Saturday, 19 June 2010

A ball and glass and neighbour story

Jerry, happily six and eleven twelfths years old, had been playing football in the garden, but Rooneyed one over the fence and heard that glass sound, that sound when glass is no longer quite what it was. To his and her credit Jerry ran to his mother with his concerns. She encouraged him to be brave and go and knock at the door, apologise and find out the damage. He did so, and learned that his neighbours had been putting out empty wine bottles, as you do, at the moment of his miss-kick, and perhaps one slipped from a grasp or it was just vigorous clinking.

19 Jun 2010 21:03:25 | Neighbourhood relations, Vignettes

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That Mead quote I see that the famous Margaret Mead quote was trotted out in the House of Lords the other day: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.' (5.29pm: Lord Wei) I have no problem with the first sentence, it is memorable and adequate. The second sentence is manifest nonsense (perhaps you heard about the BP oil fiasco, for example?) so why do people always feel compelled to reproduce it? There's a danger it could come across as phoney glorification of the achievements of ordinary people.
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The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness? Yesterday I shuffled from a meeting with someone working on Big Society, to an event about how to get citizens involved in public policy. This latter was the launch of findings from the 'Rediscovering the civic' project run by the universities of Southampton and Manchester, known as 'nudge-nudge, think-think' because of the experiments exploring the effect of policies which 'nudge' people into prosocial behaviour, and those which encourage people to think through the issues in the hope of prosocial consequences. Inevitably, set in the heart of Whitehall with an array of learned speakers, the debate was at a high level of generality while acknowledging the significance of the political moment. Combined with the preceding meeting, it's helped to clarify for me quite where Big Soc fits and what it might mean. First, the suspicion that the thinking behind Big Society has been based on a shallow appreciation of the realities of the community sector have been confirmed. That can be remedied, perhaps is being remedied (well, they invited me along for a chat!). Second, we are all starting to see more clearly where it has come from, historically. Take these two quotes, via former Blair advisers, which are going the rounds: (i) Matthew Taylor referring I believe to a Norwegian journalist who pointed out that Labour's failure was a failure of public mobilisation, having campaigns like child poverty that should have been public campaigns which they turned into technocratic exercises. Can't argue with that. (You can? Go on then). (ii) Attributed to David Halpern, something like this - 'we're not trying to do more with less. We're trying to do more with more, and that comes from the social fabric'. I've heard this discussion elsewhere, when people say the Big Soc is just what we were trying to do before... Yes, at local level it can certainly look like that. But wouldn't it have helped if new Labour managerialism, and all the arrogance of previous administrations (not that much different), had been supportive instead of so often obstructive and (to pick up a point made by Sue Goss yesterday) infantilising? To put it another way, did previous administrations culturally stifle public involvement? To me these are little insights which can help measure the change to a new context. Third, insights from Phillip Blond of ResPublica, revealing the centrality of nudge to Big Society. He said that nudge is a modern way of referring to tradition or tacit knowledge, which has become derided and devalued in recent decades. 'Tradition is already a pre-selection of how we should live. Nudge is about group behaviour.' For Blond, it seems that the Big Society is about restoring the public value of tradition, of accepted shared forms of collective life. Neither De Tocqueville nor Putnam got mentioned, which I suspect is a good thing: whatever is being invented here, it's more than US-style bowling together, because of the political niceties. Still, association is key in Blond's view: 'There's almost no context in which association is...

Kevin Harris

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