Neighbourhoods

Get out of that without moving

Thoughts on individual action and collective interests

On no, what have we done? We were so angry, we just… We did what?? You mean, we fecked up the future of our country for our kids and their kids?? Just like that? How the heck did we do that? We didn’t realise, I mean… And messed things up for the rest of Europe too? Ooh. Ooh dear. Just wanted to have a go at those Westminster types, that’s all.

There seems to be some substance in the analysis that concludes that many voters felt disenfranchised and chose ‘Leave’ to express their sense of disconnection from the establishment. (I don’t know if it is true, as suggested in various places, that these were predominantly older people in middle and low income areas. Do I hear the sound of Zimmer-frames, incontinence pads and false teeth being thrown out of prams?) They have at the same time, whoops, voted for a dire future for themselves.

This is not just collective self-harm on a spectacular scale, it also perversely and unjustly condemns young people and subsequent generations. It’s ‘profoundly irresponsible’ as one young man said among several other insightful remarks on The World This Weekend today (from about 48 mins).

The force of a protest vote can look rather unfortunate when the issue is your country’s future. It leaves a lot of residual anger towards the people who distorted the reality of issues for their own interest in power, essentially in pursuit of some laughably quaint notion of ‘sovereignty’; and for the leading politicians over a couple of decades who allowed this situation to arise.

So we are left with the hard-to-deny accusation that we are a nation dominated by racists, who by definition are stupid (that seems to have been one of the most widely-used words in commentary since Friday morning).

As for democracy, well it’s been pulled and pushed around a bit lately. The extraordinary scenes of the sit-in at the US Congress have provided a focal point for the tensions between individual interests (the right to carry a gun) and collective interests (er, what about random massacres?) giving rise to the apparent need to try and twist the rules for the latter views to be heard. Here in the UK there are also attempts to twist the rules – or rather, in this case, agree them post hoc.

Many voices have lamented the poverty of the referendum process: what a way to demonstrate that turning from representative to plebiscite democracy maybe doesn’t work on such a scale or with such a historically resonating issue.

Or was it such a big issue? I certainly thought so; but the turnout was only 72 per cent, so more than a quarter of Brits either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t think it affected them. Christ what a country.

The principle that people vote in their own economic interest seems to have been trumped (I shudder to use that word) by fear of the Other. But the key word is still ‘individual’. The crazed recklessness of this result seems like trying to shout down anyone who suggests that ‘No man is an island’ and that no country can be a cultural or economic island. The people who will suffer most for it will be people on low incomes, people with disabilities, and the young who will become old without privileges. Many asylum seekers and refugees will be turned away when we should be offering them sanctuary and succour.

Could we not invent a form of democracy that encourages decision-making in the collective interest?

Boaty McBoatface and William Shakespeare: two cheers for democracy

The curious tale of Boaty McBoatface may soon be forgotten, but it might possibly mark a significant moment in the history of participative democracy.

The Natural Environment Research Council invited members of the public to put forward and vote on names for its new polar research vessel. Someone suggested ‘Boaty McBoatface’ and I guess lots of people thought, that’s a laugh. Through digital media, endorsement is almost effortless, and it easily topped the poll.

Personally I’d have favoured one of the alternatives, ‘It's Bloody Cold Here’ – but anyway it doesn’t look as though the vote-winning suggestion will be adopted.

This modestly silly saga reminds us of the manifest lack of wisdom of crowds, which is effectively what Stuart Heritage seems to be on about in this recent Guardian piece. More pointedly I think, it is a little reminder that the ways in which organisations push notions of ‘public engagement’ and democratic participation can lead them into difficulties: and in so doing, perhaps they are exposing the limits of democracy. As Sophie Blake noted on the Involve blog,

‘engagement that hasn’t been thought out can damage the reputation of public engagement as a whole.’

Meanwhile, there’s been much ado about today’s 400^th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, a man who understood clearly that crimes (or sins) and their forgiveness or payment of dues are often not equalised. In this respect, I do wonder with what forcefulness he might have written about the ways in which global corporations can buy and sell the right to pollute.

Here I just want to draw attention to further, and more powerful, insights into the evolution of democracy, with reference to Gabriel Chanan’s marvelously lucid and readable book Shakespeare and democracy.

Gabriel explains how Shakespeare played a fundamental role in building the culture that underlies modern democracy: he also argues that that contribution ‘continues to be essential to its survival and further progress’. This point is well worth pondering on the day when Barrack Obama visited the Globe Theatre in London.

At its conclusion, the book offers a delightful reading of The tempest, first performed before King James and his courtiers. Gabriel suggests that perhaps the playwright is saying:

‘As for me, Shakespeare, all I have done is write harmless plays and given free rein to my imagination. You kings and nobles, on the other hand, have made aggressive wars, oppressed the poor, condemned the innocent and killed helpless people.’

 

More on neo-liberalism

Just as I’ve been pondering the impact of the neo-liberalist project lately - in reviewing The Divide and also in a review of social media and community action that I’m working on – up pops George Monbiot with an analysis based on his forthcoming book, How did we get into this mess?

What fascinates me about the effect of neo-liberalism is the way in which it enforces its punishment through claims about freedom and by the rhetoric of distributing power, for example through insistence on the empowerment of the consumer. The widespread (and lingering) disaster that was New Labour managerialism must have felt like a total endorsement to those of the neo-liberal faith.

So to return to the question raised earlier in the week, can anyone see the beginning of the end of neo-liberalism? I think if he could see it, Monbiot would tell us. Here’s what he writes in the article:

‘What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.’

 

What has become of our humanity?

On the subject of the Other and the shame of Calais, here's Frankie Boyle in yesterday’s Guardian:

“If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal', or that chilling American word 'alien', then what has become of our own humanity? To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself. I think most people resist that, but are pressed towards it by an increasingly sadistic elite. If you’re worried about threats to your way of life, look to the people who are selling your public services out from under you. The people who will destroy this society are already here: printing their own money, printing their own newspapers, and responding to undesirables at the gates by releasing the hounds.”

 

 

Civic activism toolkit

Here’s a curate’s egg for yer. In Northern Ireland the Building Change Trust has just published what it calls a grassroots democracy toolkit for civil society.

There’s lots to like. I was immediately impressed by the structure and design of the site: it neither overwhelms me with choice and information, nor feels stingy or shallow in what it is revealing. That’s a smart piece of design.

Against that, there’s surely not much excuse for the peculiar masculine bias and old-fashioned total whiteness of faces in the graphics. More than 5 out of ten for sure, but a pity.

 

What to do about local community information?

What’s needed to re-invigorate local democracy? Well we could start with an honest assessment of the state of local community information, and who contributes to it.

Some years ago Hugh Flouch and I ran an unconference at Ofcom for people interested and involved in local online networks (sometimes unhelpfully called ‘hyperlocals’) in London. A number of recommendations emerged for modest pieces of work – e.g. around standards, training in journalism and editing etc – which wouldn’t have required much funding to ensure they happened. As far as I know no funding was secured and none of this work was ever carried forward.

Despite the early enthusiasm and promise, and many remarkable examples of good practice, the local online networks movement can hardly be described as being in rude health; and I’m sure there is much reinvention of wheels. Meanwhile the state of local information provision around the country is dire. A new paper by Martin Moore for the Media Standards Trust notes that around the country, local council meetings now regularly go unattended and unreported.

Moore argues that:

• Innovation in local news and information is urgently needed to address the decline in local newspapers and to help support and reinvent local news and community information for the 21^st century
• Without such reinvention we risk weakening our civic communities and our local authorities becoming unaccountable
• There is a window of opportunity for the UK government to seed, through an independently run competition at no cost to the taxpayer, a flowering of innovation in news and information and civic technology at a local level
• The opportunity for innovation and growth will decline as non-UK technology platforms further colonise local media space.

There's a little hyperbole here - local authorities won't suddenly become 'unaccountable' - but the argument is sound. I would have preferred less emphasis on competitive funding schemes, which have arbitrary effects, and more on (i) small-scale targetted grants that add value across the sector; and (ii) the social, economic and governmental benefits of involving more citizens in the production of their own news and the discussion of their own issues.

I’ve recently been designing a questionnaire survey to be administered at a local level in east York, for a JRF-funded project. Among the questions we’ll be asking will be a few about local channels of information – how important are they? do local people contribute to them? and could local people be contributing to them more? Is a local resident-run website likely to encourage community involvement in local issues, or discourage it? Would it make for a more positive sense of local identity or a more negative one?

By taking a non-tech, community development approach to such questions we may gain insights that will be valuable in re-invigorating the neighbourhood online networks movement: that certainly seems to be needed.

 

A word about the neighbours

Like many English people I’ve experienced occasional nationalistic abuse from Scottish people in the past; but given the often nasty historical abuse perpetrated by the English establishment all over the place I’m more than ready to overlook that.

With a few hours to go to the true historical moment of the referendum, my thoughts are with those Scots who are riven with indecision. I hope they manage to reach a decision that they remain comfortable with.

I also hope they exercise their right to vote. Yesterday I was told of a predicted turnout of 81 per cent, though one would hope it will be higher: on such a momentous occasion, how could nearly one in five citizens not be bothered?

Among the numerous unresolved issues around the campaign, I’m still pondering these:

• Concerning all these economists and financiers and their predictions of economic disaster… can someone remind me of their economic forecasting competence and explain the basis for their integrity, impartiality and appreciation of social justice?
• Is it not perfectly reasonable for at least half a nation to vote on the principle of social justice rather than on the values peddled by an arrogant self-serving elite from another country? (That's a no-brainer if ever I heard one). I hope it will be rather more than half a nation.
• Will a Yes vote lead to the reinvention of a genuine politics of the left? And how long might that take? I reckon 5-10 years with a Yes vote. With a No vote, forget it, you’ll need to find a small independent country to emigrate to.

Good luck to them.

 

People who want to be in charge

Don’t follow leaders, said Dylan. Many people want to be in charge, and I’m aware that the English do not have a monopoly on this trait. But we do tend to do it in - how shall I say - a more polished and superior way than others.

And in Scotland this week, as Suzanne Moore puts it in probably the best piece I’ve read on this tense topic, ‘Those in charge are all campaigning simply to be in charge.’ If you read nothing else about Scotland, read this one.

 

 

Commons sense: CDJ special supplement

Occasionally my amateur interest in the history of the commons pokes through – for example while exploring the history of eating in public, questioning the present government’s attitude to public ownership, reflecting on the system of gebuurten developed in medieval European cities of Belgium and the Netherlands, or simply delighting in the history of neighbours.

Perhaps we'll all be thinking and writing more on the topic, on the grounds that

‘It is almost a law of contemporary social life that the more commons are attacked, the more they are celebrated.’

This quote comes from an article in a special supplement on the commons, published by the good folk at Community development journal. Here's the blurb:

Commons sense: new thinking about an old idea

All articles permanently free to download

Editors

Mary McDermott, Tom O’Connell and Órla O’Donovan

This Special Supplement aims to introduce the efflorescence of commons activism and thinking to people who are new to the old idea. In addition to celebrating how the commons can enrich our perceptions of the present and possible, the contributors caution us to look critically at contemporary discourses on the commons, recognizing how some actually reinforce capitalism, albeit with a human face. The articles demonstrate a high degree of reflexivity, along with clear and critical assessments by commoners themselves of their own projects. In articles focused on contemporary urban, water, knowledge and traditional music commons in contexts ranging from South Africa, Bolivia and Ireland, commoning right here, right now is considered.  True to the spirit of the movement itself, many of the debates taking place between commoners with different ‘common senses’ are explored.

The collection helped me appreciate how so many of the arguments and warnings about threats to the commons were offered by Ivan Illich years ago. It also gives us all a chance to reassess the relation between the commons and community development: could we have the latter without the former? As Maria Mies points out, reflecting on the village where she grew up,

‘no real community could exist without commons. All persons in the community were responsible to maintain and care for the commons, even children. This responsibility was not enforced by formal law, because it was evident to everybody that people's survival and subsistence depended on the commons and on free communal work.’

So take a look. Here you can have a think about paradoxes in the current momentum behind open access academic publishing, observing Orla O’Donovan’s ‘search for cracks in the pay walls that commodify and enclose much publicly subsidised research that should be common knowledge.’ You can reflect on the perception of traditional Irish music as ‘an artistic and cultural commons’ and the ‘annexation’ of sites of performance by the commerce of copyright. (Or as I did, just ponder how an author can describe himself as ‘radically rooted’).

I recall that Illich’s works were out of print for some years in the UK, presumably because there was ‘no market’ for them. Perhaps that’s as strong an indicator as we need for the counter-productive mismatch between the cultural commons and late capitalism.

 

Common interest?

I have been thinking of writing something about the notion of ‘common wealth’ – partly as a reaction to the way the recent Commonwealth Summit in Sri Lanka exposed issues of shared principles, compromise, the value of inclusion and the meaning of exclusion.

Time has not allowed, but at least I can point to one or two articles where the themes that need exploring, in my view, are taken up.

Owen Jones, for example, last week was puzzling over some of the nonsense claimed for the private sector by people who deride the necessary platform of the public sector on which they depend. (I covered very similar ground here, baffled by some drivelling plonker claiming he or she made no use of the state except ‘when my driver drives on public roads’).

Or Seumas Milne here covering the Haves' ongoing and highly successful project to transfer income and wealth from workforce, public and state to the corporate sector.

This perverse determination to destroy the commonwealth that has been built up over centuries for good reasons, manifests itself sometimes in quite unexpected little corners, because the media surreptitiously encourages people to make more and more daft observations. Hence for example the predictably silly suggestion from author Terry Deary, that ‘giving poor people free e-readers would be a "hell of a lot cheaper" than keeping libraries "open at all costs." The only interpretation available here seems to be that what you can get from an e-reader and what you can get from a library are comparable. The possibility that they might not be, seems to be beyond this man’s capacity. Perhaps that doesn't matter to him so long as whatever is public gets demolished.

In all this, one of the messages that seldom gets attention is the profligacy of the style of government represented. We know that the cost of privatisation, to the taxpayer, is exorbitant in most cases: it follows that any government that pursues this course while still spouting rhetoric about reducing the cost of the state is guilty of extravagant deceit at best. But the nonsense reigns under the aegis of acceptable ideology.

Among those who are trying to do something about this are Shared Assets, New Start and Co-Operatives UK: they are jointly hosting an event on ‘Land and community: a 21st century commons’. London, 5 December. More here.

 

Re-feudalising the country includes selling off common land (and hiding Cromwell)

What’s this about common land? Jane Merrick in the Indy this morning tells us that there are 3,870 registered ‘village greens’ in England and Wales, covering 8,770 acres. Apparently that's less than half the size of the family estate of Richard Benyon MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Natural Environment, Water and Rural Affairs. Merrick writes:

‘We don't take up that much land, we commoners. Our families don't need 20,000 acres to take the dog for a walk, or let the kids kick a football.’

And without a hint of irony, it seems – these rich posh people tend to have a substantial intelligence gap in that department - Mr Benyon has said: ‘Towns across the country have been held back from getting the developments they want through misuse of the village green system.’ (Nothing then about damage to the country from misuse of the hereditary and political systems?) The Open Spaces Society response is here and the straightforward dishonesty of the department’s line is exposed here.

File under Tory Arrogance. But take it more seriously. This is about their systematic attack on what is public and on the rights we have in common. It goes alongside the wanton, evidence-free and often costly decimation of the community sector, social support, public libraries and the postal service – things we own. Further down in her column, Merrick notes the irony in the fact that:

‘a new 10ft-high iron perimeter fence has been erected along the main public access area of the House of Commons. From the pavement, you can no longer see the statue of Oliver Cromwell which stands near St Stephen's Entrance.’

It’s a brazen stroke of sinister symbolism. Parliamentary democracy is bankrupt and the statue has been sequestered - by parliament! Perhaps the fence should be stormed for that reason - which in some eyes, in an added irony, would justify its installation.

This is all part of the determined re-feudalisation of the country, although of course as the increasingly perverse climate-change-deniers with ministerial responsibility for Mr Benyon’s department are trying to make sure, before long there may not be much environment left for the peasants to work on. And there will be fences around the whole of Westminster, like a vast medieval castle.

 

Democracy undergoing change

If you ever wondered quite what is wrong with the model of representative democracy so often steadfastly defended by western politicians, the recent commentary on developments in Egypt should help to clarify. Apart from the unexpected source of the letters column in today's Times, all I have heard and read amounts to hand-wringing condemnation of the 'abandonment' of democratic princples with the downfall of the elected president Morsi.

It's not abandonment, it's pursuit. Our commentators, especially the politicians, seem determined to perpetuate the idea that occasional elections are pretty much all there is to democracy, and any further involvement of citizens is an inconvenience to be discouraged.

It's a bit pathetic, not just because it's the usual cadre of Haves exposing their privilege and pompous patronage, but also because it's stupid. 

What has happened in Egypt is about democatic progress - in spite of the massively dubious, US-supported role of the military; and even if it fails - but it's a different kind of democracy to the tired and partial hierarchical model our politicians self-servingly try to protect. Because it's already reflecting a new empowerment of horizontal networks. True, one of the vertical networks remains dominant, but it can only be wielded in combination with the power of citizens acting collectively.

It's a critical moment. Democracy either goes forward - celebrating the power of citizens to get the kind they want rather than the version politicians want them to have - or it gets smothered. The world's influential commentators need to get the point and back the movement, not quibble about arcane terms and conditions.

 

What is the place of emotion in the making of policy?

In the years I spent shuttling between local initiatives in low income neighbourhoods and oddly clean cupboard rooms in Westminster, I never really cracked the way the experience of disadvantage was absorbed or dismissed as ‘personal’ and disconnected from policy.

You see this constantly in the skirmishes of local democracy of course – a local meeting where an officer or elected member gets a thorough bashing by a resident who’s living a kind of hell that current policies don’t address. Fierce steam gets released but policy is unaffected.

Such occasions can be off-putting for the well-meaning policy maker. I think most are aware of the gravitational effect here, caused often by internal pressures of work, of the risk of gradually becoming detached from local experience.

Politicians shield themselves from occasional bombardment, and disparage the ‘personal’ as ‘emotional’ while routinely exploiting examples through the media when it suits them to do so.

Sometimes politicians try to use public events to draw the sting of citizens’ anger, and occasionally find they’ve over-estimated their own political skills. When they view confrontation with residents as political sport and not as a chance to understand and address needs, that illustrates the tension I’m talking about.

At the same time, people who have profound experience of the failure of social systems to protect them, may not have the perspective that helps anyone relate it to policy in a meaningful way. But sometimes you hear a really considered, articulate exposition of experience that takes the personal and places it in a generalised policy context. That’s rare, and risks diluting the very emotion of lived experience that gives pertinent urgency to the cause. And often intermediaries, like housing workers say, who can speak the equivocal language of policy while combining understanding of several individual examples of disadvantage, can make contributions that are valued and welcomed by both sides.

So what is the place of emotion in the making of policy? Rosie Anderson has done some work on this ‘essential but difficult territory’ and TSRC have just published a fascinating paper based on policy making around poverty in Scotland (Summary; 4-page briefing; working paper). Emotional knowledge, she says, is frequently described by her informants as

‘ambiguous, unreliable and potentially overwhelming knowledge – in contrast with “rational” knowledge, which is the prerequisite for “professionalism” in policy-making and a necessity for making policy decisions.’

This sounds a lot like what Ivan Illich described as a ‘cognitive disorder’, resting on the illusion that

‘the knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the “knowledge” of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is “objective” – defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined… and fed into a process, now called “decision-making.” This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.” (Tools for conviviality, 1973).

Anderson makes the point that policy processes are contrived to exclude subjectivity and individuality. And if people are to engage with those processes, it's hard to see what else they are to bring to them. I have been in public meetings where a roomful of people, having collectively an enormous wealth of knowledge about the local issues under discussion, have sat in disconnected silence because the language and process disenfranchised them at the very point they were supposed to be being ‘invited’ to participate. Even the most well-meaning policy makers can flounder at this point.

Conversely, there are those meetings which seem like unstructured and unruly free-for-alls, a sequence of barely related angry rants. As Anderson says,

‘In practice this process of moving from the particular and emotional to general and impersonal, so simple-sounding on paper, is actually very difficult to get right in the eyes of policy practitioners because of emotional knowledge’s ambiguous status in policy.’

Partly, I have no doubt, this is an educational issue. As I have said often before, too many of us emerge from the education system with no idea how local democracy functions. For a long time it’s been in the interests of politicians to keep things that way, although some of them appear to be less sure nowadays (that’s a network society effect, I think). And Anderson raises the question of how we provide better support for policy workers emotionally when they engage with such lived experience.

We’ve all talked about emotional intelligence over the years. But it strikes me as curious that no-one seems to have got to grips with this topic before. This is a hugely important site of conflict and potentially fruitful understanding, and Anderson has pin-pointed the significance of

‘the negotiation and policing of the boundary between “personal” and “professional” knowledge about social change.’

 

How society is managed: signs of the times

Here are two comments I heard recently which seem to characterise our peculiar times.

Talking to the mayor of a town council the other day on the subject of poverty, I asked if they had a team working on it, and was told simply ‘We don’t have any teams in the council any more.’ Pause and think about the implications of that, multiplied across the country.

And from a public services worker reflecting on the past and referring to young people: ‘many of them don't understand what a trade union is.’

 

Creating citizenship communities

Civic involvement is an enduring ‘worthy-but-dull’ theme of social policy discourse. The school curriculum is currently a bit of a policy hot potato. What do you get if you bring the two together? Some schools struggle to deliver anything much beyond the core curriculum, while the fact that there are so many old Etonians in positions of power and influence is explained by an ‘ethos of public service.’

Here’s a report of research into Creating citizenship communities, published last week, which investigated the thinking and actions of young people and professionals in schools about ‘forms of citizenship that relate to strong communities’:

‘There appears to be a disconnect between school discourse around the importance of community and civic engagement, and what is taught in schools. Citizenship education is not always viewed as a subject that is taken seriously by schools. Young people in this study did not feel that teaching about community and citizenship fully prepared them to take an active part in their school or local communities.

‘Young people have strong opinions on what schools can do to recognise the contributions they already make to their communities, as well as to support young people in engaging in civic action. These include building positive links with other schools in their community; actively encouraging interaction between different groups of pupils within and outside of school; making sure that opportunities to get involved with in- and out-of-school projects are equally available to all students; and taking an interest in pupils’ lives beyond the school gates.’

 

Living in interesting times

England seems to be shifting from being a rather right-wing country to a frighteningly right-wing country. JRF research published the other day shows not just that ‘the public has become increasingly likely to say that individual characteristics rather than societal issues cause poverty;’ but also that this is largely accounted for by a shift in attitudes among voters on the left. In 1986 the proportion of Labour voters who cited social injustice as the main cause of poverty was 41 per cent: in 2011 it was just 27 per cent.

Never mind, let’s see what’s in the news to cheer us up. How about this? A brand new UK Independence Party councillor, Eric Kitson, has made racist ‘jokes’ and shared ‘a cartoon of Muslim people being burnt at the stake with copies of the Koran fuelling the flames’, on his Facebook page. The following sentence seems to be his explanation for why Ukip have not suspended him:

‘I'm not a politician - I'm a bit of a fool really.’

Meanwhile, Colin Brewer, the previously mentioned independent councillor in Cornwall who said that disabled children should be put down, apparently was re-elected in the same round of elections: according to the Indy, ‘with 335 votes – a winning margin of four votes.’ Brewer compared disabled children with deformed lambs that are dealt with at birth by ‘smashing them against a wall.’ His presence on the candidate list would certainly get me out to the polling station.

In both cases, I’m perversely curious about whether some voters put their cross against these names without at least some understanding of what they stood for. The logic of democracy means that you have to believe that a majority of those who voted for these people knew what they were doing. Something is very rotten in the state of England.

 

Exclusion and protest: people left out in the street can make a difference

Yesterday, as various sources report (BBC, Indy), five disabled people lost their High Court challenge over the government's decision to abolish the Independent Living Fund (ILF). Only from Zoe Williams’s less resigned account in the Guardian do we learn that:

‘It's an inaccessible courtroom, so the people who brought the action couldn't get into the room to hear the verdict.’

What an exquisite vignette for the moral bankruptcy of the system. Can the injustice of British politics and the notion of British ‘justice’ sink any lower? We must wait and see. Matt Kenyon’s superb illustration brings a weird sound, a bit like laughter, to the cries of derision.

But there are sources of encouragement. According to Andreas Whittam Smith in today's Indy, action by those victimised across Europe by authorities in the name of ‘austerity’ has brought results:

‘When the President of the European Commission says that austerity has reached its limits, then something profound has changed. The street protests in weaker eurozone countries have made a difference.’

Plenty still to do though.

Bashing ordinary people who are making their civic contribution

It’s been a triumphant few days for those who like bashing ordinary people who happen to be making a civic contribution. Last week we had a rash of unfortunate remarks about a group of citizens who, as jurors, asked for clarification on their role. True, it sounds as if there may have been some difficult characters among them, but the questions were presumably part of the (legitimate) way other jurors dealt with that difficulty. There’s not much justification for some of the snobbish sneering (e.g. about 'intelligence' - wait, make that 'cognitive abilities') from some commentators.

Thankfully, the Independent kept perspective and published an article by Trevor Grove, clarifying things for His Lordship the Judge Bod:

‘as someone who has been on several juries and also written a book about the jury system, I must tell Andrew Edis, QC, that jurors often do struggle to understand their basic tasks. After all, they are ordinary members of the public drawn from widely different backgrounds, most of whom have not been inside a courtroom in their lives. Some may not have been born in this country. Others may never have passed an exam. Yet amazingly enough these unpaid, untrained, randomly picked, involuntary volunteers, who are suddenly required to pass judgment on a fellow citizen in sometimes very disturbing cases, nearly always rise to the occasion. A large majority of judges, lawyers and police agree that most jury verdicts are just, or at any rate reasonable, in light of the evidence. And only in about 1 per cent of trials do juries fail to reach a verdict.’ (Emphasis added)

To continue the theme, today (on WATO and elsewhere) we have had a moralising, ideology-loaded hectoring of school governors from Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s chief inspector. With all the sensitivity of a drunk rhinoceros, the man plunged straight into likening ‘the worst governors’ to jurors who were ‘incapable of understanding their responsibilities in a court case'.

Well done there Mike. So if there's a problem, it’s not the system, far less a conflict about the purposes of the education system, it’s just that ordinary people are dull-witted peasants. Sadly, that’s still really the problem for the elite – how to get the plebs to do what is expected of them. And you thought it was only a question of ordinary people doing their duty, or in many cases, far beyond their duty, in the interests of fellow citizens. It might be worth pointing out to people like Wilshaw that many school governors invest their time, energy and expertise in their roles in order to give young people chances despite the heavy forces, ahem, working to deny them such chances.

For example, judging by his preoccupation with them, it still hasn’t occurred to Wilshaw that performance targets are damaging. What explains this determined denial by the governing class? Even the police are getting the message, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission making it clear yesterday in the depressing example of Southwark Sapphire Unit, that

‘The pressure to meet targets as a measure of success, rather than focussing on the outcome for the victim, resulted in the police losing sight of what policing is about – protecting the public and deterring and detecting crime.’

Well there's a surprise.

Wilshaw wants ordinary people either to adhere to the culture of target obsession disorder, or get out of the way. But people get involved in civic participation often because they can see a service needs re-directing or rescuing from misguided policy meddling. It's not going to help if there is also a growing culture of clobbering the volunteers.

Sand and the aggregate of local issues

Over on New Start, John Houghton takes this image of sand, magnified 250 times, as a handy analogy:

‘To the disinterested observer, sand is deadly dull. Yet when you look much more closely, as this image allows us to do, its surprising richness and diversity is revealed.

‘The image makes me think of neighbourhoods because there’s a similar tendency in policy discourse to talk about the ‘ordinary families’ living in ‘typical streets’ that make up ‘your average neighbourhood’. From this lofty perspective, neighbourhoods must seem equally monotonous…

‘The reality is very different. If we take time to look, we can see that neighbourhoods are full of gems and shells, rocks and pearls. People with unexpected stories, landmarks loaded with significance, networks of friendliness and gossip.’

The analogy works nicely to expose the awkwardness of generalisation in policy: but we still have to address that problem.

One place to start would be by dealing with the heavily centralised power base that dominates most policy discourse. An interview today with Simon Hughes on The World This Weekend provides an example. The point was made that the unpopularity of a government in power is commonly a direct cause of the demise of local councillors at local elections. The Lib Dems lost 40 per cent of their local elected members at the last local election. As Hughes conceded (at around 14:15) - ‘that’s very unfair on councillors.’

It’s also an inadequate foundation for localism, demonstrating how the dominant cause-effect reaction between centre and local is in the wrong direction. Localism will remain little more than a conceding gesture until we have circumstances in which central government is forced more consistently and realistically to take account of local politics. At the moment that tends only to happen when MPs feel threatened locally by constituents’ reactions to central government policy.

If we had some way of packaging and presenting in the aggregate, to coin a phrase, the achievements, distinctiveness and concerns of local people through the legitimate channel of local democracy, and central government had no choice but to take it into account, we might start to see policy at a national level that reflects the fine-grained richness and diversity that John refers to.

Long way to go, especially since the political party (aforementioned) most likely to push such an agenda has messed up a bit lately.

 

 

Happy-clappy community engagement and the politics of disadvantage

Two years and five months ago I attended the (opposition) Conservative Party launch of an idea called the big society. I must admit it took me a few days to appreciate what it meant.

Since then I’ve heard people whose views I might once have respected, express enthusiasm for – even regret for the apparent passing of – this devious and snide attempt to theorise the demolition of the public, the suffocation of community action (manifestly not its liberation) and the justification for disempowering gestures of philanthropy.

Today - thank you Patrick Butler - we have a bitter-sweet example of just what big society amounts to. Patrick reports on how Children North East, a long-established organisation with a sound reputation for serving disadvantaged young people against the odds, found that the erosion of public funding for what they do stopped, abruptly, at the pockets of the charity’s staff:

They put their hands in their pocket and paid for the children's lunches themselves. The staff set up what in effect was a mini-food bank scheme. They bought ‘a little extra’ in their weekly family shopping trip, and used it to stock up the charity's new ‘pantry’.

The article quotes tellingly from the blog of the charity's chief exec, Jeremy Cripps:

So here we have a Government without the humanity to care for very vulnerable people until they are deported by giving them even a minimal amount of money to feed their children; a local authority providing shelter for those families but forced to cut back on its spending by the Government; passing that cut on to a charity which too has to economise; the buck passes to the charity's staff who cannot stand by and do nothing while in daily contact with children in basic need of food; so they take it upon themselves to make sure children do not go hungry.

The problem I have is not that this could be any kind of surprise to anybody who has been paying attention.

What bothers me is that the emergence of circumstances like these has been accompanied by a degree of encouragement among people in the new community engagement industry, who have been happy to promote a form of community development that ignores the politics of disadvantage: lots of jolly emphasis on happy-clappy ‘community’ but no recognition of the manifest and rampant social injustices that try to make philanthropy (and by extension, depoliticised community involvement) an acceptable substitute for social responsibilities.

I have suggested before that the assimilation of selective-value community development into public policy could effectively neuter the movement and marginalise the voices of anyone who protests against political injustices that cause great need. Further, it seems to me that collusion in such policies amounts to subscribing to the demonisation of the poor. That is inexcusable.

 

Adult learning and social relationships

The social and health benefits of adult learning are hardly in doubt, and now they've been quantified. 

In a report for Niace, Valuing the impact of adult learning, Daniel Fujiwara found that, for adults, participating in a part-time course leads to:

• improvements in health, which has a value of £148 to the individual;
• a greater likelihood of finding a job and/or staying in a job, which has a value of £224 to the individual;
• better social relationships, which has a value of £658 to the individual; and
• a greater likelihood that people volunteer on a regular basis, which has a value of £130 to the individual.

So will this lead at last to some sensible government investment in community education? Might there be a policy maker somewhere who wants to see an increase in the proportion of the population who are healthier, more content, have more supportive networks, are more employable and who contribute to society? Non? Oh well, just thought I’d ask.

Previously:

Adult learning: why it matters

Community engagement and trust in government

A couple of years ago I was told a story about residents in a rural farming area who objected to plans for a wind farm, got very organised and vocal, and saw off the proposals.

My first reaction was to reach for the old quote from the days of Thatcherism – ‘you wonder if the middle ages will ever come to an end.’

Then more practically I reflected on the apparent likelihood that while the objection was presented as an argument against wind power – and it’s hard to sustain that argument for long – it was really an objection to surrendering certain rights to land and its value.

It seems that, while this farming-based network was sufficiently well-armed with hayforks and tradition to stomp up to the city hall and stop proceedings, they hadn’t worked out that the same community energy could generate collective income from the process and retain ownership. Oh, and generate renewable energy at the same time – although in this case that doesn’t seem to have been a consideration.

I was reminded of this by the news (via Planning daily) that the House of Commons science and technology committee says that giving communities more ownership of local energy infrastructure by offering shares in projects 'could be conducive to building trust and acceptance'.

You don't say? But there’s a catch. Here in one paragraph from the summary is how far the committee has come and, towards the end, where it’s headed:

‘Community benefits are an important way of building trust and negotiations can enable the public to feel a greater sense of control, choice over and ownership of energy projects. We encourage the further use of current community engagement processes led by energy companies, working with local government and the public, for building trust around nuclear new build proposals.’

What a falling off was there. You can get precisely the same effect with the next paragraph:

‘We were impressed by a citizen partnership model being developed in Germany for wind farms and suggest that enabling communities to feel more ownership of local energy infrastructure by offering shares in projects could be conducive to building trust and acceptance. Partnership models could form part of community benefits discussions for new nuclear build and other energy infrastructure.’

Well, if your government favours nuclear energy, would you rather have policy to promote it without community engagement, or policy that required it?

But it is hard to read this without suspecting that they want the phrases ‘community engagement processes’ and ‘community benefits discussions’ to mean ‘coercion’. We want people to have a say in deciding on what we want them to decide on.

The problem is that the closer that policy gets to ordinary people, the more barriers to trust it seems to have to build. In my lifetime I have witnessed how, first, people lost trust in government as detached-authority which did not see the need to consult; then how, more recently, government that consulted without engagement lost more trust where it had expected to gain it; and now I fear we are beginning to see how government adopting spurious ‘engagement processes’ will further drain the depleted reservoirs of public trust to critical levels.

 

Ellie told Nelly

I’m voting for him, he’s done a good job. Nelly told Ellie no way, not for that lot. So we cancel each other out. I’m really busy tomorrow anyway. Me too said Ellie, let’s not bother. Agreed?

Next morning Ellie recognised Nelly’s boots under the booth, almost squealed, lost concentration, and crossed the wrong box.

 

Local people defending the public realm? Deny them access to toilets!

Here’s a torrid story told by Adam Langleben of how one council – the infamous Barnet council in north London – chose to behave corporately in the face of a few residents seeking to defend their local library against a devious closure tactic. The officials’ sense of exclusive ownership over the property, including toilets, water and electricity supplies, shows a remarkably weak grasp of the notion of a public building.

Further, the council’s poor handling of the entire process is shown up, surprise surprise, by the use of social media. As Adam writes:

‘you cannot simply push around residents, lie to residents and expect them to simpl[y] take this.’

Part of the problem seems to be that Barnet council have signed up to some religious mumbo-jumbo which claims that the private sector runs things more efficiently than the public sector, de facto. Even if this were true – and there’s enough evidence (e.g.) to have discredited it long ago, if everyday experience were not sufficient – there’s a small question of the meaning and value of a public realm.

What matters now is for some of us to start thinking about how we restore services as public services - not products that people who can afford them, buy, or that are subject to the big society model of a miserable suspended animation, kept breathing artificially and fitfully through inadequate and unpredictable resources and expertise.

Building a sense of agency: community engagement in the age of consent

Last week Julian Dobson reported that the government “has been having a series of conversations about how to, in its words, 'mobilise neighbourhoods'”. I don’t know who these conversations are with but it sounds like they might have a bit of catching up to do. Julian reminds us that government seems to want a form of community action that gets people growing and picking apples for motherhood pie but doesn’t upset the cart.

I sense that a new phase of community engagement is emerging and I want to try and clarify what that might mean. First, four little insights from the past week or so.

• I heard how a Chinese restaurant had been inspected by the fire services, whose officers found several dangerous transgressions (not just out-of-date extinguishers) for which they could have been closed down. Rather than do that, the fire officers contacted the chair of the town’s Chinese Association, who intervened to help establish some quick fixes followed by managed upgrading, so that the business was able to keep going.
• I’ve been in conversations to facilitate a process of community engagement in an area of west London that is anticipating extensive regeneration. Our approach will be to help ensure that residents recognise that it is legitimate to have ideas and aspirations for their area; and that local agencies should provide a responsive environment in which such ideas can be tested and opportunities provided.
• I heard some trading standards officers talking about moving from a triggered prosecution approach, when a business transgresses (for example in under-age selling), to an advice and training model, encouraging traders to learn, appreciate and abide by the law. They call it ‘community protection’.
• I ran a workshop with young people who experience exclusion, who were part of a young inspectors’ scheme, whereby they gain confidence, acceptance and employability skills in return for helping local services (like libraries, surgeries, activity centres) through systematic evaluation. The young people’s role was welcomed by the receiving agencies and they could only tell me of one throw-away remark that might on a bad day have been construed as patronising.

Examples like this confirm to me that we are moving into an age in which governance is far more about permissions and consent – in both directions - than about top-down decree. This may be consistent with what has been called ‘permission-based policy-making.’ You can’t do that without genuine engagement. Most politicians haven’t spotted this, because politicians don’t tend to notice change that they haven’t brought about themselves. All four of the above examples were instigated by some of those hugely innovative, under-rated, committed people in modest-ranking roles in local public services.

This change in the relation between local people and service providers is profoundly related to the nature of the network society, which is characterised by the erosion of hierarchies and the emergence of powerful horizontal communication systems. That’s been going on for at least 20 years and is nothing whatever to do with political direction from the centre. The transformation draws on, and depends heavily on, people’s connectedness at local level.

So if government wants to understand the context of ‘mobilising neighbourhoods’ (I think that phrase probably means community action around local issues), it first needs to appreciate how neighbourly recognition and interaction underpin readiness to mobilise in time of need. That’s always been the case. The bit that I think is emerging now is about building a sense of agency at neighbourhood level, which you don’t do with flimsy rhetoric about ‘innovation’ and silly competitions and decimating the public sector.

What this is leading to is a space where people who have previously experienced only disempowerment, come to feel that they have consent to act.

 

 

 

Compound interest

Here's a lesson in grassroots democracy, from Libya. The BBC have a short report from Gabriel Gatehouse on a local democratic initiative emerging from the ruins of Colonel Gaddafi's former compound in Tripoli.

After Gaddafi's cronies fled, apparently some 68 families moved in to the various buildings, some of which are extensive villas, some 'little more than concrete bunkers'. There is public discussion about turning the compound into a large park, but the squatters have organised themselves already, formed a residents' assocation, sent a petition to the national transitional council, and begun the process of negotiating another solution.

 

Local democratic participation and parking

I sometimes wonder whether, in late medieval cities, there were disputes about where people left their carts. Car parking is a major issue in contemporary neighbourhoods, and inconsiderate parking infuriates people. Maybe some kinds of personality just get sparked by the very idea of public space, and always have done.

I’m not known for defending car drivers, but when you have situations where residents cannot get their own cars out of their driveways because others have left their vehicles in the way for long periods of time, you have to ask whether there’s a problem understanding that others have a right of access to public space.

A week ago I designed and ran a consultative process for a public meeting about car parking, in a large village on the outskirts of Sheffield. The material I had to work with included a lot of written remarks in open questions from an online survey, many of which suggested solutions and many of which consisted of repeated annoyance at inconsiderate drivers.

The process I came up with may have helped move things on. One reason is that most participants apparently were expecting a conventional public meeting in which councillors said something from the front, were shouted at by a few worked-up voices from the rows, and nothing much changed as a consequence. There were no rows (in either pronunciation) – the chairs were set around tables, people had the chance to shape their own agenda (and therefore found it hard to complain if the meeting did not discuss what they wanted discussed); they had the opportunity to augment and comment, in groups, on every live proposition as it was passed round, using pre-formatted sheets which included a street map; and they had the chance to vote, at the end, on preferred options to address the parking problem. There was no disruption. It was local participative democracy in action.

What was striking for me was the genuine sense of novelty among the participants, which I’m still absorbing. The sceptical might argue that just because some southerner comes in with an arty-farty creative approach, it doesn’t mean anything will change as a consequence. That remains to be seen. But I sensed from various comments afterwards that some people were grateful for a completely fresh experience of genuinely participative local democracy, which was, well, revelatory to them. That’s change, in itself.

The car resembles the traditional meeting as symbolic of communication confusion: it helps us to share some information (like status, power or detachment); in a car you can say ‘we’ve been through’ somewhere much as the conventional meeting ‘goes through’ an agenda. And cars really mess up interaction, and all the unseen benefits that go with interaction.

 

Taxes and governmental powers: what are they for?

When I dropped out of school and went into ‘the world of work’, as it used to be called, I remember being disturbed by the fact that the education system left me utterly ignorant of what government and local government do, and what taxation is for. It looks like things have got little better, in spite of the introduction of citizenship to the curriculum.

Yup, it’s time for a bit of seasonal gloom, with the British Social Attitudes report published today and plenty of publicity given to this statistic:

The proportion who think we should pay (more) taxes to improve health and education and social benefits is only 30% in England, 40% in Scotland. A decade ago it was 60% in both nations. (BBC)

Like a separating galaxy, it looks like we are moving at speed away from the traditional civilising notion of the ‘common weal’. (In case you missed it, here’s the link to requirements for people who don’t want to pay taxes).

Do people who think like this imagine, for instance, that business could function without publicly maintained roads and systematically tested vehicles, or a managed wider economy? Or that the police could maintain order without some sort of funding; or that the food and water they consume could be guaranteed to be hygienic without public agencies? Perhaps it does not occur to them?

Ah wait, perhaps what really bugs them is that poverty is self-imposed, not structural:

63% believed parents who don't want to work were to blame for children living in poverty.

I suggest you blink hard, and re-read that figure: almost two thirds.

According to Mark Easton on the BBC site today, the UK ‘has long been the most judgmental of the needy in Europe.’ In a way, that’s a relief; but yes we do seem determined, disastrously, to become more and more like the US. Income inequality is increasing, with a government apparently comfortable with polarisation. And we seem to be a bit angry too.

Dark age ahead, as Jane Jacobs warned. Jane listed five pillars of culture including ‘taxes and governmental powers that are directly in touch with needs and possibilities’. But civilisation will pay a heavy price if too few citizens really appreciate what they’re for.

 

'Added public value'? FE colleges

Further education colleges have long played important roles in community development and citizenship in the local context, and they've been subject to a lot of shortsighted central government manipulation over the past 20 years or so. Like libraries, they represent a tradition that implies democratic engagement, and mutual-support for empowered, purposeful citizenship.

Now NIACE have published the final report of the Independent Commission on Colleges in their Communities, which was set up to investigate the role that FE colleges play locally, and the added public value that they bring to their communities as 'leaders of learning'.

Judging from the summary, the report is far from hard-hitting. It seems to be super-sensitive to the likelihood that any criticism would invite more awkwardness from government. Well, the commissioners are closer to policy than I am, so perhaps it's the right approach, but it hardly inspires fringe supporters like me. If nothing else, I'd want to see some assertive upfront demonstration of that 'added public value' that is claimed.

Previously: Shifting institutions

The cleansing of community development

The other day I attended the launch of the Church Urban Fund’s new programme called Near Neighbours. The programme will disburse central government money in small grants through local parishes. There are strong themes of cohesion and working with faith groups:

‘This fund will help local initiatives that build cross-community relationships i.e. people of different faith groups and those of no faith, working together through social action in their community to form closer relationships.’

The scheme is focused in the north of England (Bradford, Burnley and Oldham); Leicester; areas of London, and areas of Birmingham ‘which are diverse and multi-faith.’

There are already impressive stories of collective endeavour in Near Neighbours projects. Judging from conversations about the kind of project that is being funded, it’s apparent that the work that will be supported is community development work or community action. As is the fashion, the language is dominated more by the N words ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘neighbours’ than by the C word, which is taking a breather after a really hard decade.

There is no attempt to anchor this initiative in the principles and experience of established community development. Indeed, the programme fits the emerging pattern of new community-development-that-is-not-quite-community-development –

• National funding with a local orientation, that conveniently ignores local democratic structures and roots itself in traditional philanthropic soil. People in positions of power don’t want ordinary people to be political, but stuff needs doing in society. So it’s obvious - invent and fund a de-politicised form of CD.
• A high expectation of voluntary involvement that stimulates other local voluntary involvement, which won’t (in Julian Dobson’s words) ‘frighten the horses,’ and which arguably ‘will leave most of society pretty much as it is’.  
• No allegiance to or even recognition paid to a tradition of such work, known as community development, that also acknowledges inequalities and power structures as part of the problem.

So in its humble way, the Near Neighbours programme fits tidily alongside Nesta’s Neighbourhood Challenge and the Big Lottery’s People Powered Change in the contemporary cleansing of community development.

Much good will come from this strange form of air conditioning, but you gotta wonder about what gets shut out. What happens to people who only breathe filtered air? I guess they get ill if they have to go outside.

Get used to plenty of branding but not much about process or values – and yet a form of community development will have taken place. Get used to a diet of neat success stories, and bright shiny case studies, and people in positions of power queuing up to take the credit while blessing the peasants. And yet a form of community development will have taken place.

It needs to be pointed out that any substantial CD programme with a very weak grasp of the principles and values of CD is rather vulnerable to capture, distortion and misrepresentation.

In spite of these reservations, there are several reasons why I think these programmes will be beneficial. For a start, on a superficial level, CD really did need brightening up: how did any set of practitioners who work with human beings come to be so characterised by humourlessness and dour ruggedness? Like the stereotype under which librarians suffer, it may be exaggerated but it’s there and is counter-productive.

More importantly, I don’t think any attempt to suppress the politics in CD is likely to be successful for long. I think of Marx’s well-known remark, referring to the final emergence of revolution: ‘well-burrowed old mole!’ (OK, perhaps it’s best not to dwell too closely on that analogy).

And most interestingly, what these programmes may do best is to shake up the power structures at the micro-level, more effectively than has happened before. If all the blather about ‘innovation’ can be made to mean anything, it should be about this: developing recognisably-effective relationships at local level that are independent of pre-existing power relationships. (Incidentally, if someone from the coalition government tries to tell you that that’s why they bypass local government, take a moment to examine their motives). That’s where the social media comes in, to help make processes and actions transparent: it could serve to transform the power relations between the people who get things done and the people who stop things being done.

 

 

Selective localism

The government’s localism champion, Eric Pickles, appears to have the support of the High Court for his anti-localist decision that the residents of the village of Kings Cliffe should put up with having radioactive waste dumped in the vicinity.

According to a Public Service article published just now,

'The case was seen as an example of how the government may speak of encouraging localism in one breath but in the next force communities to accept decisions that they have opposed through democratic means.'

Some of the background here. Kings Cliffe Wastewatchers site is here.

Sooner or later, those who got over-excited about localism were bound to have to face up to the fact that some decisions affecting localities have to be taken at levels beyond the most local. It didn’t seem to occur to Mr Pickles and his advisors though, so we get the rhetoric of localism when it suits them but not when it doesn’t. I hope it turns out that the government has picked a bad example here.

The assault on the public

When I was in France recently I was a bit shocked at the prevalence of private beaches, in a country which I had thought took liberté and égalité seriously.

Perhaps it will get as bad in the UK before long. I vaguely recall, but cannot find evidence of, an early Thatcher attempt or threat to sell stretches of the British coastline.

And I've been wondering, what will it take eventually to spark a serious debate about the nature of 'public' in this country?

The government's determined assault on what is public encompasses a scary disinterest in formal care services for vulnerable people; spiteful bullying contempt (especially from here) for local-elected bodies almost by definition; the washing of hands on policy for public libraries; the idea of selling off nature reserves; and the outrageous attempt to sell off publicly-owned woodland.

And we have a London borough apparently serious about charging children to use an adventure playground. That should get rid of the riff-raff. I daresay there are plenty of similar examples, as the Haves seek to drive home their advantage and accentuate what Geoff Mulgan described as the 'evident imbalance between private affluence and public poverty.'

The other day I was in a London square where I was told that you weren't allowed there if you were wearing overalls. Presumably if a worker is needed to fix something, he or she has to be brought in behind screens or under cover of darkness: the leisure of the wealthy should not be spoiled by the risk of catching sight of hoi-polloi. It was, presumably, pseudo-public space - privately owned, the developer having extracted from the local authority pretty much whatever they wanted in return for providing pavements and conditional access. Bless them, the London Assembly recently published a report which

'identifies a number of concerns relating to the shift in the ownership and management of public spaces from local authorities to developers, and recommends solutions.'

But last month's BBC programme about the street without services suggested to me that there is a lot to be done before people will join up the evidence of these various little skirmishes and recognise them as a war. How late is too late?

 

 

What are councils for?

Why do taxpayers invest in services like education which don't help people to understand why taxpayers should invest in services?

Uncritical and uninformed condemnation of the notion of state services funded through taxation is so embedded in our society and heavily reinforced by our media, it comes as a surprise to find even a public sector broadcaster taking steps to redress the balance.

The beeb went to a street in Preston, withdrew council services for six weeks and reimbursed people with their council tax. The programme involved quite a lot of interference, juggling with the logic of relations between different public services, economies of scale, the need for expertise and adherence to the law, and so forth. The result, The street that cut everything, can be seen here for a few more days.

I will pass over the trampled ethics of powerfully invasive forces, like television and all its accoutrements, provoking disagreements between neighbours.

One of the more easy-going of the televised residents observed,'you don't realise how dark it is, do you, when you turn the lights out'. The turning-off of street lights was an eye-opener, you might say. And it helps to keep the metaphors simple. On the whole, what happened was that people came to realise the point of paying for, and the complexity of, public services, some more readily than others. The woman who says at the outset, with regard to her council tax, 'I just can't see any value for money' completely revises her opinion at the end.

Behind that, there were curiosities, like the single mother insisting 'I'm not used to relying on anybody' without acknowledging that the state support she receives might just count.

With creaky logic, although the council 'doesn't exist', the programme makers require residents to invest in other council services by volunteering their time. So we see two neighbours cleaning city centre public toilets with the poignant observation,

"If you wanna use 'em you should be prepared to clean 'em."

And why not? What is to stop us organising a rota so that council money is saved and we all contribute to the maintenance of such an essential public resource? Pragmatic democracy, anyone? The big society theorists may have been missing a trick. Start with the bogs. Has anyone done the arithmetic I wonder? Depending on population obviously, it might be a duty you'd have to carry out a couple of hours in a year. Not quite the same as jury service I know but the idea's there.

John Crace in the Guardian suggests the programme helps to explain why 'the big society is probably a doomed project':

'However much people might talk up their community credentials, when given the financial choice most are only really happy to pay for the services they believe they benefit from directly and not for those they might one day need or are required by the more vulnerable. So a civilised society depends on a state which removes that choice.'

That seems a little cynical to me. The programme summarised a social experiment, and we saw plenty of evidence of mutual support and the recognition that people have differing needs for support at different times of their lives. On the whole it avoided trivialising the issues, which is more than can be said for some of the big society rhetoric.

For me the irony is always that we invest through our taxes in an education system which leaves so few people equipped to reflect on these issues. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we all as citizens emerged from the education system appreciating the reasons for democratic structures used to take decisions on public services?

 

 

Moving unconsciously in the same direction

The other day I wrote a little about arrogance and power. This evening we had a masterful display from Hosni Mubarak, an awesome example of the patronising superior stupidity of someone inexcusably detached from ordinary life.

Exceptional though his bizarre, tasteless speech was in that particular quality, its basics are hardly unfamiliar. The tone is not much different to what we are accustomed to from Westminster and many of our town halls: I know best, I have the power, you are young and enthusiastic, jolly well done in that respect, and it's nice to think about change, gosh yes quite right, but not just now.

The style is characterised by patronising half-compliment, damning with faint praise, miserably-minor concessions, ignoring the real issues, selective deafness, and measured encouragement to keep on keeping on for the common cause - but on status quo terms, otherwise there could be recriminations, I think you know what I mean.

More than once I have heard the same tone of unjustifiable, in-the-face-of-reason arrogance from the chair of a community group or residents' association, from a housing officer, once I remember from a senior council officer who thought she could play politics with everyone.

How does this come about? Scientists, help us: where is the disempowering gene, can it be isolated? What is it in humans that drives them to demean others in this pathetic and incendiary way? What is it about arrogant people in power that fails to stop them behaving like History's Total Dickheads?

I want to ask, is it really necessary to be detached from the everyday to have power? If you attain power, do you have to sever ties with the ordinary? Why? What could be more inapproriate?

And let's just note that, as with the London disturbances in December, this is a network society moment. A moment focused by the democratising lens of technologies, with people able to network together in a way which is no longer inferior to the networking power of the Haves. One BBC correspondent said of the people in Tahrir Square,

'This is the twitter generation, they know what's going on.'

Other comments I heard on the BBC's coverage:

'What matters in this is the street, the people on the street... These young people are too smart...'

Of Mubarak's inner circle: 'They don't know what democracy is'.

And from within the crowd, the crowd itself described as 'Moving unconsciously in the same direction'.

 

Big society debate video

Back in October I took part in a debate about big society at the Battle of Ideas (short account here) and a video has now been published. My five min chunk starts here. Plenty of interesting stuff in the discussion.

Other BoI debates here.

Inactive democracy was always a bad idea: street reps and new forms of governance

I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in a traditional oak panelled, leather-benched council chamber in Shipley, Yorkshire, with a group of practitioners discussing their work with street reps across the district.

Symbolically, the room was dilapidated and its pomp had been subjected to un-ceremonial uses. Conceptually, the meeting served to accentuate the anachronistic surroundings, exposing many of the issues of our accelerating transition from the age of authority. If not perhaps a defining moment, certainly a moment for defining. (The pic is Blackburn Town Hall, not Shipley, which is similar but the seating is red).

The immediate cause was to review some community development work carried out by Groundwork in various neighbourhoods. But for the area neighbourhood management coordinators and street wardens sat round, it was mainly just another meeting working out how to tweak detail, and exploring the raw niceties of probable futures – fewer staff, less resources, recession-hit residents with accumulating problems. Several of those present probably do not know if they will have a job in three months’ time, and yes, emergency exit strategies were mentioned.

But still it felt like a privilege to be there, because I’ve been witnessing the ungainly, messy emergence of the new order.

Discussions about the role of street reps, as I’ve suggested before, are about adjusting the relationship between citizen and state, with an emphasis on co-production; understanding a less formal, more everyday kind of democratic action-in-place; about resisting attempts to formalise and prescribe what people do but supporting them in doing it; acknowledging that targets and performance measurement are at best unhelpful and inappropriate; that networks not organisations are the key but that you can’t make them accountable, and so on. It’s a whole sticky messy tangle of contemporary theoretical policy spaghetti…

These are the kinds of issues that exercise the minds of political theorists and people in think tanks right now - and people who, can you imagine, are not embarrassed to be called ‘thought leaders’ - who are looking at screens or reading reports but not listening to folk like these in rooms like this in towns like this. Thought leaders my arse.

So I listened and was able to appreciate that behaviour change needs local exemplars, plenty of nurturing by local practitioners, and lots of time: just like community development. What these practitioners are trying to do, in some pretty downtrodden localities, is to help networks develop which have credence and weight but do not become cliques, which are open and reflect an informal participative democracy based on local people’s interests. What these practitioners are trying to do is exactly what this government would like and what it needs to understand.

Some of the issues for practitioners are old familiar tensions of course, like whether the politics of intervention are broadly universalising (as typically under Tory councils) or targeted (as under Labour authorities). The question is as sharp as ever when it comes to resources for supporting street reps. Should street wardens be equally involved in more affluent areas? In such places, someone claimed yesterday, if people want something done they just pick up the phone. The Place Survey and Citizenship Survey data can show us, in general terms, where people feel least empowered. So if resources are targeted at the least affluent areas, how does that change perceptions of the role of street reps? In my view, we do it because it’s not healthy for society to have significant imbalances of power.

Against that, it’s worth remembering that when I asked experienced street reps, who had been attending area forum and housing committee meetings and so on, whether they felt they could influence decisions, the answer was a clear ‘no’. People felt they could influence actions, but they could see that the process of decision-making was hidden from them, because of course it doesn’t really happen in the meetings. Especially not when they’re in attendance.

Arguments like these have always run through community development practice, but I want to suggest that discussions about street reps offer a remarkable lens on the new order. And I was full of admiration for the way this mix of staff kept probing for ways to help local people support each other and improve their local quality of life, because schemes have to be made to work in the space between budget and politics, between residents’ energy and capacity, and allocated support.

Inactive democracy was always a bad idea. I wonder if we will look back in 10 years’ time over a transformed conceptual landscape of local social relations and governance, and recognise this awkward work for its nervous, principled clearing of the ground. And what will the council chamber be being used for?

Searching for a culturally unifying notion

Along comes a recession, and maybe the political advantage goes to the first to come up with a compelling and uniting conceptual framework. Except, 'big society' hasn't quite engrossed or convinced enough of us. OK keep thinking.

Here's a new collection of papers (via Will Davies) about associational democracy, asking questions about approaches to governance and economics that can 'increase the flow of information, accountability, trust, inclusion, choice, as well as enable individual empowerment and freedom.' And noting in passing that part of the problem is that

'we have become too constrained by an individualised, abstract and largely economistic set of beliefs and practices. So how can we become more collaborative and human, to improve our wellbeing, increase the effectiveness of what we do and manage the processes and tensions of both desired as well as unavoidable change?'

(More useful stuff about la vie associative and associationalism on the Infed site here).

I wonder whether searching for some all-encompassing culturally unifying ensign is ever again likely to be fruitful. Where it seems to work in its own terms ('God Bless America') its consequences seem, er, questionable at best. Big society won't be the last ever attempt of its kind, because we humans don't give up so easily, but it could be that western civilisation has outgrown that sort of large-scale cohesion. Ah of course, what we need is a culturally integrating notion that accommodates the sense of cultural disintegeration (or diversity, if you prefer). 'Small society' could be a good starting point. Let's see what happens.

 

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

How the government is helping young people to learn about community organising

For a long time it puzzled me that my kids and most of their peers grew up a-political. Now I realise I was not being very bright about it. For a start, I needed to turn the reflection around: it was probably as much that politics was 'a-young-people'.

And, as I suddenly realised while reading a marvellous, passionate article by Suzanne Moore in today's Guardian, for a long time they didn't have a cause of their own. For myself and my brothers and some friends, as we bemoaned our youngsters' apparent disinterest, it feels in retrospect like we expected them to take up other causes, which is not necessarily an easy route to early political awareness.

Moore writes of excitement and energy in the current student protests. No surprise that, as she says,

'these kids are able to quickly organise new kinds of creative chaos'.

And as we'd expect, the learning they are going through is invaluable:

'These people have discovered the politics of self-organisation quickly. Some of what was going on was the painfully slow but necessary business of process. How does such a diverse group make rules for itself?'

What interests me even more is the sophistication of their disquiet: it does not seem to be raw anger or outrage - the kind of last-ditch, backs-to-the-wall desperation that characterised the miners' strike for instance.

What seems to be happening is a calculated rejection of the kind of political attitude - imitated across the country by the embarrassing complacency of the Haves - that has no qualms in dumping ordinary people perceived to be incapable of organising their own resistance. In some ways the students' resistance is perverse, in that there is nothing anarchic about it:

'their main contention is wanting access to state institutions.'

We are being governed by two political leaders who exude contempt for anyone not swimming in the mainstream, and seem ignorant of the risks of their lofty disdain. If Moore is right and young people make the clearest demonstration that this politics is morally unacceptable, I for one will find it very inspiring.

And it would be pleasing if in a few years' time we can look back at today's learning about the organisation of resistance as providing the platform for a revitalisation of community politics. That would resonate sweetly with the rhetoric of big society.

 

How bad will it get before people get really angry?

A man known as the deputy prime minister, which you'd have thought was a responsible job calling for intelligence, a sense of perspective and the ability to reflect in a balanced way on important issues, has been quoted as saying that it is not the role of the state "to compensate the poor for their predicament".

I feel chilled. The further these people go with their superior, complacent and condescending attitudes, the nearer we get to something very confrontational and potentially violent.

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 not part of the determinative answer. And yet we do not have the conceptual architecture to make association desirable, to help it happen.'

Don't we? He spoke about making this happen around the issues that people care about 'in their communities', proceeding to an immaculate if not quite intentional definition of community development, without mentioning 'community development'.

But, fourthly, Michael Saward challenged Blond's 'unitarian' interpretation of good citizenship as uncontroversial and universally accepted. That may be unfair, I can't say, but it gets back to a central problem for the Big Society which Saward himself had raised at the outset of yesterday's discussion:

'Will awkward citizens be welcome in the Big Society?'

I've raised this question here in a different way myself: what does BS mean for the local activist who is moved to confront social injustice, not just for the cakestall mafia? When street reps in Shipley talk to me about the tensions between being a 'good citizen' (reporting disorder, keeping an eye out for drug drops, liaising with agencies etc) and campaigning to become empowered and overcome inequalities (activism in the local political arena), it feels like Big Society is not ready to provide the frameworks for that activism, to accommodate awkwardness.

Yesterday's material helps me visualise Big Society as one big nudge towards prosocial action, and I have no problem with that. But if and when Big Society does recognise the need to engage at the level of social justice, it will need to do so in a way that does not feel to local activists like assimilation or an attempt to neutralise whatever frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness they may be feeling.

Local citizen-based websites

Alan Stanton, a Labour councillor who contributes occasionally to Harringay Online, speaking of the attitude of politicians to local websites:

"We shouldn't try to harness it. We can be part of it, contribute to it and listen to it but shouldn't try and colonise it."

This comes from a BBC News article by Jane Wakefield this morning, which also refers to Brockley Central and East Dulwich Forum, quotes Andy Williamson from the Hansard Society, and even has a few words from Hugh Flouch and meself. All part of the growing interest.

Will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies?

Another day, another government. You know how it is - wake up, a cabinet's been formed, eyewatering public sector cuts in the air, wonder what's up for neighbourhood management? Pottered along to the National Association for Neighbourhood Management conference, along with about sixty other folk. Probably all of us (with the exception of one of the speakers, who shall remain nameless) had years of experience of co-production and were sensitised to its nuances, and led by NANM we co-produced an absorbing event.

We heard two nicely complementary presentations from Gerry Stoker and Steve Broome. Gerry spoke about the Manchester Uni / Southampton Uni research into changing civic behaviour, which has come to be known as the 'Nudge-nudge, think-think' project because of the way it contrasts two ways for policy to influence what we do. Meself, I just think there's a massive policy conspiracy to get me to see things in that framework.

Steve Broome offered the first update I've heard on the RSA's connecting communities project which has been carrying out social network analysis in the New Cross area of south London. They've been rather coy about what's been happening but suddenly here's a whole lot of data which, Steve says, will help us understand 'the total set of connections and possibilities within a community'. Drilling down you can appreciate where the strong and weak points might be, and  you can help people to recognise and exploit their network position. Apparently

'people who value neighbourliness are more likely to be in the core of the network.'

This will be worth examining closely. At least two pieces of work that I'm aware of have suggested that there may not be a strong connection between neighbouring and community activity. The project report is expected in about 6 weeks' time, and Steve said the data will be made available online. Hopefully the kind of work they've done will be inexpensively replicable, and we'll begin to see constructive ways of exploiting the knowledge gained, eg in finding ways to support older people to age in place.

This is the place to offer a note of tribute to two street reps from Shipley, Sue and Arthur Kenworthy, who made the journey down to London to have an input to the two workshops I ran. When a number of practitioners are gathered together in a room, there's nothing like having the experience of local people to draw on. Sue and Arthur are a couple of residents trying to make a little bit of difference in their neighbourhood: they exemplify the barely-recognised efforts of thousands, but yesterday their thoughts and experience were listened to and valued.

So will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies? We  seem to be watching a rapid shift from what I call transactional government - characterised by treating the citizen as compliant consumer of state services who has to struggle for their entitlements - to what Geoff Mulgan has called relational government, characterised by involvement in decisions, co-production and conversational democracy. Am I being over-optimistic?

An argument resonating at yesterday's conference was that we can't afford not to invest in NM. A few weeks back on the NANM blog, Ben Lee put it like this:

'The coming weeks and months will be a crucial time for all of us. On the one hand there is more support and hard evidence than we’ve ever had for the principles of neighbourhood action, localism and empowering citizens through co-delivery. But while some local agencies hold their nerve and take considered decisions about radical devolved service models, others are already taking rushed decisions to reduce or cancel ‘pilot’ programmes - flying in the face of evidence.

We believe local practitioners and community activists need to be taking the best evidence and achievments of neighbourhood working to the heart of the debates about cuts.'

Local activism and a general election

Diane Dyson has an excellent recent post about third places, including this observation:

Early British suffragettes did some of their best community organizing in the town laundries, away from the strong pitching arms of visiting farm boys who lobbed rotten produce at them when the women stood on the back of wagons at village markets calling for the vote.

An exchange of messages with Diane helped me to this recent post about Hannah Mitchell - about whom, to my shame, I knew nothing. It's at moments like this that I feel most keenly the half-hearted incompleteness of my education; but really, for me in late-20thC england, dealing with that lack was trivial compared to the systematised exclusion which people like Hannah Mitchell confronted and overcame.

I invite you to take a few minutes to listen to this reading from her autobiography (scroll down) describing her intervention at a meeting before the general election of 1906. And if your mind happens to be on the fluid nuances of the forthcoming UK general election, this is something to reflect on - not just for the ferocity of the local action against vested interests that was necessary to bring democracy out of the cradle and belatedly learning to walk; but also for the stark political differences and the enviable(?) focus that was possible on causes of social justice.

Well, it would be an insult to those campaigners to envy the context of their struggles, but perhaps politics now does suffer from a lack of distinct causes.

And there's another point to be made, which I am not qualified to explore, about the comparative contribution of women to local anti-slavery activism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the suffragette movement. Maybe someone will tell me this has been done? It's the localness of their action, its morally-forged courage against far broader political forces, and its need to accumulate patiently in order to have effect, that interests me, and from which I feel we should be learning.

Big Society is being watched

David Wilcox has blogged more on the Big Society Network, which describes itself as 'an organisation being set up by frustrated citizens for frustrated citizens, to help everyone achieve change in their local area.'

Our aim is to not only create the largest co-operative or mutual in Britain, but to create a mutual that is Britain. Every citizen can be a shareholder, contribute, receive help and rewards.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think there's a difference between a network and an organisation, which is kinda significant. Either that's been thought about and is being disregarded, or it hasn't been thought about. If I'm reluctant to trust the network it's because it seems to be an organisation with an agenda, and the agenda doesn't appear to include values and principles that in my view are essential to community development: inclusion and social justice, for instance.

If the response is, 'no, the members set the agenda, so join in and help shape it' then it begs all sorts of questions such as why there are no proposals to strengthen the existing community sector networks (er, we call this 'bottom-up' - it's just a bit if jargon we use, you'll get used to it chaps). At least the Brown government recognised this, albeit in its central-controlling way. Any self-respecting community activist can smell a hidden agenda from well beyond their own territory: they will be suspicious of the Big Society Network perhaps not because it has an expressed agenda just yet but because it's a centralised construct coming from a philanthropic tradition.

A post on ConservativeHome notes the possibility of 'the politicisation of community activists' under the Big Society umbrella, which apparently has also occurred to the Taxpayers Alliance. Is it possible that these people have been immersed for so long in a cakestall-mafia version of the voluntary sector that the prospect of voluntary action having a political dimension is a bit of a shock?

Here's a suggestion: start from the recognition that community action is fundamentally, insecapably political, and get used to it. Attempts to depoliticise it will be self-defeating and may lead to a revival of confrontational radicalism. I welcome the Big Society thinking from the tories because it might just force us to think about the politics of communty action after a couple of decades when that really hasn't been paid much attention.

Julian Dobson has it about right I reckon:

If we want community activity that won't frighten the horses and will leave most of society pretty much as it is, and will give you social action without having to worry about social justice, this kind of set-up may be a good bet. Those who want more substantial change may well find themselves suffocated in such a network.

 

Let's hear it for neighbourhood groups: Conservative party launch of the Big Society

In the 1980s if UK politicians talked about community action at all it was defensively, because the notion was subversive, anti-establishment, tainted with radicalism and, typically, intensely confrontational.

Today eleven members of the Conservative party shadow cabinet (yes, eleven, including the party leader David Cameron) presented their ideas for 'the Big Society' which are dominated by plans to stimulate involvement in neighbourhood groups. Given the party's realistic aspirations to be in government within a few weeks, these policies constitute a justification for neighbourhood action at the highest political level.

It was genuinely peculiar to sit and hear the emphasis placed on the role of local residents in social policy. The single phrase most repeated through more than three hours of speechifying (shame about the talking-heads format, they still have a bit to learn in that respect) was 'neighbourhood groups'. They are, we were told, 'the essential building blocks' of the policy.

The three key promises are:

• strengthen and support social enterprises (I'm sure I wasn't the only person surprised at how little emphasis was placed on social enterprises)
• stimulate the creation and development of neighbourhood groups in every area
• encourage mass engagement in neighbourhood groups and social action projects.

Financial incentives are promised 'for people to come together to form neighbourhood groups in the poorest areas', and funding for 5,000 independent community organisers (note: 'will have the skills needed to raise funds to pay for their own salaries').

On page 5 of the document you can read the powers and rights that will be assigned to neighbourhood groups. The list begins:

'Neighbourhoods will be able to bid to take over the running of community amenities, such as parks and libraries that are under threat'.

Threat from where? Understandably, this will be widely read as 'funding for parks and libraries is not gonna be great, but we'll support voluntary action to run them: and if it runs into the sand after a while, that's the community's decision.'

So this, boys and girls, is what localism means - local people being given support to run facilities like schools and parks, or taking over ownership of closed down shops. In his introductory remarks, Oliver Letwin equated the Big Society squarely with social capital, and part of the assumption is that in controlling their own resources local people will also generate much-needed social capital. Empowerment featured frequently in the speeches: local government hardly at all.

Most of the nine points in the neighbourhood powers list imply local consensus, using the N word where so often in the past the C word would have been used. This cheerily-assumed consensus is one of the areas where som elearning might be needed, but for now, the onus is on the community sector to respond to this extraordinary challenge.

If people react saying 'they don't understand the messiness of neighbourhood life - or the inertia, the separation and exclusion...' that won't get us far. Neighbourhood politics can be very intense, but you wouldn't have guessed that from today's speeches. Nor do we know whether grants will be available to unconstituted groups. All that reality-checking is yet to come.

Scepticism about individual choice being packaged as neighbourhood action won't help either, because great stress was placed on membership of neighbourhood groups. Make no mistake, there is, radically, a collective dimension to this policy: it's not just promoting individual civic behaviour (although the sop to the party traditionalists is to call it 'collaborative individualism').

So there I sat, listening to a potential Conservative prime minister say that the role of the state is to agitate for community engagement (speech here). And I remembered the day in 1997 when I heard a representative of the brand-new exciting-new socially-dynamic Labour government say 'we know things can't all be done quickly, we're planning for ten years'. I rushed back to my colleagues at Community Development Foundation with the message - c'mon, c'mon, we've got ten years to prove community development works.

Well, we didn't. Now I reread the phrase in today's document: 'We will encourage mass engagement in neighbourhood groups and social action projects' and it seems to me this is another chance; because the welfare state and a society of institutions are things of the past, and you can't do without support for local involvement.

Press release.
 

Jim Diers on citizen action

Yesterday Jim Diers, author of Neighbor power, spoke at a meeting that I co-organised in London with Ben Lee at Shared Intelligence.

We'd managed to gather a select band of interested and interesting people to hear Jim's inspiring presentation about citizen action and democratic involvement, based on his experience running Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods.

What Jim has helped local people in Seattle to achieve, and what he's helping others around the world to grasp, is a sustainable and appropriate contribution by local people in the processes and actions that make a difference to their neighbourhoods.

The key points that I take away from the discussion for reflection are these:

• Collective citizen empowerment is not so much an idea whose time has come - it was always an obvious option: rather we should say, time's up for some of the barriers that have been in the way for too long.
• One reason Seattle's Neighborhood Matching Fund worked was because the Department of Neighborhoods imputed a value to residents' voluntary time. This is a topic we've been talking about off and on in the UK for far too long.
• Another reason for the Seattle success was that they chose to encourage and accept bids from unconstituted groups of residents. They found other solutions to the problem of where to bank the grant. Again, this is something we've failed to work-through properly in this country, largely because of the centre's control-obsession.

We also had input yesterday from Hugh Flouch about Harringay Online, which stimulated a lot of discussion about how neighbourhood networks can contribute to collective action and how people can use them to interact with the structures of governance. More when Hugh and I have finished our London study.

Special thanks to Steven Clift for the heads-up on Jim's visit, and thanks to Shared Intelligence for the venue and catering. If you missed this opportunity, watch this space because Jim expects to be back in a year or so, and we're confident we can find a larger room.

**Postscript**  David Wilcox has offered a characteristically imaginative and thorough account.

Street reps, empowerment and statistics

When I ask the street reps I've been working with, do they feel they are able to influence decisions affecting their area, there is a bit of pondering but definitely no evidence put forward. A little probing confirms that they feel they can influence action - getting some rubbish cleared or maybe dealing with a flagrant drug-drop - but not decisions about how services are run or resources targeted.

These are active citizens who feel relatively powerless, partly because of their low visibility and in many cases the need to remain anonymous. For example, none of the group I was working with the other night would go to court and testify against another resident. If we ask 'what would it take to overcome this and raise their profile?' the answer obviates the purpose: it would be a peaceful, ordered neighbourhood where people showed respect for one another, and street reps were (in their terms) unnecessary.

Still, thousands of practice agencies want evidence that government investment is leading to citizens feeling more empowered. That's what the empowerment indicator (NI4) is for, and there's a lot to be said for it. NI4 tells us the proportion of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area. But it's causing a bit of head-scratching.

For example, Inspire-East recently published an absorbing (if cunningly-hidden) report on behaviour in relation to NI4, but confused a few of us right at the start of their exec summary with this:

'measured through the 2008 Place Survey... in the East of England, as nationally, 29% of respondents agree they feel they can influence decisions that affect their local area... the Citizenship Survey shows that in 2008, nationally 39% of people agree they feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area.'

If you go to page 8 of the report, you get a sort-of explanation. They're different kinds of survey. But still, a 10% discrepency doesn't seem trivial. The next survey could ask, do you feel disempowered by statistics?

At the same time, the National Empowerment Partnership has published a document which seems to have very similar intentions to the Inspire-East report, attempting to explain 'what drives feelings of influence?' I've only read the summary, but it's told me some significant things. For instance, that among people who have been civically involved in the past 12 months, some 56% say they cannot influence decisions. This would include the street reps I've been talking to. Being involved, as the report says, 'is no guarantee that people will feel they can influence decisions' - indeed, feeling informed is a stronger driver of sense of influence than is actual involvement in decision-making.

The street reps go to meetings, and tell me they feel listened to, and that it's good to have the chance to give your opinions. But as the NEP report suggests, it could be that through the process of getting involved, people can gain greater insight into what they are not able to influence.

Do unto others: on the appropriation of citizen empowerment

I posted some musings last month about the way empowerment has become an industry: its recognition as an issue in policy is welcome but its neutralising assimilation distasteful.

Meanwhile I've been watching as that well-known authority on local activism, the RSA, plans to follow up on its idea for a 'new community development qualification' by toying with notions of 'citizen power' as if it were a conceptual plaything. I was invited to the launch of this project recently, but I still haven't understood why a local project required a London 'launch' with Triffickly Important People speaking.

The invitation noted:

'With political disengagement on the rise and public services feeling the squeeze, it has never been more important to realise the potential of people to affect change at a local level by shaping the identity and direction of the places and public services they use.'

OK, I'm with you so far, how you gonna do that? 'The potential of people': any particular people?

'This pioneering project led by the RSA in partnership with Peterborough City Council and Arts Council England East, will experiment with different ‘models of social change’ across a range of spheres including civic behaviour, education, local enterprise, rehabilitation and treatment services.'

Ah I see, not led by local people then. But experimenting with their lives and their place, how thoughtful. Well you wouldn't want to risk increasing political disengagement, would you?

The text went on to explain the RSA's belief that 'the goals of individual fulfilment and social progress require an ambitious model of citizenship'... It has to be a model, because the wealthy elite like to play with things and then go off and do something else, leaving ordinary people to, er, well tidy up and make do afterwards I suppose.

David Wilcox has been trying to inject some sense of responsibility and offered a couple of comments here, with a gentle irony that seems either too subtle, or too late, or both:

'I know that there's a strong theoretical commitment to citizen engagement, empowerment etc. But isn't there a slight danger that without some evidence of citzens at the heart of the project this will look like social architecture designed in John Adam Street?'

The rhetoric ('We do want to involve people in all aspects of the project') isn't hard to find but sounds as hollow as always. When I started to wonder about the '.co.uk' url, it struck me that not only is this an audacious attempt by wonkdom to appropriate, govern and direct citizen empowerment from the top-down; it also implies it can be turned into a project of social entrepreneurship.

It may seem trivial to be pricking the RSA's pomposity (although they seem to work hard at it). But I'm more concerned with a growing suspicion that one of the legacies of new Labour will be the erosion of the validity of radicalism by treating it as intellectually fashionable and appropriating its language. If you do unto others and call it empowerment, what will residents call real empowerment when the time comes to get you off their territory?

 

Street reps: an everday story of trust and power

The other day I was running some workshops with street reps in Shipley with my daughter, three years since the first set of workshops I ran with them.

On the surface, the initiative has gone well, with a good sprinkling of residents taking up the role and ready to talk about it. And their contribution seems to have had an impact. For example, the proportion of people in East Shipley who say that rubbish and litter lying around is a problem has decreased from 50% to 36% in three years. Anecdotally, the drugs presence has diminished significantly as people have at last felt supported in raising concerns.

But there is disquiet. This is a predominantly white low income area, part of which comes within the 2% most deprived in the country. One report notes that a lot of people feel that all the ‘big’ regeneration money goes into areas of central Bradford dominated by black and minority ethnic groups, and that ‘white Shipley’ misses out. Well, I don't know the central areas of the city, but there's no evidence of any kind of regeneration money going into the two neighbourhoods of Shipley where I've been working. So it doesn't feel wrong to sympathise if these people feel a sense of marginalisation and abandonment.

What do we expect from the community cohesion indicator? The percentage of residents who believe that people from different backgrounds get on well together declined a disconcerting 10% (from 66% to 56%) between 2007 and 2009. The national average is 76%. So it was not totally unsurprising, if unnerving, to overhear one of the street reps delighting in the prospect that a BNP candidate is likely to get voted in to a local ward. This could be a nasty, dingy corner of local politics.

The second group we spoke to insisted that their role is not political, by which they mean, it's not characterised by party politics. But it's profoundly, inescapably political: these are unpaid volunteers living among people whose neighbourhood they 'represent' - often anonymously because of fears of reprisals - without democratic process or accountability but with the essential task of standing at the interface of citizen-as-subject and state-as-provider.

Every call they make to environment or housing services, every conversation they are having with the police support officer, perhaps every time they step outside and have a word with a neighbour, they're trying to reassert the citizen's influence over what happens, and juggling the fizzing firesticks of responsibility, responsiveness, interference, surveillance, vigilantism, identity, collective interest and so on. They do this from a base of controlled influence and minimal power.

We'll be going back for several more sessions, but (partly because they've not had much press for a long time) I'm already concerned that the street reps movement may not be in blooming good health.

I see it as an important experiment, as much about new forms of engaged democracy as about making services locally responsive; as much about co-delivery as about efficiency. But it's apparent that, as with Neighbourhood Watch before it, the whole initiative can be weakened by lack of trust.

Neighbourhood Watch empowers its representatives, but is based unavoidably on a foundation of distrust. Street reps take their place on a basis of pro-social action, but (sometimes for very good reasons) may have neither the power nor the necessary level of generalised trust to have the influence that justifies the effort.

Maybe too little has been tried. The potential of neighbourhood websites is certainly one area that cries out to be developed alongside support for street reps. We're not done yet.