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.’

 

Tell it like it is

From the research point of view, stark honesty is always reassuring, however negative. I’ve just been going through some comments in a questionnaire survey and came across this little gem:

Q. ‘To what extent do you tend to get involved in local community issues?’

A. ‘I can't be bothered. Nothing has really motivated me to get involved.’

OK, can we have the next question please?

 

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.

 

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.

 

Have your say

The recent silence hereabouts is due to sub-optimal health. I've been clearing my throat. For days.

Hmm, nothing wrong with this blog that a few posts won't cure. Oh look, here's a note on 'How to consult the public', over on Freedom from Command and Control:

'The words are important. The word ‘consultation’ has been replaced by the words dialogue and conversation. The conversation should be described as ongoing, constructive and mature, it is never a childish, unproductive one-off. To have a proper conversation, you need plenty of written documents. Make these documents comprehensive, polished and final. Seal off the consultation document with a front cover, logo and strapline. This creates the impression that the proposals are early ideas, open to change rather than a fait accomplis. Advertise the consultation with the original phrases ‘Have your say’ and ‘We’re listening’. Illustrative with photos of ears and megaphones. The look you are going for is jaunty, fun and patronising.'

'An event with more than 0 members of the community is a success. If no one comes, ask staff who live locally to ‘wear a different hat’ and contribute. If you are disappointed with the turnout, remember the dialogue is ongoing, not a one-off.  No one can reach ‘Hard to Reach’ people. If they do reach back, you’ll end up with more writing up to do. At this point, the phrase ‘consultation fatigue’ becomes your friend. Rather than trying again, arrange an internal discussion on the causes of apathy in the community. If no one comes, the loop is closed and your work is done.

Thanks (indirectly) Simon!

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.

 

Whatever happened to ‘publicness’?

Last week I chaired a panel debate on community managed libraries, at the national conference of CILIP (formerly and more recognisably The Library Association). It’s hard to keep up with this rapidly changing but hugely symbolic issue. I try to do so not least because – as I have argued often before - our libraries are one of the few things left that consolidate the public realm.

For three years now whatever is regarded as public has been under sustained, unambiguous attack by the present government under the guise of ‘necessary’ public sector spending cuts. Deliberate inaction in defence of the public library network, by the minister with responsibility for them, is in my view manifestly strategic. I am not likely to forget having been at the pre-election launch of the big society three years ago, when we were told that

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

The ‘threat’ had yet to be articulated but the clear message was that if people really wanted their public amenities, they would demonstrate this in practical ways by showing a readiness to manage them unpaid: and if not, those resources, tainted by the ideology of being collectively owned, would be allowed to wither.

Some still haven’t seen the plainness of this particular writing on walls all round the country. Many people seem ready to blame their local council for the circumstances they find their libraries in, but it’s just too much intellectual effort to work out why those councils – and the economy - are in the state they’re in. Of those who recognise that the problem goes beyond local government, most seem to have signed up to the myth of excessive Labour spending (even though there is 'no evidence that increases in social policy spending caused a crisis in the public finances preceding the global financial crisis and recession’ - Lupton et al, 2013); the rhetoric of shirkers and scroungers; and the narrative of public sector profligacy and incompetence. All of which serves both to deny the culpability of the financial sector and to smokescreen the systematic dismantlement of things that are public.

And while we watch people in Greece, Brasil, Egypt and elsewhere express their anger against exploitation and manipulation by the Haves, in this country we go all quivery-mousy and get on with nibbling our own tails.

The sheltered, lethargic indifference and lack of political awareness seemed to have its dull echo at the CILIP debate last week, reinforced by the fact that those who work for local authorities are unable to express criticism of their employers’ policies. The tone of passive acquiescence in the room was largely about acknowledging the apparent inevitability of the current transformation of the library network into a mix of different, experimental forms of governance and day-to-day maintenance; but it also smacked of political naivety in a very English sense.

The speakers and I will be working on a short document based on the session, and I’ll make a little announcement on this blog when the time comes. In the meantime, I thought I’d just set down one of the points I made in my introductory remarks.

Several years ago, Martin Dudley and I published a short study on public libraries and community cohesion for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It included (p15) a framework of four essential attributes of public libraries:

• Library as resource
• Librarians as expertise
• Library as place
• Library as symbol of the public realm.

We claim no special credit for this model: it drew on the work of others before and around us, but it’s handy to have and to refer to.

More recently, the Arts Council (which has taken over the responsibility for libraries from the MLA, but with what looks like a stronger political steer from the government strategists) published the much-publicised The library of the future. The paper refers to the following three essential ingredients that ‘define the public library’:

• a safe, creative community space that is enjoyable and easy to use, in both physical and virtual form
• an excellent range of quality books, digital resources and other content
• well-trained, friendly people to help users to find what they want either independently or with support.

These will be recognisable from the list that Martin and I settled on, but there’s one missing. What happened to publicness? How is it that ‘being public’ is no longer an essential, defining characteristic of public libraries?

I can’t help wondering if the notion might just be politically inconvenient and inexpedient, perhaps? And its omission from that document and its elision in more general debate amounts to collusion in the destructive anti-public policies of the present government. Does anyone have a better explanation?

 

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.’

 

Not the big society

About three years ago I was told first hand by someone closely involved in propaganda for the new government, that a group of officials had made a visit to Finland to collect examples of big society behaviour.

The prize specimen, most proudly displayed in conversation on their return, was to do with groups of residents who filled the potholes in their own roads. Apparently this was it. The great Cameronian idea was that citizens did not feel they had to depend on their local authority to repair their roads: they got together and did it themselves. I waited for some explanation as to why this made sense, but none was forthcoming – the story just stopped there, as if it was self-evidently beneficial all round.

Outside my window this afternoon, a truck drew up. Two men got out and took about 10 minutes to effect a thorough repair to a glaring pothole. I have reasonable confidence that they knew what they were doing, having done it before. Some of my neighbours might know what to do – what ingredients to use, what mix, what order they should go in, the optimum temperature for the sealing tar, etc – but I certainly wouldn’t. If asked to make a contribution to those costs, I wouldn’t really want to have to make another contribution in a year’s time because we got it wrong.

I take reassurance from the fact that the highways department, whose decisions are monitored more or less thoroughly by democratically elected representatives, is in a position to know what is needed, can buy the materials in bulk, has access to experienced workers who do quite a lot of this county-wide, and can carry out quality control.

I’m no more expert on economics than the folk in the Treasury seem to be, but I believe the phrase ‘economies of scale’ is relevant here. The local state is the logical steward for maintaining our roads, and fortunately the folly of the pothole-filling principle never took root. As with the hugely expensive privatisation of services, I think the overall point is that this government wouldn’t want an ideological obsession to be obstructed by the possibility of doing things more efficiently, fairly and less expensively.

 

‘No life.’ Young people talking about poverty

Last month I helped organise and run an event involving children and young people in poverty, so that government officials could hear them talk about their experiences.

The slightly formal context of a conference venue was going to be unfamiliar for the participants, the timetable was very tight, and they would not know most of the others there. So we designed a mix of plenary and group sessions, exercises, discussions, and one short presentation; followed by a trip round the houses of parliament. We also had to take account of the fact that some of the young people had fairly complex backgrounds and there was always a chance that attention spans would be short and their behaviour could be what is euphemistically called ‘challenging’.

One of the exercises was designed to allow some of the experience to be fictionalised: this gave the participants ‘permission’ to release some fairly strong concerns – and some personal aspirations - that otherwise might not have been shared. This post summarises that process.

We had seven groups of about 5 or 6 per table, of mixed ages. Using a pre-printed worksheet, each group was asked to invent a character and describe their family background and the area where they lived. Prompt cards were provided but only the age of the child was prescribed, in order to ensure a variety.

We used the carousel principle so that each table inherited the character created by others. The second stage required them to think about the skills, interests, fears and friendships of the character. We provided plenty of prompt cards for this stage, covering a broad mix of options to get people talking: some groups used these while others chose to draw or write, for example -

Fears: ‘not being able to leave the estate’

‘A bit afraid of new people. Doesn’t know what is happening.’

‘He does not go to school so he don’t have a good ajication.’

They all offered a reasonable degree of consistency – that is to say, there were only a few apparent contradictions along the lines of ‘loner’ / ‘team player’.

In the next stage, inheriting a character with some detail known about them, the participants were asked to think up a crisis (or crises) that affected the individual, and to describe the implications. As we had anticipated, this gave them no difficulties whatsoever, although there were one or two oddities –

‘No life. Goes into foster home & runs away. Police find him and Bob wants to stay with the policeman.’

‘They move to a small stone hut.’

There was plenty of mention of adults in the household losing their jobs, plus imprisonment and quite unceremonially reported death.

In the last group phase, they were asked to think through the future for the invented character they inherited, given what was known about their circumstances and the crisis which afflicted them. Here, what was striking was the sense of resilience in some of the outcomes (but not all):

‘Finally he got his own business. And he doesn’t do any illgele job.’

‘(After 1 yr) Taken into care. Social involved. Abused in care. Bunking school. Mum + Dad not aloud to see them. Parents in rehab. Angry at parents. (After 2 yrs) Kills parents -Juvinal prison – No one to help him. (After 5 yrs) Turns life around and starts studying in Safe Children’s Home. Goes back to school and doesn’t get bullied.’

‘She become so ill and suffers too much. Luckily someone adopts her but she is so ill that she dies.’

‘(After 1 yr) out of prison after serving 6 months. No family support L (After 2 yrs) goes back to prison for selling drugs, couldn’t find work. (After 5 yrs) Dies from drug abuse. [Alternative happy ending] 1 yr – lots of support from family. 2 yrs – rehab and courses. 5 yrs – police and youth work, educating others to prevent them doing the same thing.’

The final phase of the exercise was a table-by-table account and short discussion of each of the characters. Unsurprisingly, energy levels had flagged a little by this stage but the richness of the narratives gave us plenty to work on in the final sessions and in our report, which will be published soon by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

If you're interested in finding out more about the process described here, please get in touch.

 

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.

Against gentrification: the Siege of the Elephant

Southwark Notes Archive Group are currently inviting folks to contribute to ‘The Siege of the Elephant,’ a one-day convergence against the gentrification of Elephant and Castle and surrounding area in London. The event aims to bring together local communities, activists, campaign and amenity group members and traders, as well as academics, students, researchers and members of campaign groups involved in similar regeneration/gentrification struggles in other areas of London.

London, Saturday 17 November 2012

Further information

Proposed themes for the day:

• How does gentrification work and what are its causes and effects in
  Elephant and Castle?

• How can we resist or alter the dynamics of gentrification?

Southwark Notes Archive Group ‘have also been organising regular anti-gentrification walks, printing postcards, posters, maps and comics, and keeping active on within various groups and campaigns in the ongoing struggle whilst keeping an eye on the history (the mistakes and successes) and the big picture (globalisation, financialisation and all that!)’

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.

 

Anti-social behaviour and ‘the true nature of privilege’

Last week the RSA got some publicity for their idea that people should be ‘trained in basic community safety skills,’ meaning dealing with ‘antisocial behaviour and low-level public disorder’. Ben Rogers floated the idea a couple of years ago. It builds on the history of first aid lessons, and would fit into the tradition of adult education. The paper doesn’t acknowledge the fact that community centres have been running self-defence classes for women for as long as I can remember.

As so often with the RSA there’s that uncomfortable sense of appearing to say ‘we could try doing this to people’. Suggestions need to be based firmly on what people are already trying to do for themselves, in their own neighbourhoods. And if policy is to be influenced, it might be reasonable to acknowledge the value of, and strengthen opportunities for, informal and semi-formal interaction in local spaces.

Recalling the ‘respect’ agenda (lots more here, although of course the Blair government's respect website site has disappeared) I’d note that well-meaning ideas of this kind tend to lack appreciation of what it’s actually like to live in an area where the tensions of uncivil behaviour are consistently high; or that people are and always have been working to confront disorder around them.

So we read that the proposed approach ‘relies on training and skilling people to meet social challenges, rather than always resorting to the law or police’.

‘Always’? People aren’t always resorting to the law or the police. False start, immediate disqualification.

Residents almost always are already investing in the co-production of safety, often in a context where the police and other agencies are unresponsive and the law is simply not an accessible option. What's it like living on an estate characterised by civic absence? Draining, disempowering.

Lynsey Hanley, meanwhile, has stepped forward and admonished the RSA gently in this Guardian article. She goes on to point directly at the problem of ‘the true nature of privilege’ which is that ‘it allows you to live an entirely stress-free existence, should you choose to do so.’

‘Having lived for a long time in a poor area and then, for a much shorter time, in a rich one, it strikes me that the main difference is the overwhelming sense of control and "rightness" the rich area had. Anti-social behaviour was much rarer for the simple reason that people generally had better things to do and had no wish or reason to debase themselves in public.’ 

This is what I think of as the 21st century version of 'two nations'. Lynsey goes on:

‘The point is that we cannot do the work of the state without the back-up of internal as well as external resources. A fragmented neighbourhood of stressed and transient people is not going to be able to police itself as well as a settled area of contented and confident people.’

I'm sure there is scope for Ben Rogers' idea to be grafted on to existing community initiatives. As a movement of its own, I think not.

 

Towards sustainable service involvement

When a bit of home decorating has to be done, old workshop flip chart sheets come in handy. I just discovered this one on the floor under a pot of paint.

I don't know where it came from but it’s definitely pre-recession, probably at least five years old, and would have been from a workshop in which I was helping participants to reflect on the relation between participation and governance. The sheet, with a quotation pasted in the centre, would have been passed round a few tables to get an accumulation of views.

Here’s the quotation, does anyone recognise it? I don’t know where it comes from, perhaps a recognised academic source or policy paper, or an online forum of some kind -

‘Community involvement costs public services significant time and money. Communities volunteer their scarce time and limited resources, taking away their energies from other activities in their community. If neither providers nor communities are clear about the objectives nor perceive any impact on decisions, on service quality or on citizen satisfaction, the policy is not sustainable in the face of tightening finances and difficult decisions about resource allocation.’

Allowing for the challenge being made, quite rightly, to the use of the word ‘communities’ rather than reference made to individuals, what struck me was that all the comments were negative, and some completely dismissive, about the sentiments expressed. ‘Wrong assumptions’, someone has scrawled. Does that imply blind faith in the ability of people in communities to bring about change?

FWIW, my own take on it would be that if community involvement proves not to be sustainable on these terms (which do not seem unreasonable in themselves) maybe it’s just not being handled properly.

Or maybe, given the current trajectory, it is subject to a gradual cultural change which is already well underway and which in time will render phrases like ‘community involvement’ meaningless: maybe we'll be talking about trying to stimulate ‘sustainable service involvement’ in what local people are doing.

So here’s a rewrite for a future workshop exercise:

‘Service involvement costs local communities significant time and energy. Officers commit scarce time and limited resources, taking away their energies from other duties in their area. If neither they nor residents are clear about the objectives nor perceive any impact on decisions, on quality of life or on citizen satisfaction, the policy is not sustainable in the face of tightening finances and difficult decisions about resource allocation.’

 

The hidden wealth of informal activities

Instinctively I flinch at the phrase ‘hidden wealth of communities’ because I just think, here they come, the Haves want to take that as well.

Well it’s been tough for the rich and powerful lately and they’ve started to get a little uneasy about the rate of return on their enormous investments. And really, one can’t help thinking that poor people just have to work harder, it’s not good enough, let’s see what else we can plunder from them. What’s this social capital they have, couldn’t we make something out of that?

The model’s straightforward: if only poor people would do more with their social capital – all those network connections made in clubs and pubs and community centres, my dear fellow, places where they laugh at stuff one simply wouldn’t comprehend – public services would become obsolete or cost less to run and profit would be easier to make at the top.

Yes, it could be deemed offensive for people with lots of money to describe the social capital of people on low incomes as ‘wealth’, and then to try to exploit it. Having said that, semantic niceties aside, it does matter how local social connections give rise to informal and formal participation; and how they in turn relate to formal governance. I’d subscribe to the view put forward back in 2005 by Paul Skidmore and John Craig in Start with people (an unacknowledged precursor of some elements in current policy thinking):

‘we need to create greater value from the connections popular participation creates between public services, civil society and our structures of democratic representation.’

But it’s taking so long to get policy recognition for the value of those interactions, while all the time the third places we need for this associational life are increasingly threatened. Even the stoutest defender of the current government, and they do exist, stout ones anyway, could hardly deny the assertiveness (some might call it wanton vandalism) of its deconstruction of the public realm. It doesn’t help.

Start with people explored the connections within and beyond civil society that are forged in community organisations. So, more broadly, does this recent report from ResPublica, Clubbing together, by Keith Cooper and Caroline Macfarland, sub-titled unfortunately ‘the hidden wealth of communities’. It explores the potential for a greater ‘club-culture’ in the UK. It offers a review and a very welcome discussion of the largely forsaken place of local clubs and community centres in associational life, mostly well-written, if clearly rushed.

Will this report push the pace among policy makers, to help protect and promote local civil associations? There’s a crucial section on page 31 which refers to social impact statements and cites a Public Administration Select Committee report, ending – you might almost think inspirationally - with these points:

‘A better recognition of the hidden wealth of informal activities [that’s more like it] requires this more sophisticated understanding of how casual connections contribute to our national social capital stocks… Leisure pursuits, as ‘crucibles of casual connections’ that are purposive, pooling, and encourage inclusive social mixing, should be recognised and promoted in policy implementation as vehicles for cultivating social value.’

Yes, more please. And among the report’s recommendations there’s a strong and much-needed case made for social value impact statements. Coming from this source, it may be heard, and if there’s anything left of the public realm by the time it gets processed, some good will come of it.

Meanwhile, back on page 31, the authors break down the category of 'casual connections' and point out the need

‘to distinguish between the kinds of connections we form when engaged in purposive activity from (sic) non-purposive types of chance activity, such as bumping into friends or family at the shops or striking up conversations with strangers at bus stops.'

They note that

'Purposive casual connections are forged and fostered in situations where people indulge in activities for a particular purpose and social outcome, when engaging in sport or team activities, other competitive games such as bingo, or educational leisure such as arts classes.'

Which of course has long been one of the arguments for adult learning, so wretchedly underfunded by recent governments. I merely mention. It doesn't mean that we can dismiss ‘non-purposive casual connections': we're told that these more informal encounters

'are unlikely to lead to social actions.’ 

The word ‘directly’, inserted about four words from the end, might have helped saved this sentence, otherwise it’s an unfortunate remark which weakens the whole approach. Non-purposive casual connections are fundamental – everything else would fall over without them. It would be difficult to describe or account for social life (adapting a phrase used by David Morgan which I quoted here) without passing and fleeting acquaintances. Apart from anything else, they give rise to a lot of other encounters and activities. In social relations, the trivial is massively significant. The 2008 CLG guidance on ‘meaningful interaction’ made the same mistake. We have been here before a few times.

That is not to say that casual connections in purposive surroundings are not important, of course they are. Just don’t diss the superficial, ok? You see why this paper is such a frustrating read, by turn informative and insightful, then inadequate and misguided.

As an example of the latter, and I’m really not worked up about this, there’s a shallow section on ‘From online to face-to-face interaction’ which embarassingly fails to grasp the extent or nature of local online interaction. This would not be a problem if the authors didn’t decide to pronounce on the subject with such assumed authority.

Local social technologies have moved on a long way from ‘cyber balkanisation’ – the phenomenon whereby online participation is perceived to cluster around interest not locality (and no, Putnam didn’t coin the term, it goes back at least to Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson in 1996. I published something on this in New statesman in about 99. It's past).

Just a glance at Keith Hampton’s work, well-known as the leading researcher in this field, would have helped; or even some extensive, well-respected, ahem, home-grown UK primary research carried out a couple of years ago. After that, when chapter four begins on the premiss that 'individuals have adapted their group behaviours to changing socio-cultural and technological environments' without reference to Barry Wellman and networked individualism, it's hard to retain much confidence.

Where I feel this paper fails most, however, is at what may be the most difficult task, which is explaining what the traditional concept of membership means in the network society. Is association through membership, with or without the tradition of unionism, co-operatives and mutual societies, an anachronism or a social necessity? Personally I suspect it's a characteristic of hierachical societies dominated by organisations rather than networks, but I'm ready to be persuaded otherwise. In spite of an interesting section on ‘From consumers to members’, this paper doesn’t get near an answer.

My sense of disappointment in the squandered opportunity of this paper is barely allayed by the possibility that ResPublica's access to policy makers might have some effect. Perhaps shrewdly, they adopted a smart technique to promote the report among people in positions of power, while discouraging those in community development or community action from taking any notice – they got Eric Pickles to launch it. 

But still, the unexpected attention on clubs is welcome. My excellent friend Ruth Cherrington, an authority on working men’s clubs, will doubtless be as pleased as the rest of us that at last some policy attention might be paid to the ‘untapped value’ of ‘membership environments’. But only a big society sleepwalker would overlook the likelihood that there would be attempts to capture and exploit a celebration of ordinary people’s community lives mutually-constructed against the odds.

With a couple of exceptions, the recommendations are disappointingly unambitious, characterised by the customary passing of the buck to local authorities, using the standard reality-blind formula of ‘local authorities need to consider [insert  favourite topic] as an alternative to closure’.

Maybe that last phrase, ‘alternative to closure’, needs a little more reflection among right wing think tanks. Taking the right's approach to public libraries as an example - often offered as one of the key reasons for the tories to get a thorough hammering as soon as moderate middle class people can get to the polling stations – it’s worth noting that an alternative to closure is sometimes, ahem, keeping things open.

(My dear chap, why didn’t we think of that?)

And that's it really - arguing for investment in informal social networks is vital but seems pointless in a policy context dominated by the demolition of the public. 

One last thought. I mentioned Skidmore and Craig’s Start with people, an uneven work but one that should not be overlooked. With all the recent fuss about the ‘innovation’ of localism as if it were an invention of this government, you might be surprised to read this on p88 – published seven years ago:

‘subject to certain safeguards, if local communities can demonstrate sufficient popular support they should be granted a right of initiative to propose a local intervention and require local authorities to bring forth a proposal and vote on it.’

Even their best ideas aren't new.

 

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.

 

Neighbourhood planning is already being ‘re-thought’

Today saw the publication of a paper from ResPublica in association with the RIBA on Re-thinking neighbourhood planning: from consultation to collaboration.

Start with the document title and allow yourself a wee smile. Neighbourhood planning was introduced not much more than a year ago, but apparently this is long enough for it to need ‘re-thinking’ – by an organisation whose director is an acknowledged influence on contemporary Tory policy.

Then consider this: the paper argues that

‘involving communities in planning on a collaborative, rather than purely consultative basis will not only lead to more successful developments, it can also generate social capital and value…’

It’s really a bit scary if, as implied, neighbourhood planning policy hitherto had not absorbed this basic community development principle. I guess I haven’t been paying attention. It’s not clear how this cultural shift in understanding will be brought about.

But it gets better, and there’s a welcome emphasis on developing some SROI indicators. Among other recommendations it suggests that the government should:

‘appoint an independent panel of experts to define the metrics and structures required to capture the social value created through the neighbourhood planning process.’

And should accumulate evidence to:

‘create future economic indicators that can be used to monitor the social impact of neighbourhood planning as part of a ‘total neighbourhood’ approach.’

Bring on the total neighbourhood approach. Government, it is suggested, should also put in place

‘the legal framework to introduce a ‘Neighbourhood Consultation Deposit’ paid up-front on committing to a Neighbourhood Partnership Agreement, as a prerequisite for the planning application process. This should be used to fund the collaboration process and independent support for Neighbourhood Forums.’

One last thought. The words ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ are used quite a lot in the paper, reminding me that there’s an overlooked skirmish going on in some of the dirty impasses of contemporary public policy: a fierce tussle between (often entrenched) professional defence of ‘standards,’ and political determination to break them down. (I have some sympathy with the politicians here, strongly favouring as I do an anti-professional ethos in community development and being distrustful of the way some professions become preoccupied with their own status). Oh that reminds me, by way of example, elsewhere today, the battle lines have been more firmly drawn on the question of volunteers replacing the specialised roles of staff who work in libraries. 

Planning is complex (unavoidably?) and the paper acknowledges that neighbourhood planning cannot move forward without an appropriate revision – but certainly not an abandonment - of the relation between resident and expert. This is not new but its restatement from this kind of source is very welcome.

 

Seven ways to disrupt your public space

I distrust numbered lists of ‘rules’ or ‘laws’. In community practice and social policy we ought to have grown out of cheap commercial advertising techniques.

And apart from anything else I feel patronised by the implication that I am so stupid, these ideas that someone wants to sell me have to be reduced to a list I can carry round in my wallet and check furtively while I’m in the post office queue. (You bet my lips move while I'm reading it). Somewhere I have a draft of the Five Reasons Not to Bother With Silly Lists of Rules.

Having said that, ahem, yes I accept there’s often useful stuff to be gleaned, even wisdom, as in this case over on the Placemaking Blog:

1. Identify and eliminate your place’s persistent visitor pain points
2. Dramatically reduce complexity
3. Cut costs 90 percent or more: think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper
4. Make stupid places smart
5. Teach your stakeholders to talk
6. Be utterly inclusive
7. Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.

 

 

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.

 

What is social participation?

‘Social participation comprises three dimensions: neighbouring, trust, and interest in politics.’

This comes from a chapter of early findings from the ESRC’s Understanding society programme (the new household longitudinal study, described as ‘the world’s largest household panel survey’). The sentence is regarded as sufficiently important to be given a large-font margin box all of its own, so they must have meant it.

It’s certainly different. Those who construct these large national surveys have to make a few questions go a long way, which ain’t easy; but it’s quite hard to see how you could get to this 3D reduction from the mix of concepts covered for example in this mindmap which I knocked up a few years ago. And we need the survey makers to get their structures right because they will set in train a whole lot of subsequent research, policy and practice for years to come.

We can compare and contrast the Understanding Society framework with, for instance, the framework offered in the recent Pathways through participation report. Distinguishing social, public and individual participation, the PtP summary report suggests that social participation includes

'being involved in formal voluntary organisations, informal or grassroots community groups, and formal and informal mutual aid and self help.'

The PtP project put a lot of intellectual effort into the topic, and the tag cloud on their site boasts an enticing array of terms; but I don’t see the words ‘neighbouring’ or ‘trust’. There are just two items for ‘politics’.

So here we have two national level initiatives offering quite different frameworks for a concept that affects all of us and has increasing salience in policy. The Pathways approach is more thorough and altogether more convincing, but unfortunately the Understanding Society approach is likely to have influence for some time as the next waves of data build up and get used.

In their effort to explain their framework, the Understanding Society authors trip themselves up quite quickly:

‘Neighbouring captures informal social participation, while general trust and interest in politics capture participation in formal organisations.’

Well no, they don’t, not by a long way. I’m not an academic so I don’t know what the protocol is, but I suspect that if this was an undergraduate essay you’d send them off to start again.

A new age of collective action?

 

According to a reporter on R4’s Today programme this morning, one trade union has seen membership increase by 11,000 in the past three months. So while the coalition government is determinedly polarising British life, by making no effort to constrain the vulgar greed of the wealthy while patronisingly clobbering the least well off, it’s proving quite efficient at stimulating collective action.

So this ‘rebuke to an elite that gives money to banks at the expense of the poor’ might just be an unanticipated manifestation of big society, for those who remember it. And there’s nowt like a bit of class confrontation to help take your mind off the niceties of economic forecasting.

Meanwhile it’s fun to scan through the 102 things not to do if you hate taxes – for example, ‘Do not walk or run on sidewalks… Do not expect to be able to vote on election days.’ (Via Diane Dyson).

Maybe those of us who believe in the importance for civilisation of some things being public, and who resent the systematic erosion of that principle by the Haves, should keep a short version of this list in our pockets as a handout for those moments when we encounter these people – which is always in public space of course.

 

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 neutering of community development?

It’s fair to say that a vacuum was created by the recent abrupt ending of government funding to the likes of Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange, and Urban Forum. From slightly to one side (the usual angle) it appears as if the Big Lottery Fund’s People Powered Change programme is swelling within that vacuum.

People Powered Change is the over-arching theme for Big’s investments in England. It encompasses a range of approaches to support and develop community action. The banner signals an intention to stimulate and facilitate local efforts to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods, using information and various tools to multiply the benefits of community-based initiatives.

Of course, the government’s hands-off approach is unsurprising. But at a PPC event on Monday I was struck by the picture of Jim Diers and Cormac Russell from Nurture Development, at the door of No.10 Downing Street. I have no doubt that their presentation would have been inspiring and thought-provoking. Jim spoke at an event I co-organised with Shared Intelligence last year: we already know how powerfully he conveys the value and impact of community action.

As I wrote in a piece for the Guardian’s voluntary sector network, Cormac and Jim promote asset based community development (ABCD). This was heavily reinforced at the PPC meeting and it seems to fit sweetly with Big’s approach. So the question is not just whether it is enough for PPC to dominate the vacuum left by the weakening of key funded community development agencies (and to be fair I'm sure Big would welcome more agencies with clout alongside them, in that space); we should also take note that the dominant ethos is a particular brand of CD.

So what? Quite rightly, ABCD places great emphasis on the strengths, skills and resources - the assets - that exist at local level. But to do so, it seems to have to imply that established community development works from a deficit model – over-emphasising the negatives like crime, poor housing, poor health and anti-social behaviour, especially forces external to the neighbourhood. There is a strong sense that, for instance, community action should not be complaining about environmental injustice or the local fallout from a trashed economy and depleted public services. Echoes of ‘moaning minnies’?

I would argue, first, that all decent community development is asset based, not deficit based; and secondly, that there are real dangers in appearing to dismiss those who challenge external negative influences, especially at a time when we do not have strong, influential agencies promoting other CD values like equalities and genuine empowerment. I wrote:

'Good community development practice doesn't over-emphasise disadvantage and injustice; but it isn't seduced into ignoring it, and it also has the robust courage to challenge the causes. In lieu of experienced agencies promoting these values, let's hope they get reflected in the People Powered Change programme.'

I welcome the positive implications of these guys crossing the threshold of No.10 and potentially influencing thinking in there, cos that is needed. But for all the symbolism, it’s not so much a massive moment for social policy as a good time to do some thinking about the way genuine CD - let's call it 'total community development' - could be very effectively hushed.

It’s just possible that government would like to see lots of community action where people do not recognise that some of their problems are externally-determined and are the consequence of unequal and unfair policies. This is how that could come about.

 

Power and policy

Toby Blume on 'community rights':

"The greatest concern I have about the introduction of the community rights, is also my biggest fear about the whole Big Society agenda... that government seems to have very little concern about how they are taken up by different groups. Despite Big Society’s strong language on ‘placing power in the hands of those who lack it’, there is little evidence to suggest that government wishes to actually do anything about this. If you accept that power is unequal and some groups are less powerful than others (as ‘those who lack it’ suggests), then surely you must take steps to ensure that specific effort is directed to the less powerful. I cannot believe that anyone with a modicum of intellectual capability can assume that this inequality will be addressed simply by giving everybody (the powerful and the non-powerful) the same opportunity and letting them get on with it. That is patently absurd as ‘any fule kno’ (as Molesworth would say), as the powerful are, by definition, better equipped to take advantage."

 

 

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?

 

 

'Likely to do so locally'

The Hansard Society are launching their 2011 report today and the beeb have offered an early peep into research about attitudes to political engagement.

A quarter of us (26 per cent) are either 'apathetic' or 'alienated', with a further 35 per cent either having 'no urge to get involved' or 'not very interested in more involvement'. About 14 per cent of us are 'strongly' engaged and described in this research as interested in doing more, which probably confirms Citizenship survey and other data.

The most interesting group is categorised by Ipsos MORI as 'willing localists' - 'not actively involved but willing and likely to do so locally' (emphasis added).

The category headings sent me back to research carried out by the Henley Centre a few years ago, which suggested that more than two thirds of us are either 'community bystanders' or 'passive participators'.

The Henley Centre researchers, Michelle Harrison and Michelle Singer, categorised 16 per cent of us as 'community conscious' - which may offer an interesting comparison with the 'willing localists' in the new Hansard data.

We need to understand differences in interpretation between general prosocial engagement on the one hand, and involvement that is related to the political process, on the other. This requirement applies most of all to the political theorists who seek a cure-all innovation. Harrison and Singer describe the 'community conscious' as relatively affluent, and note:

'they feel time pressure but are not low on energy. They have a very strong belief in the values of community overall, and in a sense of community where they live. This group is disproportionately female... They organise and volunteer, and are more likely to attend church or a place of worship. They are not, however, “political”: our qualitative research did not suggest that they are any more likely to engage in local politics than their less “community focused” neighbours.'

This resonates strongly with the sense that Hugh Flouch and I got from our Online neighbourhood networks study last year, that local online networks are providing a means by which this category of people can more easily and productively get involved. And the Hansard data also seems to hint at some limits to the extent to which that involvement can be politicised.

The need is to detach the community and the civic from the political. Universal politically-driven coercive messages won't work, but stimulating the local communications ecology in the civic context could be promising. This is because, as I've said often enough, there need to be conversations about all sorts of things going on at local level before we see lasting change in some of these statsitics.

 

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

It’s obvious that informal support and social networks can be critical to the way society looks after its members. When people can use their social networks to get support without going through formal agencies, there are social and economic benefits. Has the time finally come for this logic to be recognised in policy? (Image from Viil Lid).

I happen to think this is quite a big deal. I’m just back from an utterly absorbing study tour in the Netherlands, organised by my friend Jan Steyaert for researchers from the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. We were exploring policy issues around the changing nature of social care in the post-welfare society, and Eindhoven is replete with thought-provoking initiatives and articulate people who have been reflecting on the significant shifts implied for practitioners and citizens. I tagged along to make wonky observations in the background, a role to which I seem to be peculiarly suited.

The basis of lots of urgent fresh thinking is the 2007 Social Support Act (known as the Wmo) which requires a shift in care work and social work towards what is known as ‘welfare new style’. Of course, as in the UK and elsewhere, much of this is driven by the mismatch between increasing care costs and shrinking public funds; but here, unlike with big society, there is immediate and valuing recognition of people's pre-existing connections.

The main points that dominated discussion of Dutch care practice were these:

• Focus on the strengths and resources of the individual, not on their problems
• Map, stimulate and involve the individual’s social network as a key resource
• Emphasise collective rather than individual support solutions
• Use professional care as a ‘last resort’.

I think this is both radical and exemplary. Quite apart from the community development principle of bringing collective solutions into the frame, here we have at last got governmental justification for stimulating social networks, with policy makers pushing care agencies of all kinds to pay due attention to people’s social connections. For example, one disability adviser who visits people with particular needs begins with a conversation based on a simple social network mapping template. Expect to see rapid standardisation of social network mapping in the Dutch public sector.

No-one seemed to know how the idea came so marvellously to be given such primacy, but here it is. And the logic is straightforward. For a long time it has been apparent that formal care is too dominant, has unacknowledged negative effects, and is provided at unaffordable levels. Ergo, we need to recognise and invest in informal support; ergo, we need to emphasise and encourage social networks – especially at local level. Why has this not happened before or elsewhere? Is it because we don’t make measureable claims for the part played by social networks, because we can’t see the results? Is it because no budget gets attached to them, so no-one with influence wants to ‘own’ them? Incidentally, this is not about consigning professional care to insignificance, but about re-establishing an appropriate balance between formal and informal.

In theory the Wmo seems to use the term ‘informal care’ with reference mainly to long term intensive carers. But the term seemed also to be used to imply what we might call informal support, thus covering a broad spectrum from low-commitment, dip-in dip-out five minute neighbouring; through something regular perhaps like weekly shopping with or for a frail elderly person; to high-intensity 24x7 unpaid care for someone with physical disabilities. This breadth of meaning may reflect developments in thinking since the act, and would account for the emphasis on social networks.

One advice worker rationalised the process by saying that as a society,

‘We have to go back to normal and look after each other.’

And so philosophical and anthropological questions about ‘community’ get raised. On what scale and under what circumstances is it 'normal' to provide informal support to others? The nostalgic plea doesn’t work very well, I suggest: some people challenge the mythology of the close-knit community, others point to the downsides and the basis in necessity neighbouring, and so on. Against that, we need some basis on which to establish the levels of trust that can in turn give rise to useable network connections.

An acknowledged problem for the Dutch approach is that many people are reluctant to ask for support, to make claims on their social network, to invest in their social network or exploit it for such purposes. One observation we heard was that in some cases ‘the social network is broken’. Another story concerned an individual who appeared at first to have no appropriate sources of support, then when they went out onto the street with the social worker there was plenty of recognition by others and the individual acknowledged,

‘yes of course I have a network, but I didn’t want the network to know my situation’.

We heard about this on several occasions and in particular in the significant research of Lilian Linders – which I happen to know a little about and which I will describe in a separate post in the near future.

 

 

Informal volunteering continues to decline

I missed this when it came out a month ago but it's worth going back to. We now have Citizenship survey figures for informal volunteering for the first half of the present year (April - September) and the decline ought to be of real concern to policy makers.

Over a year ago I pointed out a five per cent decline within the space of a year. The proportion saying that they volunteer informally at least once per month is now down to 27 per cent; and once per year, 54 per cent. These compare with 37 per cent and 68 per cent respectively in the bumper year of 2005. I devised this chart from data supplied in Table 5 here.

I've suggested before that this trend might just be a bit critical in terms of care for older people. I'm writing this in the plush comfort of the night ferry (yes, free reliable wifi) on my way back from an insightful study visit to the Netherlands. Two intensive days of learning have clarified the argument for me sharply. The Dutch are well in front of us: their Social Support Act (2007) has led to a radical emphasis on informal support and social networks, which I want to cover in my next post.

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'.

 

'Communities! Seize your opportunities!'

I try not to be negative all the time, honestly, but these are strange times. Here's an unfortunate post on the ResPublica blog which exemplifies the peculiar cultural gap in understanding that divides the country. Matt Leach comes straight out and admits that big society is top-down: but version 2.0 is emerging which will be - wait for it -

'the start of a transfer of responsibility for mobilising and leading the project from central government downward to our neighbourhoods and communities.'

Stand well back, here comes big society 2.0 (or 'Big Society' as these people like to frame it: the initial capitals presumably intended to give some cred just in case it struggles to merit it).

It strikes me that version 2.0 will probably accelerate the tendency to retrospective or lateral branding. Expect more desperate or subtle attempts (like this one previously) to capture and badge 'initiatives like Lambeth's Co-operative Council, emerging plans around housing in Rochdale...' as evidence of big soc.

Among the give-away remarks in the article - Big Soc Two Dot Nought, we are told, is going to be

'an open source project defined by the extent to which communities are willing to seize the opportunities available.'

I know it's just one throw-away piece of weak rhetoric but it does exemplify the problem I think. It's not nice to accuse people of arrogance but when they are in a position of influence it may be justified. I'm prepared to believe that much of BS thinking was conceived with good intentions and it's not all consciously politically manipuated. But are we to expect that 'thought leaders' will get any less arrogant in version 2.0?

I've spent enough time over the past 25 years on the edge of London think-tanks, and in quite a few meetings in Westminster, in addition to time spent listening to people in community groups in various places around the country and beyond - people tryng to do stuff themselves against the odds. Those 'odds' don't just include overly-bureaucratic local government. They also include deeply-embedded class-based 'us-and-them' language breathed night and day by people in positions of power. We are the officer class, we govern, it's a tremendous responsibility you know. Your role is to be, well er, energetic, when we finally get the conditions right for you.

The lesson I'm finally having to accept is that arrogance is inevitably found in positions of power and doesn't know itself. Anyone who can write 'the extent to which communities are willing to seize the opportunities available' without self-parody is so manifestly part of the problem, perhaps we just have to be patient until they go away.

 

'In there, or out here'

On one of my favourite themes, gated communities, check out another little gem from babycakesromero...

'You're looking to come into a non-gated community, so unless you can show me proof of residency for out here, I can't let you proceed...'

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.

 

Informed and willing participation

Last week I mentioned the government's 'barrier busting' initiative designed to free-up local action. Now the National Association for Neighbourhood Management have published their idea for a 'liability waiver form', drafted in the summer, which is

intended to make it easier for people to undertake practical but informal activities which involve some kind of potential hazard and where an owner of land or equipment is concerned about the risk of claims of liability against them.

NANM describe it as

a way to help people get on and do things like mow a grass verge, clear a patch of derelict ground, or… (like the folks in Longlevens in Gloucestershire – see below) help clear the snow and ice.   It is loosely based on what you’d sign to hire a mountain bike or go paintballing and basically says “we’ve chosen to do what we’re doing, there might be a small risk, but we won’t pin the blame anyone if we get hurt”.

If you make use of it or have some comments, tell the good folk at NANM.

 

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.

 

A crisis of volunteer management?

Yesterday I was at a conference in which representatives from the voluntary sector in south London were seeking understanding about big society. Today I was at something quite different - the launch of a substantial paper on poverty and social exclusion in later life by the Centre for Social Justice.

On both occasions I was struck by a clear common sub-theme in the discussion: people involved in the management and support of volunteers are getting very agitated as their work is getting hacked away and its validity seems not even to be debated.

What seems to be happening is that public sector funding cuts are eroding systematic management of the volunteer force rapidly. This is consistent which what some people see as the big society ethos: process hardly seems to matter any more. Big society isn't bothered how stuff happens, as long as people get out there and do it. Against that, volunteer managers speak from experience when they insist that volunteers need management, support, regulation, training and so on.

I think it's fair to say that a significant proportion of the volunteer force comes from the traditional conservative philanthropic base, not from community action so there's an interesting new political take on this.

But having railed against the over-formalisation of human and social systems for years, even I am starting to feel a little queasy about the wild ride we're all going to have as the free-for-all involvement culture takes over.

Discussing big society without using the words 'big society'

A couple of days ago someone posted this note on the East Dulwich Forum (a very popular local site which covers an area in south London):

sweep your own leaves, clean your own ice and snow: saving the council money balancing the budget

Posted by ataubin November 14, 04:48PM

At the Community Council Meeting on 10 November at St Faith's we were told Southwark has to cut 80 million from its budget. But where? What if we make East Dulwich a trial, a model for community (tiny) action that saves mega bucks? If every one sweeps the leaves and clears the ice and snow from the 8 metres in front of their property the council would save up to 10 million pounds. Yes, you read that correctly: 10 million if everyone did it. Seems a small action to me to save a lot of money. In an entire year it might take one hour? two?. No leaf blowers, no trucks. 10 million saved...

The sequence of responses encapsulates a number of the standard responses to big society, including for example -

The Perverse-Logic rejection:

'there would need to be a shed load of money spent to advertise this so people knew they had to'

(which seems to deny the power of the local online network itself to do this bit for nothing).

The Naive-Detection-of-Fatal-Flaw parry:

'Great idea and no problem doing it but my street has quite a lot of older people living on it. Would they be expected to clear up? If they don't then how will it work with half the street clear and the rest not?'

The I-Couldn't-Possibly-Where-Are-The-Servants? riposte (not for the novice, a difficult niche genre this one but supremely performed here):

'I don't mean to be unhelpful but I own neither broom nor shovel (dustpan and brush aside). Having traversed the mulchy leaves in frippantly high heels, I know this is a task that needs doing, but I'm afraid my tools are not fit for purpose.'

The We're-So-Rubbish-In-This-Country-Other-Places-Do-It-Better standard proclamation:

'In Germany and parts of the US and Canada you have to clear the path in front of your house of snow by law.'

The Informative-Intervention by a ward councillor:

'The Snow code highlights good practice to clear snow from pavements and paths such that you can avoid being successfully sued - which is a commonly given reason for people saying why they haven't cleared the pavement outside their home.'

The Calm-Sensible-Intervention by same:

'Their (sic) will never be enough council employees to clear all pavements outside homes - hundreds of kilometres of pavements.
But if residents clear the pavement outside their home the effects of the snow would be dramatically reduced. This really helps reduce peoples isolation.'

The Defence-Of-Jobs-Above-All-Else deflection:

'I presume more people would be made unemployed by this thus money would have to be spent supporting them and their families?'

The Completely-Miss-The-Point-Damnd-If-I-Will blurting-out (exquisitely executed in this example):

'Considering the amount of council tax we pay I personally wont be sweeping any leaves or clearing ice from the streets or taking part in any other activity that is supposedly covered by my paying of council tax.'

And the Thin-End-Of-The-Wedge kneejerk:

'How far do we go with this? Self-policing? That would save billions!'

Ooops, I nearly overlooked this -

The Timid-Reassertion-Of-The-Basic-Idea:

'But if we all did our bit in sweeping leaves, clearing snow etc that can be regarded as a physical, non financial, contribution to the local area that avoids an increase in local taxes. As an added benefit we might get to know our neighbours, help out th elderly who were unable to sweep / clear and perhaps as an added bonus everyone would take a little more civic pride intheir immediate vicinity.'

 

'Local solutions to local problems'?

Weather's turning cold, time for a precautionary draught of Kev's Traditional Grumpy Old Cynicism.

Among the happy-clappy mantras trotted out so readily in the present policy context is this one: 'local solutions to local problems'. As with 'there is no money' and 'we're all in this together', all a politician has to do is regurgitate this and shake a few hands, and apparently-intelligent beings fold away like reeds before the prow.

I observe that a lot of poverty that can be witnessed today is experienced as a local problem, well it would be wouldn't it, to which people are not able to find a local solution. Cos there's this thing called the economy, and it doesn't simply operate at the local level.

Or you might not like to think about poverty, so let's take transport. Major roads affect traffic flows indirectly causing damage in local areas, which sometimes local people are powerless to do much about. There may be a regional solution, but often not a local one. And so on.

It's not a new observation, even on this blog. Five years ago I posted some thoughts on neighbourhood governance after a meeting at which the point was made that residents in a given locality have to be able to intervene at levels other than their own. And I noted that people were uncomfortable with the requirement to have neighbourhood boundaries defined in order to ensure representation and therefore accountability.

Well well, plus ca change. The recent Local growth white paper includes the idea for 'neighbourhood plans' - around boundaries that the government doesn't want to have the responsibility for deciding. Here at para 3.9 is the stated intention of

giving every neighbourhood the chance to shape its own development through the creation of neighbourhood plans, which will give local communities greater flexibility and the freedom to bring forward more development than set out in the local authority plan.

'The freedom to bring forward more development'? Who are these people comprising 'neighbourhoods' who are so determined to surround themselves with more development? Could there be a connection with this point made by Domenic Donatantonio on the Planning blog? -

in a bid to scythe through red tape, the government has said it will provide incentives to ensure that local communities benefit from development, raising the dangerous spectre of cash payments to buy off frustrated neighbours.

And here's Huw Morris on Planning daily in the second of two provocative articles (the previous one is here):

For planners, the big number from the big society will come with the onset of neighbourhood plans. The final bill for these as yet unproven tools depends on the size and shape of each authority.

However, the cost of producing each neighbourhood plan is likely to be at least £30,000, while some commentators put it at closer to £80,000. Another estimate puts the number of rural and urban neighbourhoods affected by the localism bill at 18,000.

Even on the most conservative estimates, this suggests £540 million will be needed to secure national coverage. At a stroke, planning could be transformed from an income stream into a big spending service.

If such figures are plucked out of the air, this is inevitable. The government has failed to offer any kind of cost-benefit analysis of its proposals. However worthy the principles and visions of a particular policy, such a lacuna in an age of austerity is staggering. It is just the type of oversight that leads to unintended and damaging consequences.

I submit that there's been some naive policy thinking which will lead to tears. It's not helped by thinking of 'communities' as some kind of 'here's-one-I-prepared-earlier' consensus, nor by pretending that local problems are necessarily going to have local solutions.

To me, it makes sense to invest in community development that is geared to helping people work towards consensus in decision-making contexts in the respected and respectful company of professionals; and also to equalise genuine participation, co-design and co-delivery through the area and regional forums that will remain necessary in order for people to have a say in decisions on a wider geographical scale than the neighbourhood.

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

In the debate at yesterday's launch of nef's paper on big society there was a lot of confusion about philanthropy, mutual aid and community action. Each of these at some point seemed to be implied by speakers and comments from the floor in using the short-hand but inadequate term 'charities' (or 'small charities'); and sometimes covered by the term 'volunteers'.

Each of these forms of involvement tries to compensate for the shortfall in formal support or otherwise complement the role of the state, and is assumed to be unpaid. However, they may differ very markedly - in political ideology for example and obviously in the degree to which they aspire to empower or in practice disempower. It's also obvious that they are unevenly distributed in localities across the country. As I've suggested before, in some places it will be relatively easy to mobilise philanthropic volunteering while in others it could prove very hard to sustain even the proudest tradition of mutual aid.

Guardian Society editor Patrick Butler was the only one to come close to unpacking this in his short talk, sending me back to a seminal paper by Gabriel Chanan called Taken for granted, published in 1991.

Taken for granted was important because it revealed the distinction between volunteering based on a philanthropic tradition (ie something which comes from the surplus that 'well-motivated people' donate to others who they see as less fortunate than themselves); and community action which arises from people's own life-support needs, being

occupied in looking after children, elderly people, sometimes people with disabilities, and in doing the whole range of unpaid work which is taken for granted in the running of society - cooking, shopping, cleaning, maintaining social networks, 'emotional housekeeping', protecting local interests and the many other forms of essential activity which we take for granted as the basis for our common existence.

Gabriel went much further, locating the cause of the confusion over the community and voluntary sectors in the economic value placed on unpaid work:

All this tends to confirm the conventional definition of economic activity and to reinforce the image of the 'inactive' half of the population as being passive dependents of the 'active' half.

Sounds sort-of familiar. Twenty years on, here we are contemplating a forced revision of that conventional definition of economic activity against a cacophony of complaints about the economically 'inactive'. It's not a good time to be blurring our understanding of the different agents who can bring about that revision.

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

'many of the charities that the big society will rely on will be dead, dying or missing in action.'

This brings an urgency to the necessary examination of that word 'charities', and perhaps we have to move the big society emphasis away from philanthropy that disempowers, to mutual aid and community action that drives and makes possible the development of skills, confidence, trust, tolerance, co-production, and local economies that include caring.