I arrived late at the one-day conference and missed the big speech (and the drinkable tea). Having heard what Nick Clegg said about public services, I’ve been checking out the blogs this evening and – rather to my surprise, actually – they seem to be as enthusiastic as I am.
Of course, there are difficult details that will have to be hammered out about the Free Schools policy – letting local people set up local schools, under local authority oversight – but it is still for me a transformative moment. It is, at last, a genuinely Liberal policy on public services, and (I might add) badly needed in my own area in north Croydon, where children are corralled into too few places in mainly indifferent schools managed by a cash-strapped, unimaginative Tory borough.
There have been blogs in the last few hours pointing to the experience of Summerhill and – more relevant this – the Hartland Small School. We might also learn from the Danish small schools movement. Taken together, this is exactly the stuff we need to put flesh on the otherwise empty phrase ‘people’s politics’.
But we have been late arriving: Michael Gove has already spelled out related ideas for the Tories, which leaves us with a problem – how do we distinguish Lib Dem localism from Tory localism, without falling back so boringly on claiming they don’t mean it? This is what I would suggest:
1. Cameron localism is the apotheosis of the quango state: his new schools are not knitted into other networks of local schools, but run by a Whitehall department, as the academies are now. This is not localism; it’s centralisation.
2. Embed what we are saying about localism in a much more fundamental critique of public services. Why don’t they work? Why are Beveridge’s Five Giants still alive and well? Partly because of centralisation, partly because frontline staff and customers have been so side-lined – but partly also because only human-scale services, based on relationships between professional and client, create sustainable change. Yet Cameron is advocating Gershon style cuts to exactly these aspects.
3. Link public service centralisation to economic centralisation: the narrowing of choice to a few giant corporate supermarkets, waste contractors, etc. And do so in such a way that at least one of Cameron’s factions finds it impossible to follow us into radical anti-trust legislation.
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
History, thrift and nuclear energy
Say what you like about New Labour, under either Blair or Brown, and you come back to two extreme truths about them: they are extreme modernists and obsessive utilitarians. Their blind spot, therefore, is history. They don’t believe in it or understand it. Hence Iraq, and goodness knows how many other misjudgements which a simply knowledge of history would have avoided.
This also applies to recent history. They don’t remember what went wrong with nuclear energy last time, don’t even think it’s important to know, don’t see that it’s relevant. My feeling is that, despite their announcement, only one or two new nuclear power stations will actually be built, and for the same reason as before:
· The vast expense: nuclear energy is not economic if you include decommissioning, security and insurance (nuclear power stations are not commercially insurable, for obvious reasons).
· Public concern about the vats of high level nuclear waste, hanging around waiting for some kind of viable storage solution.
· The terrorist threat, to the plutonium, the waste and the power stations themselves.
In the end, just like last time, the Treasury will pull the plug – but we will have wasted tens of billions and maybe another decade to invest in efficient decentralised energy systems.
But it does provide a political opportunity for the Lib Dems to revive the traditional Liberal campaign for thrift. Look at the waste, after all: nuclear energy (£15 billion), ID cards, NHS computer fantasies, Iraq, bailing out Northern Rock. Isn't there some kind of theme emerging here?
This also applies to recent history. They don’t remember what went wrong with nuclear energy last time, don’t even think it’s important to know, don’t see that it’s relevant. My feeling is that, despite their announcement, only one or two new nuclear power stations will actually be built, and for the same reason as before:
· The vast expense: nuclear energy is not economic if you include decommissioning, security and insurance (nuclear power stations are not commercially insurable, for obvious reasons).
· Public concern about the vats of high level nuclear waste, hanging around waiting for some kind of viable storage solution.
· The terrorist threat, to the plutonium, the waste and the power stations themselves.
In the end, just like last time, the Treasury will pull the plug – but we will have wasted tens of billions and maybe another decade to invest in efficient decentralised energy systems.
But it does provide a political opportunity for the Lib Dems to revive the traditional Liberal campaign for thrift. Look at the waste, after all: nuclear energy (£15 billion), ID cards, NHS computer fantasies, Iraq, bailing out Northern Rock. Isn't there some kind of theme emerging here?
Monday, 24 December 2007
Daemons, gobblers and education policy
I went to see The Golden Compass last night. Perhaps I had low expectations, since I kindof think Northern Lights is a work of genius, but it was really rather brilliant. The target was, predictably, less obviously organised religion, but some of Philip Pullman’s other meanings were made clearer, and that heightened the whole experience for me. It also made me think about the politics of education.
Because the film and the book include a very urgent message. There are, after all, such things as Gobblers. There is, in fact, an all-powerful branch of the established power that is experimenting with cutting the daemons out of children. As a former teacher, Pullman knows that all too well.
His choice of the word was specific: ‘daemon’ in Latin is ‘genius’, and we are talking here about the heart, imagination, creativity and divine spark in us all. Of course there are forces out there now who are intent on removing that aspect from children, to make them more amenable, more employable, more receptive to consumer culture.
It so happened this week that someone close to me (I’ve promised not to identify her) left her job as a primary school teaching assistant, partly because this painful process of daemon removal is now so obvious. To those who believe education can be fixed by more money, or any more of the usual technocratic tweaking, I would say this:
Think about the poor seven-year-olds who are never allowed outside in the natural world, or encouraged to paint or make music, but are lectured for an hour about how to put glitter onto glue (or who have to draw from miserable photocopies rather than from life, or who have bits of stories for comprehension rather than the whole things).
Or the nursery teachers with their clipboards in the playground, ticking off the various stages of play development set by DfES (but never actually help them play, heaven forfend).
Or the eight-year-olds who are not allowed to learn aspects of reading or writing, which the rest of the class is learning, because they have been ‘graded’ at a lower scale (just because the 11+ has gone, it doesn’t mean we’ve got rid of selection).
So is New Labour’s utilitarian education policy really the target of The Golden Compass? Not precisely, but that’s what I thought about as I watched the scenes of daemon-removal. I’m sure that’s what Pullman thought about when he wrote it: the people at the heart of British education who are so concerned to divide learning up into measurable parts that they can’t put the heart of education back together again.
And for Lib Dems like me who yearn for an education policy capable of confronting this widespread, pernicious caricature that passes for schooling – not for everybody, but often for the poorest – then let’s spend 2008 developing a language with which to talk about it, to name the evil and to tackle it head on.
Because the film and the book include a very urgent message. There are, after all, such things as Gobblers. There is, in fact, an all-powerful branch of the established power that is experimenting with cutting the daemons out of children. As a former teacher, Pullman knows that all too well.
His choice of the word was specific: ‘daemon’ in Latin is ‘genius’, and we are talking here about the heart, imagination, creativity and divine spark in us all. Of course there are forces out there now who are intent on removing that aspect from children, to make them more amenable, more employable, more receptive to consumer culture.
It so happened this week that someone close to me (I’ve promised not to identify her) left her job as a primary school teaching assistant, partly because this painful process of daemon removal is now so obvious. To those who believe education can be fixed by more money, or any more of the usual technocratic tweaking, I would say this:
Think about the poor seven-year-olds who are never allowed outside in the natural world, or encouraged to paint or make music, but are lectured for an hour about how to put glitter onto glue (or who have to draw from miserable photocopies rather than from life, or who have bits of stories for comprehension rather than the whole things).
Or the nursery teachers with their clipboards in the playground, ticking off the various stages of play development set by DfES (but never actually help them play, heaven forfend).
Or the eight-year-olds who are not allowed to learn aspects of reading or writing, which the rest of the class is learning, because they have been ‘graded’ at a lower scale (just because the 11+ has gone, it doesn’t mean we’ve got rid of selection).
So is New Labour’s utilitarian education policy really the target of The Golden Compass? Not precisely, but that’s what I thought about as I watched the scenes of daemon-removal. I’m sure that’s what Pullman thought about when he wrote it: the people at the heart of British education who are so concerned to divide learning up into measurable parts that they can’t put the heart of education back together again.
And for Lib Dems like me who yearn for an education policy capable of confronting this widespread, pernicious caricature that passes for schooling – not for everybody, but often for the poorest – then let’s spend 2008 developing a language with which to talk about it, to name the evil and to tackle it head on.
Friday, 7 December 2007
"The interests of the child are paramount"
It isn’t easy to argue against the ingrained New Labour doctrine that, for professionals at least, “the interests of the child are paramount”. But, having listened to the interview with the paediatrician Dr David Southall yesterday – now struck off the medical register – and with one of his victims today, you can’t help feeling that the doctrine can so easily become a mask for a hideous tyranny over children and families.
I’m not of course arguing that there is no such thing as child abuse – you can see minor versions of it every day in the street, especially round here – but there are some major drawbacks to the doctrine in practice, and here are three of them:
1. There are only rare cases when the child’s interests are really separate from its parent’s. In the vast majority of cases, even in cases of abuse, any child will have better life chances than they would do in social service care. It is neat, bureaucratic thinking to imagine that children’s interests and those of the rest of the family can be separated and opposed. It is rarely true. Unless the interests of the whole family is taken into account, you can ruin the lives of all of them.
2. In practice, the doctrine means that, as a parent – and I know this all too well, looking into the eyes of the health visitors – professionals are no longer on your side. And when parents sense this, it widens the very gulf with professionals and agencies which allows abuse to happen unchecked. Even as a relatively articulate and middle-class parent, I am uncomfortably aware that some of the agencies I deal with now treat me with an officially-sanctioned aura of mild suspicion. If I feel that, you hardly need any more explanation why so many others are designated ‘hard to reach’.
3. I won’t name the cases, because I don’t want to test this theory in the libel courts, but it is increasingly clear that – for some embattled and flummoxed professionals (police, social services, paediatricians) – if they don’t know the reason for the problem before them, they tend to assume that the parents did it. Who knows how the McCann case will end, but I’m inclined to believe this is another example. Yet parenting is now so unfashionable, and regarded with such suspicion by what has become a child protection industry, that these convenient interpretations come to court and children are removed from their parents, never to return – even if the grounds were later found to be completely false.
Once again, I’m not denying that child abuse is serious and must be dealt with. What I am saying, is that the child protection industry is, and always has been, part of the abuse. And behind that reasonable sounding mantra “the child’s interests are paramount” is a cruel bureaucratic blindness that can justify absolutely anything.
Add to that a sprinkling of local authority targets to increase the number of successful fosterings, and you have the makings of a racket that is truly evil – when social service departments hide behind the secrecy of the family courts to remove children of those they deem too stupid, or too peculiar, to have them.
I know two Lib Dem MPs currently tackling cases related to this. At some point we need to see them not so much as a series of individual miscarriages of justice, and realise it is something bigger: that, when doctrines allow professionals unchecked power – even in the name of children – then history shows that it is always abused.
I’m not of course arguing that there is no such thing as child abuse – you can see minor versions of it every day in the street, especially round here – but there are some major drawbacks to the doctrine in practice, and here are three of them:
1. There are only rare cases when the child’s interests are really separate from its parent’s. In the vast majority of cases, even in cases of abuse, any child will have better life chances than they would do in social service care. It is neat, bureaucratic thinking to imagine that children’s interests and those of the rest of the family can be separated and opposed. It is rarely true. Unless the interests of the whole family is taken into account, you can ruin the lives of all of them.
2. In practice, the doctrine means that, as a parent – and I know this all too well, looking into the eyes of the health visitors – professionals are no longer on your side. And when parents sense this, it widens the very gulf with professionals and agencies which allows abuse to happen unchecked. Even as a relatively articulate and middle-class parent, I am uncomfortably aware that some of the agencies I deal with now treat me with an officially-sanctioned aura of mild suspicion. If I feel that, you hardly need any more explanation why so many others are designated ‘hard to reach’.
3. I won’t name the cases, because I don’t want to test this theory in the libel courts, but it is increasingly clear that – for some embattled and flummoxed professionals (police, social services, paediatricians) – if they don’t know the reason for the problem before them, they tend to assume that the parents did it. Who knows how the McCann case will end, but I’m inclined to believe this is another example. Yet parenting is now so unfashionable, and regarded with such suspicion by what has become a child protection industry, that these convenient interpretations come to court and children are removed from their parents, never to return – even if the grounds were later found to be completely false.
Once again, I’m not denying that child abuse is serious and must be dealt with. What I am saying, is that the child protection industry is, and always has been, part of the abuse. And behind that reasonable sounding mantra “the child’s interests are paramount” is a cruel bureaucratic blindness that can justify absolutely anything.
Add to that a sprinkling of local authority targets to increase the number of successful fosterings, and you have the makings of a racket that is truly evil – when social service departments hide behind the secrecy of the family courts to remove children of those they deem too stupid, or too peculiar, to have them.
I know two Lib Dem MPs currently tackling cases related to this. At some point we need to see them not so much as a series of individual miscarriages of justice, and realise it is something bigger: that, when doctrines allow professionals unchecked power – even in the name of children – then history shows that it is always abused.
Thursday, 29 November 2007
The truth about the monster hospitals
Today's new research which shows that one in ten people going into hospital are harmed by the experience is actually not a surprise. It confirms almost identical research elsewhere. The problem is that it is unlikely to become the political issue that it ought to be because political parties don’t know what to do with it – which of their various complaints and campaigns does it relate to, after all?
Actually, this is a key element of any non-technocratic campaign against the corrosion of our public services. The research was carried out in a large teaching hospital in the north; it would be good to compare it with a human scale institution. My guess is that the findings would be very different there.
Because the tragedy of our hospitals is that they are far too big. They rely on creaking technocratic systems, you never see the same doctor twice – which is not the ‘choice’ most people would make – and the whole system gets by without the very relationships between doctors, nurses and patients which make change happen.
The same corrosion and ineffectiveness is happening in our factory schools, merged police forces and struggling probation service. Because the technocrats at the heart of New Labour think these things are unimportant, whereas actually the ability to forge relationships is what makes professionals effective.
These monstrous hospitals have been driven partly by the need to sell off sites for capital gains, partly by the pride of consultants for ever bigger fiefdoms, partly by an unproven belief in the efficiency of big systems. There are economies of scale, of course, but they are bought at the cost of these hideous inefficiencies – mistakes, bugs, over-ordering and the sclerosis that happens when relationships are replaced by IT systems.
If you want to find an issue that really affects people’s lives, look no further.
Actually, this is a key element of any non-technocratic campaign against the corrosion of our public services. The research was carried out in a large teaching hospital in the north; it would be good to compare it with a human scale institution. My guess is that the findings would be very different there.
Because the tragedy of our hospitals is that they are far too big. They rely on creaking technocratic systems, you never see the same doctor twice – which is not the ‘choice’ most people would make – and the whole system gets by without the very relationships between doctors, nurses and patients which make change happen.
The same corrosion and ineffectiveness is happening in our factory schools, merged police forces and struggling probation service. Because the technocrats at the heart of New Labour think these things are unimportant, whereas actually the ability to forge relationships is what makes professionals effective.
These monstrous hospitals have been driven partly by the need to sell off sites for capital gains, partly by the pride of consultants for ever bigger fiefdoms, partly by an unproven belief in the efficiency of big systems. There are economies of scale, of course, but they are bought at the cost of these hideous inefficiencies – mistakes, bugs, over-ordering and the sclerosis that happens when relationships are replaced by IT systems.
If you want to find an issue that really affects people’s lives, look no further.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Hustings angst
I was perched up in the gallery for the hustings, the first one I've actually managed to go to, and was excited by the sheer competence of the speeches. But in the end, as someone said in the pub afterwards, Chris talked about the same issues in the usual language, but Nick talked about new issues in an inspiring way - and, heavens, we badly need that.
It is true that there could have been more in the way of potential solutions, but at least Nick was framing the questions in exciting new ways.
Then there were the questions and answers, and I have been worrying ever since why I found these so dull. Am I wrong to be involved politics at all, if I feel that way? It isn't that the question of poverty and inequality is unimportant -I just don't believe the old Fabian mantras any more.
Again, it isn't that redistribution isn't important - of course it is. It is the technocratic terms in which the answers are trotted out, tweaking the tax and welfare systems as if people were rats in a laboratory. We have spent broadly 20 per cent of national income on welfare and defined broadly 30 per cent as poor now for two centuries (amazing that 20 per cent was spent before the New Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, but it was - just distributed by parishes), and through a century of brutality and a century of the welfare state - Beveridge's giants are still with us. Something else is needed.
And if we don't face this head on and come up with a non-technocratic alternative, then the only alternative on offer is going to be Wisconsin-style brutality. So we had better get on with some radical re-thinking.
How is this relevant to the leadership issue? I don't think I can bear to go through another general election feeling that our manifesto was almost as irrelevant as our opponents'. I may be alone in this frustration with the way we cling to the old Fabian technocracy, but - speaking entirely personally - I desperately want us to choose a leader who will think, who will face up to the real questions and lead us into developing Liberal alternatives.
Listening to them both at Friends Meeting House, so articulate and polished, I felt Clegg was more likely to fulfil that role. It isn't certain - it's difficult being Lib Dem leader, especially a thoughtful one - but he gives me a reason for hope. Which is a relief, because I've already voted for him!
It is true that there could have been more in the way of potential solutions, but at least Nick was framing the questions in exciting new ways.
Then there were the questions and answers, and I have been worrying ever since why I found these so dull. Am I wrong to be involved politics at all, if I feel that way? It isn't that the question of poverty and inequality is unimportant -I just don't believe the old Fabian mantras any more.
Again, it isn't that redistribution isn't important - of course it is. It is the technocratic terms in which the answers are trotted out, tweaking the tax and welfare systems as if people were rats in a laboratory. We have spent broadly 20 per cent of national income on welfare and defined broadly 30 per cent as poor now for two centuries (amazing that 20 per cent was spent before the New Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, but it was - just distributed by parishes), and through a century of brutality and a century of the welfare state - Beveridge's giants are still with us. Something else is needed.
And if we don't face this head on and come up with a non-technocratic alternative, then the only alternative on offer is going to be Wisconsin-style brutality. So we had better get on with some radical re-thinking.
How is this relevant to the leadership issue? I don't think I can bear to go through another general election feeling that our manifesto was almost as irrelevant as our opponents'. I may be alone in this frustration with the way we cling to the old Fabian technocracy, but - speaking entirely personally - I desperately want us to choose a leader who will think, who will face up to the real questions and lead us into developing Liberal alternatives.
Listening to them both at Friends Meeting House, so articulate and polished, I felt Clegg was more likely to fulfil that role. It isn't certain - it's difficult being Lib Dem leader, especially a thoughtful one - but he gives me a reason for hope. Which is a relief, because I've already voted for him!
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
The real economics of nuclear
At long last, there is a study by an economist of the likely effects of the government's exhumation of the nuclear industry, and it is worth a read - especially by the nuclear enthusiasts who appear to be running some kind of campaign in the letters page of Liberal Democrat News. It's at:
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/downloads.html#Nuclear
David Fleming is the economist behind tradeable energy quotas and what he writes about nuclear energy seems to me to clinch the argument against:
1. The remaining uranium ore in the world is now so depleted that the nuclear energy will itself run out of resources, to the extent that it will not be able to generate the energy needed to clean up and store its own waste - it will therefore be a net user of energy.
2. Uranium shortages will cause interruptions of supply before 2019, which will then get worse.
3. Every stage of the nuclear process except fission itself produces carbon dioxide, and even more so as the richest uranium is used up - especially because of the large amounts of uranium hexafluoride (10,000 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) which is used in the process of uranium enrichment.
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/downloads.html#Nuclear
David Fleming is the economist behind tradeable energy quotas and what he writes about nuclear energy seems to me to clinch the argument against:
1. The remaining uranium ore in the world is now so depleted that the nuclear energy will itself run out of resources, to the extent that it will not be able to generate the energy needed to clean up and store its own waste - it will therefore be a net user of energy.
2. Uranium shortages will cause interruptions of supply before 2019, which will then get worse.
3. Every stage of the nuclear process except fission itself produces carbon dioxide, and even more so as the richest uranium is used up - especially because of the large amounts of uranium hexafluoride (10,000 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) which is used in the process of uranium enrichment.
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