The Spirit of ’45: a flawed but powerful message for contemporary politics

You would need a heart of stone – or to be Liam Byrne – not to shed a tear during The Spirit of ’45.  My moment came when the retired doctor – one of a number of individuals whose reflections and reminiscences punctuated the narrative, and whose demeanour might have been made for a white coat and stethoscope – recalled how on the first day of the NHS, he was making a house call to a family and heard a child coughing upstairs, and offered to help.  The mother demurred, obviously worried by the cost, until the doctor gently reminded her that his visits were now free. It’s a story that has all sorts of resonances, not least of tales from my own family history of when the arrival of the NHS  eased life so significantly for my grandmother and my semi-invalid, weak-chested grandfather.

Ken Loach’s film tells the story of how a nation mobilised for total war determined never to allow the squalor and poverty of the 1930s to be repeated and elected a Labour government on an avowedly socialist platform, and how that Government took the pillars of the economy into public ownership, built good quality social housing, and set up the National Health Service.  He then jumps forward thirty years to Thatcher and discusses how the structures that had been established after 1945 were dismantled and returned to management for profit, focussing in particular on the brutality visited on striking miners in the 1985 Strike,  and culminating in the destruction of the NHS under the Coalition.  But the film also shows the disappointment that the structures of the new nationalised industries did not mean workers’ control – although nationalisation brought huge gains (for example the ending of the priority of output over safety in the mining industry) the structures of management remained fundamentally unchanged, with the newly nationalised industries being managed from the top down (although paradoxically the union officials interviewed in the post-1970 sections of the film all argued that privatisation meant that the efficiencies of central strategic planning were no longer to be had). The narrative is carried on by archive footage and narration intermingled with comment from a number of people – a man who grew up in the pre-war Liverpool slums, a Welsh miner, a group of retired nurses and our doctor.  The post-Thatcher narrative was carried on by a succession of Union officials, who emphasised the key role of class in the politics of the era and argued that Labour had abandoned its working class roots.  It ends with a powerful and emotional message about the witness of those who lived through the post-war years, and the imperative of passing their hope and belief on to a young generation that had few reasons for either.

It is a powerful, emotional film – it is shamelessly polemical, often in revealing ways.  Footage of the 1945 election campaign shows Churchill not as the powerful war leader, but strangely glassy-eyed in front of the camera in what seemed like a precursor of a party political broadcast, or hesitant in front of a hostile, heckling crowd. Or the crucial fact – often overlooked in the trope of Churchill as triumphant war leader – that on the home front, and in the organisation of wartime production, Britain effectively already had a Labour government, in which Labour Ministers directed the command economy on which victory had depended.  Elsewhere the manipulation was more obvious – Margaret Thatcher’s conference speeches interspersed with the shots of the more grotesquely eccentric party faithful, or where at the end – after the film’s witnesses had expressed their optimism – the opening shots of VE Day celebrations were repeated, this time in colour in contrast to the monochrome of the rest of the film.

There were serious omissions, too.  Not just sociological oddities like the largely-forgotten fact that Britain was consumed by a crime-wave in the years immediately following the war, but most significantly the fact that the British economy was completely shattered by the war – a fact mentioned but whose implications (profoundly important, I’d argue, in making a contemporary link) were not considered.   Economics was barely mentioned – no more than a passing reference to Keynes.

There were a number of thoughts that I took away from the film:

First, following on from the point about how Labour had directed the domestic war effort, I wondered whether 1945 was a unique moment in history that made the achievements of the Attlee Government possible.  The war had demonstrated that a planned, centralised economy could work, in a way that was unparalleled before or since.  Perhaps – just perhaps – part of Labour’s triumph in 1945 was down to an acceptance of the use of such methods to avoid the chaos that followed the First World War; perhaps the return to the Tories in 1951 was a sign that the moment had passed, and that politics as usual – based around appeals to the individual rather than the collective – had returned.

Second, the film had almost nothing to say about economics, but the economic background of the Attlee Government is of central importance; and the comparison with the modern economic climate is instructive.  After six years of total war the British economy was shattered and its infrastructure was worn out.  At a time when we are being told that we must endure the economics of austerity because we lived beyond our means, and in response to the economic crisis of 2007-8, it is worth remembering that the creation of the NHS and the building of social housing to give working people decent, secure homes as of right took place against an immeasurably worse economic situation – albeit one that reflected the necessities of national survival rather than the casino economics of bankers’ Ponzi schemes.  The austerity of the late 1940s and the persistence of rationing were barely mentioned; but surely played a part in the return of politics as normal in 1951. It is additionally almost forgotten that the Attlee government presided over the most fundamental economic redistribution of modern times – in which wages for working people rose decisively in contrast to the wealth of the rentier class.  At a time when we are seeing the reverse taking place it seems important to make the link between social progress and redistribution. Moreover, there is an interesting parallel between the nationalisation of the coal, steel and transport industries and the original motivation behind Thatcher’s privatisations – the need to invest in infrastructure that was clapped out.

Third, the film does not consider the fact that the Labour Party of 1945 emerged from the split of 1931, in which the Labour leadership went into coalition to form a National Government.  It was a party that had explicitly rejected the fiscal orthodoxy and the reductions in the living standards of working people that Ramsay Macdonald had embraced as part of a flawed Westminster consensus.  It’s important because Labour’s leadership today looks much more like Ramsay Macdonald than George Lansbury; fiscally orthodox and apparently quite willing to live with cuts in living standards – including benefits – in the name of economic necessity.  The economics-free evasions of One Nation Labour (which I have blogged about here) look very much like the sort of thing that the Labour leaders of 1945 had consciously rebelled against in 1931; Labour in 1945 was confident in its theory.

Finally, there was a powerful sense that the witness of the participants in the film was undmediated.  Apart from a few comments about the way the media attacked Aneurin Bevan, there was almost no mention of the media.  We were firmly in the world of authentic experience – of consciousnesses formed by daily realities, not by the mediation of mass media.  This was a world of reality-based politics.

So, where  does this leave us in 2013, when the apparatus of decency that Attlee built has largely been dismantled, and we are living through the last days of the NHS as Bevan conceived it?  In a week in which a Labour front-bench, faced with a situation in which unemployed people were illegally stripped of their benefits, chose not to oppose a Bill that would nullify the redress that these people were entitled to under the law, the conclusion must be that Labour, in its present form, is not remotely capable of acting as the vehicle for any optimism that the tide against austerity economics can be turned.  Interviewees like Tony Mulhearn talked of the way in which Labour was no longer a working-class party, and no longer spoke for working people; the fact that the industries have changed and the people for whom Labour is failing to speak are now supermarket workers, contract cleaners, call-centre workers and indeed the unemployed forced on to workfare schemes rather than workers in giant, unionised industries does not negate the challenge (I could add from my own experience of my short and unhappy membership of the Labour Party in the late 1990s, what really motivated local party activists in my part of the world was not speaking for the vulnerable but expelling socialists – I remember one incident in which a local party panjandrum told us that the selection of a certain individual as a council candidate would be viewed with disfavour by No 10 –  leaving aside political considerations, an organisation that relied on such arrant nonsense to rationalise a witch-hunt had some pretty basic issues to deal with). Labour’s assimilation into the neoliberal mainstream means that it remains part of the problem, not the solution.

So where does the solution lie? Ken Loach has launched an appeal for unity on the Left to oppose austerity and to put into practice the calls for a new politics based around the values of 1945.  Leftish Labour figures like Owen Jones and Green MP Caroline Lucas are involved in launching the People’s Assembly to re-energise the Left and to recapture the values of 1945; it’s a huge but necessary task, and one that I cannot see the current Labour leadership tolerating; the challenge for the Labour left of recapturing a party that filleted its internal democracy in the 1990s to make way for new Labour looks pretty insurmountable, and Labour has long been a party intolerant of pluralism and dissent.  For me, part of the key lies in an issue that did not register in Loach’s film at all – the fact that any modern socialism must be Green, and conversely that Greens must be socialist, because the planet is under dire threat and the root of that threat is that power and wealth are in the hands of a minority determined to exploit the planet for their own benefit, rather than sustaining and nurturing it for the benefit of all; it is already obvious that in the global sense, environmental catastrophe is a matter of equality, or in Loach’s terms a class issue.  And the threat to our planet is as dangerous as the total war of 1939-45 – more so in fact – and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided without the sort of mass mobilisation that won that war, involving strong – but democratically accountable – state institutions.

Perhaps the real Spirit of ’45 is this; that people came together, worked collectively in war and for a brief few years managed to work collectively to change their society immeasurably for the better.  But over time our political culture shifted back towards individualism and lost that sense of the collective.  Faced with environmental degradation and what looks like a fundamental crisis of capitalism, we need to rediscover that collective spirit.  But we have a huge way to go.

Tory benefits campaign: ideology as a bridge of lies

The Conservative Party has launched a campaign which seeks to distinguish between hard-working families and scroungers, through a poster depicting an unshaven person lounging  on a sofa in contrast to a modest 2.4 children family who emphasise the virtues of diligent work.  It is all of a piece with George Osborne’s rhetoric about those who have their curtains closed during the day.  It’s not a new tactic – it harks back to 2010 election posters – but its timing is perhaps significant, representing a time when Government has taken a quite deliberate decision that the incomes on those on benefits will fall faster than those who do not.  It is also surely significant that it marks the arrival of Lynton Crosby into national Tory politics – this kind of rhetoric is mainstream on the Australian right.

It is of course a wholly false dichotomy.  In the real world of evidence and truth it is obvious that the majority of those receiving benefits are in work, but are not paid a living wage.  And there are no jobs – even for those who are capable of work. Coalition rhetoric about generations of worklessness has been shown to be utterly without foundation.

But it provides a narrative – one that is embraced by the media and politicians of all parties.  There is powerful ideology at work here.

To my mind, it evokes powerfully the writing of Vaclav Havel, describing the politics of late communism. Havel writes about how in the crisis of late communism, the authorities used ideology as a way of distorting the populace’s connection with reality – as a form of psychological and political manipulation.  In his essay The Power of the Powerless he refers to ideology as “a bridge of lies”:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.

The lies here are about power, who wields it and for whose benefit – for example the rhetoric of how wealth derives from hard work rather than privilege, good fortune and accident of birth (the imperative, as Ivan Illich put it, of rationalising the head start as achievment); and the illusion of democratic power in a political system in which the mainstream parties share the same underlying economic assumptions; or when powerful and entitled groups like established churches and the alumni of private schools adopt the language of victimhood.  And above all, neoliberalism needs to maintain that illusion that wealth and power are functions of work and effort – to disguise the extent to which most work is alienated, and wholly irrelevant to a culture of declining living standards for the majority. Reading Havel in an age of neoliberal hegemony is to understand the irony of the great and the good of that hegemony turning out in force at Havel’s funeral.

Above all, we now live in the age of the ideological dog-whistle – something that powerfully demonstrates the common neoliberal assumptions at work across all parties.  The Tories’ latest campaign differs from Labour’s language of “hard-working families” in degree only, not substance; and I’d guess the Tories know that very well and are playing to that.  It’s interesting that in responding to the campaign, Labour Deputy Chairman uses exactly the same language as the Tories: he talks of “taxes on strivers” in the Budget.  The same words, the same assumptions, the same dichotomy: Labour choosing – consciously or not – to adopt the language and assumptions of power rather than speaking truth to it, and doing the Tories’ work for them.  I have no doubt that Mr Dugher – like so many decent people in the Labour Party – is appalled and disgusted by what the Coalition is doing to the most vulnerable in our society. But, whether wittingly or not, his language suggests an inability to step outside the neoliberal bubble and connect with the realities.

To kick over an idol, you must first get up off your knees.  Tawney’s 80-year-old message to Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour Party has never been more resonant; if we believe that neoliberalism is a dangerous, destructive and deluded ideology we have to stop using its language, and instead find a resonant narrative rooted in truth and experience, one that talks about the realities that mainstream Westminster politics consciously avoids.  The crisis of British democracy is exemplified by the fact that there is nobody in the mainstream willing to do that.

Vaclav Havel’s position is ultimately optimistic – ideology as a bridge of lies is inherently unstable, and only lasts for as long as people are willing to live within the lie:

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.

The key, then, is for people who are not prepared to accept neoliberalism to challenge the language, to abandon it, and to learn to speak truth to power.  And it’s only when the politicians who are supposed to speak for the vulnerable and dispossessed learn to abandon neoliberal narratives that they will be able to do their job within the system.

Local rag in freedom of speech fury

A small storm is brewing in the media world in Brighton, with a claim that the monopoly local paper, the Argus, has threatened the Brighton Green party with “consequences” after a Green Party member set up a Twitter account and website criticising and ridiculing its standards of journalism.

The full story can be found here.  As this piece shows, the final straw was the Argus splashing a story about a prominent Green activist and Councillor, Ben Duncan, tweeting, at the height of the post-Budget furore,  that he did not “give a fuck” about pasties.  Like so many people, he recognised that this was a non-story – the real effects of a deeply regressive budget being hidden behind a pseudo-debate about hot pies.

The issue is not just the Argus’ obvious political bias – frequently its content appears to consist of little more than topped-and-tailed Tory press releases, and at times it’s not possible to get a cigarette paper between the Argus’ view of the world and the easy populism that it local Tory MPs’ stock in trade.  For example, on the difficult and emotive issue of local travellers’ sites, the Argus appears happy to follow the local Tories’ inflammatory line, without reflecting the serious attempts being made by the Council and other agencies to produce a long-term solution; it reports a call by Tory Councillor Dawn Barnett for local people to stop paying their Council Tax - and hence to break the law – without a word of consideration of the  implications.

A wider issue is the quality of the Argus’ journalism.  It’s undeniable that local papers are under the cosh financially – it’s so much cheaper to do churnalism, happily recycling the material produced by others.  The work of the police, ambulance and fire service press offices is of course particularly useful in this respect.  Accuracy and detail are not things that one readily associates with the material that Argus journalists write – I remember one story (and I wish I could reference it) which described a large fire in a Sussex town, causing all sorts of chaos, which failed to name the town concerned.  Elsewhere detail is often vague.  Brighton is one of the most laid-back cities in Britain – but even minor events habitually lead to “fury” and “chaos”.  A toxic combination of cost-cutting and political bias appears to have led to the abandonment of the most basic journalistic disciplines.

And, faced with criticism, the Argus is not slow to resort to threats and bluster.  Not long ago, it threatened legal action after a Council officer described it as “the local rag” – which I would have thought was at the mild end of the range of appropriate epithets.  I once had a run in with the Argus in which I sent them an email criticising their failure to report a community arts event in which primary schools from across the County had participated, and received no fewer than three angry emails back.  Moreover, the Argus is no stranger to the attentions of the PCC.

So it’s not surprising that the Argus should react in the way it has to @EveningAnus.  It’s often regarded as a third-rate product, hypersensitive to any form of criticism (and deeply secretive, it appears, about what are rumoured to be sliding circulation figures).  But, if the report is accurate, threatening the collective punishment of a political party over the actions of one of its members is something of a new low.  It is fascinating that commercial media seem so quick to resort to threats and moral blackmail in the face of an individual exercising his freedom of expression – the moral hypocrisy being exposed day after day at the Levenson inquiry seems to extend even into the stagnant backwaters of local churnalism.

But there’s a wider issue here – what is the point of local papers in a digital age?  If I want to find out about, say, crime in Sussex, I just need to go to the Sussex Police website, or follow the informative and useful Sussex Police Twitter feed.  Local papers do not report any more, it seems – reportage involves money, effort and journalistic craft, none of which appear to be things that the local media as a whole are willing to provide – they simply collate.  Churnalism rules – so why not go back to the original sources.  Local news is often accessible more easily through local blogging and Twitter, and without being filtered through the political bias of the local paper’s owners or editor.

Meanwhile, the apparent inability of the Argus to take a bit of criticism without resorting to bluster and apparent threat speaks volumes about its values.  I’d have thought a confident, successful local paper would have reacted very differently.

In praise of Molesworth

It was sad to read today that Ronald Searle, the cartoonist who created St Trinians and collaborated on the Molesworth books has died.  Molesworth, the Gorilla of 3b, and his motley collection of fellow-pupils at St Custard’s, presided over by the venal Grimes, was a huge part of my childhood; I too attended a minor prep school (at which the Molesworth books were effectively banned – any boy foolish enough to be caught in possession of one would have it confiscated to be returned at the end of term).  As a boy one laughed at the spelling and the caricatures of masters; it is only in adulthood that one realises how fully the books capture the atmosphere of the minor public school – the snobbery, the jobbery, the hypocrisy, the philistinism and anti-intellectualism disguised as learning, the endless moral bullshit.  Curiously enough the one aspect of prep school life missing is religion – a step to far, perhaps, in 1950s England?

Perhaps the most alarming thing is that Molesworth remains relevant today; it’s about a lot more than nostalgia.  Sixty years on, the morality of the English public school system is still with us, and Searle and Willans’ characters still live.  Grabber, the school bully, destined for a lifetime of power and influence off the back of his father’s wealth; Grimes, offering  the appearance of moral leadership while holding his hand open for backhanders; the playing-field as the crucible of public morality, and putting on a show for parents’ day – the same ethos that characterises Cameron’s comments about the Olympics and the Jubilee in his new year’s message.  Above all – especially in Searle’s cartoons – the aura of decay and failure, of corruption and unjustified hierarchy and moral dissembling,  dressed up as a fit and honourable set of guidelines for life.

Molesworth and his best friend Peason represent an anarchical vigour that perhaps has found its best expression recently in movements like Occupy and UK Uncut – but what seems clear is that Britain remains in thrall to the values of St Custard’s. Orwell famously wrote that England was like a family where the wrong members were in control; Cameron and Clegg’s England looks increasingly like a decaying minor public school, clinging to discredited values while failing to recognise that the world has passed it by.

The monster in your mirror

As more details emerge about Anders Behring Breivik, charged with carrying out the appalling massacre of dozens of participants at a Norwegian Socialist Party summer camp, it has been fascinating to see how the media has chosen to report the events.

First, the immediate assumption that this was an act of Islamist terror – and the fact that the media continued to press this line once it became clear that this was not the case – the Sun’s “Norway’s 9/11″ headline, but also the BBC – who ought to aspire to higher standards than that.  And then, once the fact that Breivik was no Islamist became clear, the lapsing into the easy journalistic clichés about loners.

But the comforting fantasy of the “loner” is ideological, as always designed to try and demonstrate that the individual is acting outside society, not part of it.  It’s one of a range of words that aims to show to the reader that Breivik (or indeed any other perpetrator of a shocking crime) is not one of us; monster, pervert, sicko – the repertory is large and predictable.  It’s a view that might especially appeal to those who believe that there is no such thing as society, to ensure that the person with whom we are dealing is definitively “the other”.  And there’s a more subtle distinction too – the reluctance in the British media reporting the Utoeya massacre to use the word “terrorism”, to try and isolate the incident and remove it from any social or political context.

But that won’t do.  Breivik clearly had links with far right organisations across Europe, including the English Defence League in Britain; and his actions are a reminder that the far right is resurgent across Europe and in Scandinavia in particular, with Islam as a principal target.  By attacking the Socialist Party, Breivik appears to have carried out a clearly targeted attack against the social democratic ideal that everyone associates with Scandinavia, even at a time when Sweden and Denmark have right-of-centre governments; this was an attack on the Scandinavian Model itself.  And it draws on a far-right tradition that has traditionally been strong in Scandinavia – through, for example, the practice of eugenics in the early years of the Twentieth Century – and has recently re-emerged in response to what is perceived as a growing Muslim population.

That this is a political act – an act of political terror – is implicit in the reaction of the Norwegian political establishment.  It’s a very mature and democratic reaction; Norwegian politicians argue that their country needs to ask questions about its values and democracy – in powerful contrast to the post-9/11 “Bomb them to Hell” reaction of George W Bush – the reaction of a weak man holding the highest office in a failing democracy.

This morning, the Independent published some of the collected thoughts of Breivik.  They are banal and surprisingly familiar; they’re not that different from what you might read in the comments columns of the online Daily Mail, or on the BBC’s “Have your say” sections on its website.  There is apparently a manifesto, which talks about how multiculturalism is attacking Christian society.  Breivik apparently holds beliefs that are shared by many people who comment on line – people who might use words like “common sense” to rationalise their fear of the other, or who would refer to the idea that one might acknowledge another person’s cultural viewpoint as “political correctness gone mad”.  There is a banality that forces us to look in the mirror, knowing that in our society those opinions are widely-held and not remotely unusual or abnormal.

The argument that Breivik was to some extent a product of his society does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions.  There are people who share his warped views of society everywhere – almost none of them go on killing sprees. But until we accept that society has a responsibility too I believe we cannot begin to understand and deal with the problems he represents.  And that means that there is a point up to which we all have to take collective responsibility for the values of the society we live in.

The Hounding of Gordon Brown

The latest allegations that the Sunday Times sought to obtain details of Gordon Brown’s personal finances, and in particular that it sought to publish information that his son Fraser suffered from cystic fibrosis, add a further twist to a crisis that, for News International, is spinning further and further out of control.  What possible public interest could there be in publishing details of a small boy’s illness simply because his father is a senior politician?  Whatever one thinks about the rights of journalists to inquire, it speaks much for the moral compass of those involved.

But there’s something particularly significant about the targetting of Gordon Brown.  It is difficult to think of any British Prime Minister – any senior British politician, really – who has endured as much personal abuse as Brown.  All that nastiness and innuendo – about his alleged temper tantrums, the suggestions that he was mentally unstable and socially dysfunctional.  There are a lot of Blairites who were quite happy to ride the tabloid tiger who should be consulting their consciences very carefully.

In my time in the Civil Service I only met Gordon Brown once – when he was still Chancellor.  Some of the stereotype was true – Brown in a big meeting with officials was concise and direct to the point of brusqueness, a rather louring presence digesting the evidence that was put in front of him, inpatient of lengthy explanations of things he already knew.  There was no bonhomie (and having seen what some Ministers think passes for putting their officials at ease, one could be grateful for that).  It was also obvious that he had a natural authority and formidable intellectual command.  It was that authority and command that, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, helped guide world economies through the immediate dangers.

And yet the abuse was profound – why?  Brown, put simply, is not a tabloid person.  Formidably clever and without what papers regard as empathy – presumably on the grounds that a smooth facility of Blair is some sort of political ideal.  And I think that is what the tabloids hated most about Brown – his cleverness.  Blair was prepared to engage with the fictions of the tabloid world-view – the belief that celebrities matter, that what matters is individuals not society – in ways that for Brown would have been simply dishonest.  This was not a man who could deliver lacrymose homilies to People’s Princesses, or look comfortable in t-shirt and shorts at Berlusconi’s villa – Brown was the geeky kid always with his head in some book or another.  The sort of kid who has been the sport of bullies since time immemorial, and we know there’s no bigger bully on the block than the Murdoch press.  Brown was not, in the sense of the tabloids, a regular bloke; therefore he was there to be taken down.

I’m tempted to say that Brown should wear the abuse of the tabloids as a badge of honour,  but then I’ve never had the serious illness of my child used as tabloid fodder.  What is clear that the treatment of Brown, as much as the treatment of the family of Milly Dowler, shows why we deserve news media that are so much better.

Tabloid newspapers delude themselves that it as their role, to use the old Quaker phrasse, to speak truth to power; but the role of News International, it becomes increasingly clear, is to spread lies and innuendo to the powerless, to keep them in their place. And, above all, it seems, to bully and harrass those who do not conform to the warped values they promote.

Adam Curtis, loving machines and the dog that didn’t bark

The third film of Adam Curtis’ series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was as astonishing as the first two – visually arresting, compelling, throwing ideas at the viewer, sometimes brilliant, sometimes just plain wrong.  Television is a tabloid medium and the ideas could not be developed in this framework, but the questions were asked, to be considered at leisure.  The final bleak conclusion – that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are lumps of failing hardware destined to perpetuate a software of genetic code, in order to excuse our failures – was compelling, the more so for being intoned against a backdrop of commuters on a tube escalator.

The debates could – and will – go on for a long time.  But for me there was one dog that didn’t bark.  There is one essential area in which we are prepared to abjure responsibility and rely on a model of a self-stabilising system in which the best outcomes are deemed to emerge if the workings of that system are left alone – the dominant myth of the age, individualistic free market economics. The ruling ideology of our time is the belief that free markets will allow the setting of an intelligent price which will allocate scarce resources in the best possible way.  In the neo-classical economics that mysterious power is anthropormorphised in the person of the Walrasian Auctioneer, the mythic being used by the economist Leon Walras to explain the beneficent power of the market to move into a mutually satisfying equilibrium.

And, in many ways, the market follows Curtis’ formulation – it provides an illusion that masks a reality about power and the way in which the wealthy and powerful hold on to it.  As market ideology and neoliberalism have become entrenched in the last thirty years the economic outcomes for all but the rich minority have worsened, growth has slowed, inequalities have widened, wages have fallen consistently as a proportion of total income.  Yet the myth remains potent and – in Britain at least – is being perpetuated by the ruling coalition with disastrous vigour.

However valid the often extraordinary links and conclusions drawn by Curtis, it seems to me that the economics of the market could have provided a powerful and cogent illustration of his argument that to trust to mythical, self-regulating systems, abdicating the political, leads to disaster and failure.

Sharon Shoesmith and tabloid justice

The furore surroundng the legal ruling that Sharon Shoesmith was unlawfully dismissed from her post as Director of Social Services at Haringey Council in December 2008 following the death of Baby P is instructive about the relationship between the media, politicians and the process of public provision.

At the heart of the case is the fact that Shoesmith was dismissed on the fiat of Ed Balls, then Children’s Secretary – the court found that due process was not followed and awarded Shoesmith £500,000 in damages, which is more or less equivalent to the salary she would have received had she remained in post, with interest (some way from being the huge payout that her critics are suggesting).

A few reflections:

First, yesterday’s outcome was inevitable the moment Balls put populism before process.  Balls tried to play the strong man and now, with hindsight, looks like a weak man who has been found out.  It is one of the axioms of Government that advice to Ministers is kept confidential; but in the light of these events – not least the substantial amount of public money that this affair has cost – the content of the advice Balls received is a matter of real public interest (by real I mean, inter alia, the sort of thing a tabloid journalist would not recognise if it fell on him)

Second, the case indicates the utter uselessness – frivolity even – of scapegoating individuals for systemic failure.  There is certainly a case that Shoesmith should have resigned when the extent of Haringey’s failure became clear – and perhaps a case that she should have been disciplined.  But the systemic failure was wider than that, and assuming that purging and individual without due process will deal with deep-seated problems is simply trivial.  Indeed, quite the reverse is the case.  Everyone who has worked in a large organisation dealing with difficult and complex issues knows that there is no greater barrier to collective improvement than a culture of individual blame.  I am assuming that this is what Shoesmith meant in her (admittedly not particularly well-chosen) comments on BBC Radio 4.

Third, it is impossible for justice to be done against the background of a media frenzy.  The tabloid press wanted blood – although the scapegoating that followed is in many respects a result of Ed Balls’ moral cowardice, that’s not the whole story (although one notes in passing that his actions are firmly in the worst traditions of New Labour, which faced with a choice between moral principle and appeasing the Murdoch press invariably and unhesitatingly chose the latter).  This was a classic media job – ignore the facts, which are complex and ambiguous, and reduce the whole story to the gratifying moral simplicity of blood revenge, spurred on by the media’s near-psychotic hatred of public sector professionals in general and social workers in particuar.  Of course it’s so easy – most of us are spectators, who will never have to grapple with the complexities that all those agencies involved in child protection face every day, where the wrong decision can literally cost lives.  I’m not defending the handling of this case – as I said, it is obvious that there were systemic failings – but that the media’s response, and the response of the people who joined in the witchunt, are infantile and deeply frivolous.  And, after all, following the recent revelations of the culture of illegality at the heart of the tabloid press, who are they to read public servants lectures on accountability?

Fourth, it is important to remember that there is a long tradition of vulnerable children being failed by the political system.  Until a Baby P or a Victoria Climbie comes along, such children are off the agenda – certainly as far as funding is concerned.  Both the current Government and the administration in which Balls served appeared quite happy to starve child protection of resources.  To get a flavour of the politics of child protection I can do no better than refer to an excellent post on the Beneath the Wig blog, which gives a chilling account of the political failures on child protection:

As soon as Peter’s death was reported, the public, buoyed by the popular press, began baying for blood. They wanted someone, anyone, to be found responsible for this, and they wanted a public hanging.

The one place they were not looking for their demon was Parliament. No-one, not a media outlet, not one institution, not one childrens’ charity; no-one, looked to Westminster Palace.

Yet that is where the bad guy was hiding. Just four years before Peter, we had the largest review of child protection arrangements we have ever had, in the form of the Laming Report, which arose from the death of Victoria Climbie, on 25 February 2000, with 128 injuries and scars.  The report made 108 recommendations, 82 of which were to be implemented within 6 months.

Yet Peter died because much of what went wrong in Victoria’s case was repeated in his. He died because although the amount of relentless and useless paperwork has increased, nothing of any value changed post Laming.

Peter was failed by each body who had involvement in his life. The list includes (but is not exhaustive):

One social services department;

One police force;

The CPS;

Four hospitals.

Peter died due to a lack of information shared between services. He died due to poorly trained social workers, doctors, policemen and lawyers. All eminently trained in their own spheres, but not trained in how to take an overview of these cases. Not trained in how to share knowledge. Not trained in taking ownership of a problem.

Peter died because of a lack of information sharing technology. Yes, there was a social services file. Yes, there was a police file, and a CPS file, and of course he had medical records. Four separate bodies, four separate files, no proper mechanism for sharing.

Peter died because everyone in child protection is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the work. It is mountainous. The amount of families who need support is huge. The amount of people the system can afford to employ with current funding levels is miniscule. Thus it is very easy for children, especially pre-school children, to slip through the very nets designed to catch them, to prevent deaths like this happening. School is a great saviour to children, particularly children from backgrounds like Peter’s, but it is not infallible.

Peter died due to a lack of funding. There are not enough social workers. There are not enough local authority lawyers. There are not enough officers in the police child protection teams. There are not enough community paediatricians.

There is little funding for training doctors in how to spot non-accidental injuries, to train more police officers, to train and properly staff the social services child protection teams, to put trained staff into the local authority legal departments.

There is little funding to afford those in child protection work time. Time to review information. Time to listen to the suspicions of colleagues. Time to spend with the child, or on the assessments needed. Time to train those coming up behind us, to impart our skills and knowledge, and let them know what to look out for. Hell, we now even set targets as to how much time the court should afford these cases.

Peter died because child protection is not a sexy issue. We are blind to the TV adverts of the likes of the NSPCC. They make us uncomfortable. We want to believe that every child has a Disney-esque upbringing. No-one really hurts them, or uses them for sex, or is so addicted to their drug of choice they forget to meet their basic needs for days, right?

Child protection is rarely, save for when cases like this occur, high on the agenda. And when cases like this do occur, the public fall for the political magic that focuses their attention away from Westminster and towards the likes of Sharon Shoesmith.

Don’t fall for it again. Don’t make today about Sharon Shoesmith, unless you are prepared to stand up and acknowledge the political trickery and why she was scapegoated.

That is, to stop us realising that basically the government is failing children. I am not about to make this a party issue. Frankly, in terms of child protection they are all as bad. There is no funding, there never has been any funding, and children are left in situations where they are injured, suffering neglect and dying because of it.

I’d echo those sentiments totally.  Whatever one thinks of Sharon Shoesmith, we owe it to vulnerable children not to get sucked into the tabloid agenda, and not to allow ourselves the indulgence of scapegoating.  It may make a few rather warped individuals feel good about themselves, but it does absolutely nothing to protect vulnerable children.  We need a cool, hard, rational look at what went wrong in Haringey and to ensure that social service departments are given the skills, the support and above all the resources to do their job properly.  We must recognise that macho posturing by politicians is no substitute for due process.  And we need as a society to understand that the emotional spasm that is tabloid justice is no justice at all.

BBC: spine donor wanted

On the day that Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt made the entirely predictable announcement that the Government would allow Murdoch to buy BSkyB, news of more dissembling at the BBC.

Liberal Conspiracy reports that BBC reporters have been told to use the word “savings” rather than “cuts” when describing … er, cuts:

BBC journalists have been instructed by senior editorial staff to use ‘savings’ instead of ‘cuts’ in their news coverage, Liberal Conspiracy has learnt, in order to offer a “rosy” picture of government announcements.

The move has drawn outrage from journalists and led to heated editorial meetings and arguments. It is also likely to attract accusations of bias towards the Conservative-led coalition.

In particular, BBC London journalists have been told by senior management that they should use ‘savings’ as much as possible for on-screen graphics and the big plasma (the screen which sits behind the presenter).

Staff were told by senior management that ‘cuts’ made the news coverage appear too negative. New editorial guidelines have not been issued to staff by email, only to senior editors by BBC executives.

A source told us: “People in the newsroom are angry about it and several producers and correspondents have challenged the [BBC London] editors about it.”

Staff from other parts of the corporation, when contacted by this blog, painted a more mixed picture. Some said they had heard nothing about it, while others said that there had been editorial discussions on whether using ‘cuts’ was biased against the government.

There are definite concerns that the BBC is bowing to pressure from the government over its news output.

Another source told us: “This is just a ludicrous example of bureaucracy and the goverment throwing its weight [on the BBC].”

Two separate journalists confirmed that the editorial decision at BBC London had been challenged several times this week in evening meetings. Journalists from the political unit had also raised objections yesterday morning.

“It’s very frustrating for the journalists who feel [that] the true picture isn’t being told and we’re being told paint a rosy picture,” a source told Liberal Conspiracy.

We’re waiting on the BBC press office for a comment.

This is important because the words “cuts” and “savings” have such different connotations.  Savings have the positive sense of used fivers in the building society and are something that people do; cuts are things that are done to people.  And their contexts are different. If you are a single mother losing 10 per cent of your income, the concept of “savings” is pretty irrelevant to your situation. This looks like a quite deliberate attempt to manage the language of political discourse in an ideologically-loaded way; it aligns the BBC definitively with the coalition.

In the early days of the Government, the BBC was called in to No 10 to discuss its coverage of the, er, cuts.  Could this be the fruit of that initiative?

Pariahdom in the public sector

Having worked for my entire career in the public sector until taking voluntary redundancy at the end of last year (essentially a matter of taking the settlement before getting pushed), I have long been aware of the increasing scapegoating of people in the public sector.  It has reached some of its worst excesses in the hands of the Coalition’s bully-in-chief, Eric Pickles – a man who before the election “joked” he would keep a gun in his desk to shoot civil servants who told him things he didn’t want to hear – claiming that overpaid public sector workers, not bankers, were responsible for the financial crash in 2008.

But it’s a continuous drip of mendacious propaganda.  A fine example was a story in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph concerning Phil Dolan, outgoing Chief Executive of North Somerset District Council and described as “The highest-paid employee in either central or local government.” and allegedly earning £570,000 last year

Except he wasn’t.

Get into the detail of the story and you realise that this huge sum is nothing to do with his annual salary of £157,000.  It includes a redundancy payment of £167,000 and £269,000 of notional payment into his pension pot to allow him to receive an immediate pension.  Mr Dolan will benefit from this over a considerable period of time.

In other words, it’s utterly mendacious.   A pack of lies, woven around numbers that sound large but are minuscule compared with the level of bonuses at the top of the financial sector.  And this of course is a man whose duty was to deliver real services to real people, not to gamble with other people’s pension funds.  Mr Dolan’s actual salary was considerably less, than, for example, London’s part-time mayor Boris Johnson receives for moonlighting on, er, the Daily Telegraph.

The truth for most public sector workers is of course completely different.  As CEO of a private sector organisation of the size and breadth of responsibility he exercised at North Somerset, Mr Dolan would have been paid vastly more.  It’s all very easy to pick out high salaries at the top in the public sector, but for comprarable levels of responsibility with their private sector counterparts, public sector workers are paid less.  And the average allegedly gold-plated civil service pension is £4000 per year – the myths about public sector pay and pensions are admirably punctured by PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka here.

The temper of the Coalition can be perhaps best measured in the fact that when Manchester City Council announced 2000 job losses, there were no expressions of regret; instead Pickles’ mini-me Grant Shapps sought to make political capital and crowed about the destruction on non-jobs.

But truth, not least the truth that those working in the public sector are decent people working hard to deliver the decencies of life, is the last thing the Coalition – and their supporters in the yellow press – want when discussing public sector pay and pensions.  They are ideological crusaders whose case collapses in the face of the truth about the public sector.  Given the choice between backing a nurse and backing a banker, Cameron, Clegg and Osborne would back the banker every time.  And to get acceptance for this, they, and their newspapers, lie about the public sector and the decencies it provides.

And it’s time to recognise for what it is – dishonest, wilful bullying, directed against decent people who can’t answer back.