other has far more impact on their daily existences than what simple little and relatively powerless countries ever manage to effect.

Which, if you’ve cared to follow me to here, brings me to my final point.  I would like to suggest that democracy, right now, is set up to fail.  Whilst business has successfully moved on from democracy’s ideological rejection of 20th century Communism and all its tenets – examples as already mentioned range from Google’s anti-American self-driving instincts to Apple’s anti-American centrally planned economy – democracy itself is mortally hidebound by its utter inability to contemplate a retread of a Soviet-style revolution.

All this time we’ve been saying that it’s business which should be more like democracy when, in reality, what we may have had is a democracy which business has fashioned to divide, conquer and keep meek.

Set up to fail, then?  Is that a fair assertion?  Have now-Communist-like businesspeople – now-Communist-like at least in their tools of choice – deliberately made democratic practitioners everywhere so terrified of committing the same revolutionary and disruptive acts that out of this conceptual cul-de-sac no Western democracy anywhere will ever manage to emerge?

Maybe not.  Maybe so.  Maybe, on reflection, we should park the possible reasons for why we’ve arrived at this place for just a few gentle moments.

For there may be a much bigger goal on the horizon.  If we can convince the businesspeople who have already embraced this revised version of 20th century Communism I describe above to contemplate facilitating a similar move in our democratic institutions and environments, perhaps the “positive disruption” that I find myself voicing and calling for – in the same curious company today as Bill and Melinda Gates – can find a broader range of adepts and enthusiasts out there, and much sooner than we think.

As well as end up helping to save from global disintegration not only our species but also the democratic instincts which have so ennobled its political practice.

A start vs an end: the means to a new kind of democracy

 Anthony Painter, Good Democracy, Labour, Peter Levine, political innovation, political parties, politics, sorted  No Responses »
Mar 302013
 

There are many kindly things which Anthony Painter is careful to say today, in order to couch his cautious welcome to potentially new ways (at least, that is to say, in England amongst the major parties) of carrying out political activity.  If you read his piece, I’m sure you’ll see what I mean.

Three things he says in particular which I’d like to focus on this afternoon (the bold is mine in both paragraphs).  The first two, here:

The major risk is that Labour simply rides a wave of resistance politics and cites this as evidence of change and the founding of a ‘new movement’ while actually changing its power structures very little. This explains my anxiety about claims of fundamental change and a ‘new movement’. Both locally and nationally, the Labour Party remains extremely closed and narrow both in terms of access to political position and to policy influence. It’s a party that still fears pluralism; its core value is loyalism. Diversity is seen as about representation of certain groups rather than a complete opening out. It is still more a phalanx than a network.

And the third:

To be serious about change and ‘transformation’ there are far tougher questions that have to be asked about power. The conversation we are having is about organisation ultimately – though it is often dressed up in the language of power. The conclusion on this level is that there are many brilliant initiatives taking place but much of political sell around is, well, political sell. Until some vested interests not just in the Labour Party but British democracy more widely are cracked, however, transformational change will remain elusive.

All three observations are music to my ears – and really need no expanding.  I commented a few days ago on how the newly-formed and so-called Coalition of Resistance should’ve really been named something along the lines of the Coalition for Recovery.  It seems to me the left always foolishly – or at the very least, rather unfortunately – makes the mistake of defining itself in terms of reactive processes, rather than looking to take the vanguard.

Paradoxically enough, maybe, when we consider the internecine histories of socialist and Communist parties.

That the Labour Party fears pluralism is also self-evident in my experience.  Tribalism of a most closed and blocking kind is definitely a driver for those who claim to truly believe.  Of course, this is almost certainly due to real suffering and hard experience – but it doesn’t make political advancement and communication any easier in a latterday world of collaboration, connectedness and flat hierarchies of teamwork.  The instincts here, of openness to new ideas and new ways of thinking around subjects, do not come easily to those whose very life journey has taught them to be suspicious of strange bearers of gifts various.

Painter’s other point, about the need to crack vested interests “not just in the Labour Party but British democracy more widely” could easily become a motto for any new movement in any political grouping, where the aim was to properly and coherently recover our democracy.  The job ahead of us is much more profound than sorting out Labour: Labour, after all, is like it is because when you choose your competition, inevitably you become just like it.  Monolithic and tribal trades unionists, political thinkers and councillors are as they are because they are faced by powerful and expanding forces of Big Money which present exactly the same profile to the world.  After all, how on earth can any worker consider facing down a transnational without the support of an equally transnational network of informed and connected activists?

So the objective ahead must be democracy itself.  A democracy in and of a society where the concept is breaking – and if not breaking, then stumbling certainly.  A Good Democracy (more here), as per Peter Levine: a democracy which is simultaneously inclusive and efficient.

The task ahead, to create a truly sustainable politics, where people renew and inform and communicate ad infinitum, means understanding the process more as a start than as an end: a start which – on the back of different ways of organising ourselves – not only never ends but also serves as a means to a different kind of democracy.

The one, in fact, we always assumed we had a right to.

Revolution ’13 (II): A Parallel #NHS For England

 a con, NHS, NHS cuts, on a high, revolution, sorted  2 Responses »
Mar 192013
 

I previously suggested we devise a parallel set of institutions to our existing corrupt and corrupting ones, with the aim of encouraging revolution – though of a bloodless kind – to take the place of a clearly failed social and/or neoliberal democracy.

This morning, an NHS consultant tweeted as follows:

Met a colleague in the corridor this morning. He thinks the NHS is doomed and we need to get out and go private. Sad but true.

And so I quickly wondered what permutations the term “private” could possibly – or, even, constructively – lead to in what, at least to date, we have been told is potentially a far more empowering world than the one the NHS originally came out of.

Developing the train of thought, and on the back of my previous Revolution ’13 post linked to above, I tweeted this in response:

Inconceivable we could set up a parallel #NHS for England? Community health services run on mutual, cooperativist & socialist lines. #coop

What do you think?  Would there be enough interested parties for the first stage of my Revolution ’13 thesis to focus on finding a substitute set of health service provisions?  Using tools created for the Third World and other less wealthy parts of the planet (more here), we could revert their revolutionary and necessarily cost-effective approaches to medical cover “in the wild” to the job of supporting poorer people in what to date has been described as the First World.  A First World which is surely – gigantic step by gigantic step – becoming pocked and marked by holes of tremendous poverty and inequality.

No.  I’m not for one minute suggesting we give up the fight for the NHS.  But I am suggesting we put in place measures to save our perishable and finite souls from the medical Armageddon this government may yet manage to visit upon us.

WDYT?  Would it be interpreted as a sign of weakness?  Would we care if it was?

Would we have the right not to contemplate the alternatives, given the seriousness of the situation itself?

____________________

Update to this post: this piece, on GNU Health, has just come my way via the opensource.com newsletter.  It’s really worth a read.  An excerpt below:

In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the “Best Project of Social Benefit” award given by the Free Software Foundation.

GNU Solidario is the non-profit NGO behind GNU Health, started as a free software project for Primary Care facilities in rural areas and developing countries. Since then, it has evolved into a full Hospital and Health Information System used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health (such as in Entre Rios, Argentina), and private institutions around the globe.

GNU Health/Solidario and the United Nations International Institute for Global Health—UNU IIGH—signed an agreement in 2011 to train health professionals around the world on the system, as a way of promoting free software in public health, especially in emerging economies. Since then, both organizations have been cooperating and expanding their network of partners to deliver health in a universal way; which, also works towards the UN’s Millenium Development Goals.

The resulting interview is fascinating.  Well worth your time – and perhaps, in the end, your money.

Revolution ’13: Time To Benchmark A New Democracy

 brainstorming, crowdsourcing, democracy, on a high, revolution, sorted, total quality management  4 Responses »
Mar 172013
 

W Edwards Deming was a clever soul.  Here, you can find out more about what he achieved for the Japanese economy from the 1950s onwards.  And whilst he was a clever American soul, recognition for his total contribution to 20th century manufacturing was not, ultimately, terribly forthcoming from his homeland – at least, not in time to save, from one or other of its periodic slumps, what had become a rather lumbering and wasteful US car industry.

Which is why a tweeted train of thought of mine just finished thus:

Do to Western liberal civilisation what the Japanese car industry did to the US in the 1950s & 1960s. Benchmark democracy into renewal.

So what was I going on about?  What did I mean by this?  Revolution is a dangerous and difficult word.  It connotes all kinds of disruption, violence and bloodshed.  From the French to the Bolsheviks to the coarsely violent recriminatory ends of the Spanish Civil War, the Balkan Conflict and even our experience with Iraq, revolution has no happy memories for history.  At least, for the history they teach us.

Yet I wonder if revolution must always be like that.  We could define revolution in a different way.  Disruptive, yes – it would have to remain so.  But not necessarily unseamless in its implementation.  Let us take, for example, as an example too close to hand, the case of the Cyprus haircut.  Here, under the guise of financial stability – and, presumably, the European Union’s future continuity – we get a banking fraternity prepared to break the solemnest and most primal capitalist assurances in order to maintain its own sectorial integrity.  This is a pretty unhappy development – and is almost certainly a line which, once crossed, will inevitably be crossed again.

Of course, any revolution of the old-style Bolshevik kind would, in a modern world, be almost certainly doomed to failure.  Modern society requires complex specialisms to function, and such complex specialisms would almost certainly not happily function under the kind of coercion a traditional revolution would require.  Too many tenuous threads of communication would break down under the brute force of full-throated change.

And yet, even so, I find myself coming back to 1950s Japan.  Within twenty years of losing a war at the final hands of two nuclear bombs, the Japanese car industry had effected a revolution of its own.  Non-violent, intellectual, process-driven and intelligent – all these things and more as per Deming’s philosophies and mindsets.

A revolution of a disruptive nature which, nevertheless, was not bloody.

So how about we took Deming’s approach and applied it to all those systems and sectors a modern democracy and civilisation requires to function decently?  And how about we involved citizens in this process from beginning to empowering end?  We could design, from the ground upwards, a parallel set of institutions which would, like the design of a Japanese car’s dashboard unit, only ever be included in a new model when entirely ready.  In so doing, and through accessible and inclusive techniques such as crowdsourcing – even where this might necessarily involve only the crowdsourced input of a hierarchy of predisposed specialists – we could avoid the biggest danger of disruptive revolution: the non-collaboration of key workers.

In such a way, key workers and process-owners who had crossed the line – and had effectively become criminals too big to jail (the money-laundering cases which have come to light in important banking communities come to mind here) – would no longer be able to hold a wider society to ransom.  The gradually more expert revolution-engendering structures would one day not only reach but outdo the efficacy of their corrupted compatriots.

At which point substitution could take place.

It might, of course, even be the case that final substitution would not be necessary: the breathing-down-the-neck nature of such competition could automatically lead to better behaviours in these erstwhile miscreants as per standard free-market forces.  But either way, a non-blood-spattered revolution would be engineered; a new democracy would have been benchmarked; another society would have been made.

In a way, 1950s America is pretty analogous to the days we are living: societal dislocation in the recent past; societal dislocation on the horizon.  But out of such dislocation, the observant, ingenious and intelligent Japanese were able to recover a semblance of prior glories.  And recreate, to an astonishing degree, the whole concept they had of their manufacturing industry.

If the Japanese were able – through the thoughts of one perspicacious man – to create a kind of superpower out of tragic catastrophe, why can’t we contemplate – via some of the same concepts – the idea of creating a better democracy out of current desolation?

After all, there will be few of us able to trust liberal evolution any more.

And, after this weekend, there will be no one able to trust any of these socioeconomic crabs which currently hold sway.

Nor any of their sideways movements.

Creatures which – pincer-like – now make and shake our predictable decay.

The Kindness Index, please …

 kindness index, sorted  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

There’s so much cruelty around, so much unkindness, so much of it delivered by those who have power, that I think it’s time we decided to fight for a new measure: a yardstick aimed at delivering a more humane society.

That is to say, in an electronic world, a society which is more human-e.

Labels are the essence of latterday life: there is nothing more likely to engage a superficial consumer than a competition to put a name on the latest fad.  So here we go – and, perhaps, to some future good objective we can devise this yardstick for the betterment of other civilisations.

For I’m truly beginning to get the feeling that the one we call our own will shortly be as morally and economically bankrupt as any other in our complicitly shared (in)human history.

My label then?  The Kindness Index.  Something to be enshrined in international law, with the political power and widespread recognition to ensure that governments, political parties, civil services, corporations and other significant institutions of current mass organisation pay dutiful homage to the best of our species’ legacy – instead of, as is now the case, to the very worst.

What would it cover?  The treatment of the most defenceless in our societies.  It is only by observing how we treat those with no power whatsoever that we can usefully determine our moral efficacy and properly define the degree to which we love and cherish natural justice.  The following list is by no means complete – but it may serve to help explain what I am looking to achieve:

  • The degree to which we support the (so-called) disabled in their common desire to live full and fulfilling lives
  • The degree to which the approach of old age is feared by those nearing retirement
  • The degree to which those already retired fear winter, the end of the month – maybe the beginning of the month too, maybe every day of the week
  • The degree to which work is seen not only as a way of earning one’s living but also as a positive and engaging way of spending one’s time
  • The degree to which our children love school and education – maybe enjoy learning not only at home and through their very personal gadgets but also in the presence of other children and in more formal circumstances
  • The degree to which our parents love parenting – and are prepared to convey such love to others
  • The degree to which we all wish to follow politics and politicians – maybe not only what they do but also what they say
  • The degree to which we value and are proud of the way we do things for our nations

In 2003, they said I was mad.

Perhaps I still am.

Maybe so.

But I wish, even so, that some of the above could be enshrined in an index which all our leaders and institutions – whether political or business – would not only be obliged to measure up to but would also, actively, choose to subscribe to.

And that such a desire would come out of shared kindly culture.

And that such a desire would come from within.

So what say you?  What label?  Would the Kindness Index do?

An age-old battle continues – only this time on the Internet

 film, genius, Internet, on a high, original thinkers, originality, publishing, sorted, TED, web  No Responses »
Feb 242013
 

My sister just sent me a link to a TED talk.  TED talks are fascinating.  This one describes itself thus:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

I think it’s a beautiful idea, one I am inclined to value highly.  I have been a teacher most of my working life – and soon learned to value highly the contribution of students.  Not only in terms of what I asked them to do but – also, and more importantly – in terms of what they learned to ask me to do.

Genius is not the preserve of a man or woman our society determines as being so.  And even if it is, it is only because our society is incapable of perceiving the genius that all of us contain.  Even as we like to focus from a distance on the visibly astonishing, we miss out on the beauty that we exhibit every single day of our lives.  We are clever souls, we human beings.  The virtual democratisation of content we are witnessing this last decade is not primarily a cause of information ills but, rather, a massive release of pent-up generations of humanity unable for so long to visibly express their genius.

And now I have a confession to make.  I haven’t watched the TED talk my sister has sent me as yet.  And I probably won’t.  I really do hope, however, that she doesn’t stop sending them to me.  Today’s post would not have got written if it hadn’t been for her thoughtful including of me in a footnote to a Facebook post.  Although I very rarely watch videos at all, their synopses rapidly read do often spark unfinished and engaging business.

To be honest, I think there’s a reason.  I think I’m a natural reader, not a watcher.  What’s more, I think those who watch are – more often than not (though clearly an exception in the case of my book-loving sister) – natural watchers, not readers.  Which leads me to draw the following conclusion: the old-age battle (or, at least, the sixty-year-old battle) waged between literature and television has subtly restarted since the arrival of the web.  Following on from the middle of the 20th century, our early 21st century online humanity has reasserted a division which should please us enormously.  For between the geniuses of industrialised art and the geniuses of individualised art, we stumble across everything we should admire.  That some of us should continue to find pleasure and intellectual involvement in this century’s equivalent of tablets and scrolls of yore and that others of us should continue to find pleasure and intellectual involvement in this century’s equivalent of more oral and theatrical tradition simply underlines the power and strength of them both.

All those centuries ago, we got it right first time.

The instincts to register through writing and speech the thoughts, occurrences and imaginations of a wonderful species were just as accurate and apposite then as they still are these days – continuing as they do to strive and fight their way above the flood waters of passing and irrelevant technologies and discourses.

A reader then, are you?  Or a watcher?  Or a marvellous – highly literate – combination of the two?

Lucky you!

From Bloggers4Labour to Speaker’s Chair: how political blogging gets social

 Bloggers4Labour, blogging, blogosphere, commentariat, Facebook, Facebook generation, Guardian, Last.fm of thought, left-wing blogging, Liberal Conspiracy, on a high, sorted, Twitter  6 Responses »
Feb 222013
 

After meekly exiting Labour’s intranet, Members Net, having blogged for quite a while in its partisan embrace, I stumbled across an outside world of blogging at the hand of Andrew Regan’s now defunct political aggregator, Bloggers4Labour.  I thought this a wonderful device, maintaining as it healthily did the visual and locational idiosyncrasies of individual blogsites, even as it brought together in one sensible place the feeds of each and every one.  It allowed for a wonderful overview of what was bubbling under in the Labour-blogging community; it helped new bloggers get exposure and support from existing practioners; and it served to sustain a worthy sense of common cause in what has often historically been a fractured political grouping.

Andrew really did know how to integrate the needs of readerships by using technology.  He would even supply his own often gently proffered and constructive comments on other people’s posts.  This helped create a point of focus on the wider input which – in a very simple and neat way – helped generate an air of shared purpose.

My memory of Bloggers4Labour was almost entirely positive.  Both Andrew and I, sometimes together, sometimes separately, tried to build on this original achievement with other projects which I was either rather tangentially involved in (for example, Andrew’s Poblish – a super-aggregator designed to outdo Google’s own search in the global field of political blogging) or more directly engaged with (for example, my idea for a Last.fm of political thought).  In all cases, I think what drove him – and certainly myself – was a desire to return, in some way or other, to that golden age of political blogging which Bloggers4Labour – at its most didactic and pedagogical best – seemed at the time to represent.

Instead of cramming everyone together in a single platform – a kind of awful melting-pot as per a United States of Blogging – Bloggers4Labour and the ideas that came afterwards looked to allow individuality to shine through even as the aim was to bring voices together.

A European Union of Sovereign Blogging, if you like.

So if it was such a good idea, why didn’t it quite work out?  Who knows?  Maybe because we didn’t have the resource; maybe because we didn’t quite hone the ideas; maybe, in reality, because it wasn’t such a golden age.  Or maybe because blogging, in a different way, has kind of had its time and has transmuted into other ways of exchanging the information we value.

Blogging always was a bit of a traditional hierarchy of communication: author-led top-down authorities who were often challenged, but never entirely toppled, by those who would hang from their coattails.  Which is not to underestimate the importance of commenters to the good functioning of a blogsite.  Sometimes, the broader reputations acquired belonged more to those who commented than to the original posters themselves.

Symbiotic relationships of thought were ever thus.

Of course, we all know what happened to blogging: Facebook and Twitter.  It was probably going to happen, whatever the company name, whatever the online constitution, whatever the business model.  But Facebook and Twitter both hastened traditional blogging’s demise.

People much better resourced than us English blogging fans were able to re-engineer the instincts behind standard blogging for an instant-fix generation.  And so the beautiful exchanges between considered author-led hierarchies began to lose their dominance on the web.

*

So now we come to February, 2013.  And whilst the domain’s been running for a while, with a fairly traditional blogging platform behind it, SpeakersChair.com – a cross-party political blogging website on which I have had some of my recent posts published – has suddenly had the audacity to suggest, through a massive makeover of functionality, that political blogging might not be as defunct as we thought.

Before this change, SpeakersChair.com was essentially a traditional melting-pot-type blogging platform.  Writers of different political colours submitted their posts for site editors to repost on the site.  We see this model operating successfully in many places: from Liberal Conspiracy to – I guess – even the Guardian‘s Comment is Free.  I think, however, that the new SpeakersChair.com moves away from this model in several significant ways:

  1. From a melting-pot blogging platform like Liberal Conspiracy, where visuals and technologies become common to all authors even as posting rights remain with site editors, it transmutes itself more into a souped-up kind of TweetDeck, where its prime function is to sit as a front-end to both Facebook and Twitter – as well as SpeakersChair.com itself.
  2. The ability – and challenge – of each contributor is to act as an authorial hub around which comment is designed to flow.  I guess this could be the case for contributors who write original posts just as much as it might be for contributors who add their opinions as comments to original posts.  In fact, at very first glance it seems that the deliberate intention is to blur as much as possible the hierarchy between original posters and commenters.
  3. I cannot but help considering this latter innovation healthy: it clearly shows that the designers of this online constitution understand that their version of political blogging needs to “get” social, if it’s to have any decent chance of catching on.  And social is much more than tacking on commenting tools at the tail-end of the professionalising commentariat: social, above all, is a matter of sharing hierarchy and power.

Seen, then, as a communication front-end more than a traditional website, seen in fact primarily as a posting tool to various channels, there is no reason why SpeakersChair.com shouldn’t compete effectively with Facebook, web Twitter and even third-party communication tools out there.

I just wonder if there’s also an app in the pipeline.  That imperious world of mobile Internet doesn’t half make or break communication these days.  It surely would serve to complete a beautifully political blogging circle which, for me, started out with Labour’s Members Net, stumbled for a few years after Bloggers4Labour’s major steps forwards – and which could now quite easily find its natural home in a cross-party communication project that, at least in my humble opinion, has everything it needs to deservedly succeed.

¡Ya basta con machacar a una gente tan lista, cariñosa y llena de vida!

 on a high, sorted, Spain, Spanish  No Responses »
Dec 172012
 

Which loosely translates as: “Stop knocking such a clever, affectionate and life-loving people!”

If you don’t understand castellano (what we in our ignorance call Spanish), this advert from the Spanish cooked-meat manufacturer Campofrío is the perfect reason for your next New Year’s Resolution to be just that: bookmark this post and come back to it in six months time after the most intensive language course you can afford.

This is one gigantic “stick it where it belongs – and preferably up yours” to all those corrupt bankers, politicians, spivs and hangers-on who’ve helped to destroy the humane, thoughtful, kindly, intelligent, ingenious, creative and caring welfare states and peoples which have defined a post-war Europe – and, in particular, a post-war Spain.

Only they haven’t destroyed it.  Spain is my family – my family is Spain.  My Spanish family is no less deserving of my love now than it was a decade ago.  We’re just as wonderful as we were that ten years ago.  We’re just as wise.  We’re just as knowing.  We’re just as powerful too – only, right now, we don’t realise it.

Well, if you still don’t realise it, this video will set you to rights.  I watched it, sobbed and realised today was already Christmas.

I don’t need any more presents.

Power to the people.


http://youtu.be/62xGKKw7v1Q

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