Post offices: three cheers, one thumbs down

Heavens, this coalition business is certainly tough on the blood pressure.  Never before has it been quite so stressful turning on the news or opening a newspaper.  It isn't even as if my over-reactions to almost everything were exactly simple. 

All of which is a way of providing a verdict on Ed Davey's announcement about the future of local post offices.  In short, three cheers and one major thumbs-down.

Cheer 1: the end of Labour's local post office closure programme is a major step forward.  The New Economics Foundation worked out tht a local post office was worth about £300,000 flowing through the local economy of a ward.  These things matter and it is a breakthrough that, thanks to Ed and his team, we have a government that recognises it.

Cheer 2: the admittedly distant prospect of mutual ownership of the network, by customers and staff.  That is bold, imaginative, Liberal and absolutely right.

Cheer 3: letting many more people access their bank accounts in post offices, as long as that means they can bank their takings.  This is another crucial element in local economic revival, though it is hard to see where the extra resources will come from this to sustain the network.

But there is a major thumbs-down.  The failure to grasp the opportunity and launch a proper post bank, like those in Germany, Italy and New Zealand, not only flies in the face of our manifesto commitment - it is also profoundly wrong.  Why should our competitor nations have a local banking infrastructure when we have a small oligopoly of mega-banks whose attention is elsewhere?  We have the local post office infrastructure - it badly needs a major project to sustain it financially, yet the government have backed off the postbank idea.

I'm extremely sorry about that, and I hope we can revive the idea in the next Liberal Democrat manifesto - and preferably some time before.  Especially since I am far from clear whether the annoucement is enough to sustain the network as it stands.  Just ending the closure programme isn;t enough; we have to find ways of making it pay for those who run it locally.

Lib Dem successes on post offices - and maybe even guilds...

Last week's announcement that the coalition has ended the post office closures programme is a major step forward.  Read the full blog here:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2010/11/08/the-post-offices-and-the-guilds

But what really warmed my heart was a speech by a Conservative BIS minister quoting William Morris, calling for a return of the guilds, and condemning "the anonymous, impersonal supermarket or out-of-town megastore".  I look forward to the coalition's plans to tackle them - but I'm not holding my breath...

The perils of obsessive measurement

One of the great achievements of the coalition so far is the rid us of most central government targets.  The trouble is that Whitehall has agreed to get rid of them without really understanding why.  The result is, I'm afraid, is that we are tiptoeing right back where we came from - at least that is, I believe, what the flagship policy of 'payment by results' will mean.

It's a good idea in theory.  In practice it will mean targets again, with all the waste and bureaucracy and distortion that they caused.  But it isn't too late and there is an alternative.

This is what I've said about it on the website of the Royal Society of Arts:

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/11/01/perils-obsessive-measurement/

Why we need to guard against technocracy

I wrote a blog about the Tea Party movement on Lib Dem Voice earlier, arguing that they provide a lesson for Liberal Democrats here - that we must be more scrupulously on the side of people, rather than bureaucrats, if we want to avoid a similar populist movement here.

http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-the-tea-party-lessons-for-the-liberal-democrats-21774.html

I notice that there a comments at the bottom that accuse me of caricaturing them as a right-wing organisation, and also for precisely the opposite.  What can this mean?

How to judge the cuts

Like nearly everybody, I don't have much idea what to expect from the Comprehensive Spending Review tomorrow - but it doesn't stop me worrying about it.  Of course I'm not alone either.

There haven't been many Lib Dems who have clung courageously to the Liberal concept of thrift through thick, and even through thin.  I have but I don't have any illusions about what, in practice, the coalition is going to do tomorrow.  The basic thinking about how to structure Lib Dem services was never finished (it wasn't really started).  We had little or no theory by which our ministers could determine what should stay and what should go; no theory to rival the conventional Coonservative or Labour structures of controls and systems.

I wrote about this on Lib Dem Voice and one of the comments afterwards, which I take seriously, said that I had a responsibility to be clearer about what I thought should be cut.  I think that is true.  I think maybe we should all of us, me included, also have been clearer about what should definitely not be cut. 

The Browne review of higher education, for example, is a testament to the worst kind of miserable utilitarianism.  It is no basis for any kind of humane future for universities.

So, at this rather late stage, I thought I would set out three ways by which we can judge tomorrow's announcements.  Some of the trade-offs will make sense.  Some will seem bizarre - some will seem as if ministers have been in the grip of the kind of frenzy of spending cuts that I believe takes over the collective mind on these occasions.  But it makes sense not to leap to any conclusions.  So, if there is anyone out there waiting for advice from me - humour me here please - here are the questions I think we should ask.  Will the spending changes lead to public services which:

1.  Prevent ill-health, poverty, misery or ignorance?  Will they be more able to reach out locally upstream of the problems and prevent them from happening in the first place?  If not, then costs are bound to rise in the future?

2.  Increase the chance of effective relationships between public service users and professionals?  If not, then we can expect our services to be less effective, and therefore more expensive in the long term.

3.  Are delivered through real local institutions which make us proud of being citizens?

This last one is very important.  The biggest failure of the New Labour years was the way they sucked meaning out of our institutions, closing local offices, undermining frontline relationships, tying them up in red tape, procedures, targets and systems - and did so at vast expense.  The justification for cutting spending is that it forces a change to this miserable hollowing out. 

That is my touchstone.  If the CSR hollows these institutions out even further, it will undermine their effectiveness even more.  That means bigger bills in the years to come, but it also poses a threat to what is most humane and civilised about the UK.

These are important issues, and especially for Lib Dems.  We will know tomorrow what the shape of the debate is going to be for the years ahead, and I must say - I am pretty bloody nervous about it.  Perhaps that's the only sane response right now.

A small dose of Faceless Britain

I've just spent the last hour and a half holding on for various parts of AOL's call centre, which really must be one of the most useless in the UK - except of course it isn't actually in the UK at all.

Having finally got through to the first level, I was then left for another 45 minutes hanging on for the next level of support.  Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that I continue to send them money every month.

But I was at least entertained by their musical tape, which went round and round, and included a song with the line: "We'll keep on hanging on..."

Three battles against the technocrats: one draw, one lost, one victory

This blog, in case you haven’t noticed, is committed – as far as it is possible to be – to the battle against soulless technocracy everywhere. So let me report on setback in the battle, one small success, and one draw.

The draw was the court case between the arch-technocrats Ryanair (hence the picture here, which I believe is the new Ryanair logo) and a website called I Hate Ryanair. Ryanair won, but on a technicality because the website included money-earning links.

On the other hand, the website is still up, ending .org, and without the offending adverts. So that one was a draw.

The setback is in the US Post Office, a worthy organisation and normally a model to be emulated by our own. But the excellent American website On the Commons has complained about the bizarre and inhuman marketing spiel that is now being forcefed to customers by the poor put-upon counter staff.  http://onthecommons.org/postal-hucksters

Worse, they are not allowed to stop, even if the customer complains – just in case the customer is actually a spy from central management, or their consultants, who go in disguise into post offices to make sure that the marketing rants are delivered as approved.

“I want you to give me my friendly postal clerks back!” said the On the Commons blog. “You must break the spell you have cast and allow them their humanity! You have made the Amherst post office an object of dark ridicule among my family and friends, as we disbelievingly trade stories about the glassy-eyed zombies who harangue us with unwanted marketing pitches when we simply want to mail a first-class envelope. On more than one occasion, I have taken my mailings to the UPS store instead because the clerks there are at least allowed to behave like genuine, spontaneous, happy human beings.”

Luckily, there is also a success to report, albeit a small one. The campaigners who call themselves Save St Barts Hospital (even though they have saved it long since) have been running a campaign against the McKinseyite managers who wanted to change the traditional ward names to numbers.

I’m glad to report that they have won. A small victory for human values against the number-crunchers.