Tuesday, 16 October 2012

We own it

We own itThe tension between privatising policies and public need has been given a welcome tightening twist with the launch of We Own it, a campaign website to counter the irresponsible privatisation of the public sector.

A few months ago I was wondering how much further the tension could be built. While we have plenty of evidence to contradict the ideology that the private sector is by definition more efficient than the public, we have no evidence to show that this government takes much notice of evidence.

Through an article by Polly Toynbee in the summer, I learned about a few examples of ‘in-sourcing’ by which some local authorities seem to be demonstrating the logic of taking certain functions back in house in the interests of efficiency and value.

Meanwhile our rail privatisation started to creak and then fell over. At least we’re having some kind of debate now. All stirred up by the demise of A4E and the bizarre example of Atos, the company which sub-contracted disability assessments back to the NHS.

Public libraries are part of this mix. Not only are they symbolic of what remains of the public realm: as I wrote here,

‘Once they're gone, it's not just hard to get the library service back: it will be that much harder to reinstate the notion of publicness.’

The We Own It site notes that, through privatisation, costs go up, services get worse, they are run by people who are not accountable, staff are undermined, and the whole nonsense is difficult to reverse. We have been watching the large-scale, systematic, ideologically-justified, evidence-defying manufacture of widespread social exclusion. Time to bring it to an end.


16 Oct 2012 14:53:17 | Social exclusion

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We fail to socialise people, then we jail them I have before (eg) expressed my bewilderment at our society's reluctance to explore the causes of anti-social behaviour - it's easy to condemn it: but then? - and argued that policies of shaming are disrespectful ('legitimised dissing'). If someone is insufficiently socialised to show respect to others, that's a social problem probably not helped by blunt punitive measures. This may seem too obvious to need stating, but recent sentencing practice (exhibit a; exhibit b) seems determined to confer policy status to the cut-off-their-goolies approach. So thanks to Deborah Orr in The Guardian today for some much-needed clarity: 'The fact that people are now being jailed for being not criminal but simply inadequate is evidence of a systemic lack of confidence in this culture's ability to ascertain why they behave anti-socially.'
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Hurry up please, it’s time for discourse In any neighbourhood there are several kinds of time. In a delightful short paper for the ESRC ‘temporal belongings’ programme, Alison Gilchrist writes (perhaps I should say ‘wrote’): ‘time flows are rarely aligned between the different ‘players’, resulting in hidden tensions, impatience, token gestures, fragile decisions and fraught meetings. Calendar and clock time is used to co-ordinate the contributions of various stakeholders but this regulated time may not be a universal reflection of how community members perceive the way time flows through their lives, with its unpredictable eddies, pools and torrents.’ Alison’s paper prefaced the Temporal conflicts workshop in Manchester this week where we had a fascinating discussion of these and other issues. Referring to a neighbourhood where he’s worked with local people on a community garden, Ronnie Hughes highlighted the contrast between political (or developers’) time and residents’ ‘gardening’ time. And it doesn’t take long to pinpoint some of the other kinds of time, such as - children’s time car drivers’ or commuters' time older residents’ time environmental time internet time institutional time, and so on. It would be hard to capture all the insights in the workshop around, for example – acceleration, rhythms of everyday life (Marli Huijer), co-ordination, spontaneity, ‘the value of impatience’ (Jess Steele), routine, ‘meanwhile time’ (Katie Hill), the importance of incomers (Irene Evison), the analogy of dancing (Naimh Moore) as being required to keep the beat (ie consensus), chaos as a nuance of time (Jen Southern), the weakening of corporate memory in key agencies (Angus McCabe), animal and plant time (Chris Speed), letting things go and ‘moving on’ from the past (Alison Gilchrist), hegemonic time (Rob Trueblood), different kinds of ending (Graham Crow), how today’s stars in community action ‘can become tomorrow’s black holes’ (Mandy Wilson), and many more… (I hope my fellow participants will excuse any mis-attribution). Accentuating the theme, all the presentations were tightly constrained five minute ‘lightning talks’. My own contribution, headed ‘Is internet time different?’ offered examples of the immediacy of online; the ways in which expectations in the timescales of agencies and residents are now sometimes reversed in the online world, with officials now sometimes struggling to keep up with local action; and the refreshed appeal of local history online. I was the first speaker of the day, and got through breathlessly before the brutal buzzer sounded, by virtue of three double espressos, providing an experience of ‘caffeine time’. I could not resist misquoting the famous misquote of Pascal, 'I would have prepared a shorter talk, but I did not have the time'. My final slide showed a question from the 2010 Online neighbourhood networks study, in which we’d asked people if they agreed that in online forums ‘discussions sometimes move too quickly to allow proper reflection’. (For the record, only 30 per cent agreed or strongly agreed). A key message from the workshop, for practitioners, is recognising these different experiences of time at the local level, and the ways in which their intersection sometimes causes conflict but sometimes...

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