The snobbery of the BBC

There are undoubtedly some worrying aspects about the Localism Bill – not to mention the perverse incentives to stay poor enshrined in the change in housing tenant status – but overall it is an important and urgent piece of legislation.

I’ve sent out in the New Economics Foundation blog how the ideas in it have emerged here.  Slightly triumphalist, but the genesis of some of the policies in the Sustainable Communities Act are pretty clear.

But one of the first reactions thrown up has confirmed what Simon Jenkins used to say about the BBC: they do have a policy; it is to centralise.

I heard him say that years ago while I was listening to an item on You and Yours asking when the government was going to legislate to make people’s front door numbers legible. It was dramatically confirmed yesterday when they used a clip from the Vicar of Dibley to illustrate how parish councils might work under the Localism Bill.

This reveals partly that the BBC is ignorant of the difference between a parish council and a parochial church council. It also reveals their staggering snobbery about the idea of local people taking decisions, and about local government in general.

That isn’t to say that there are no risks in devolving decisions quite so radically. I’m not clear what provisions there will be for appeals and oversight. There will certainly be mistakes and abuses. But they will be less than the sheer inflexibility, the vast waste of resources, the demoralisation and the damage done by the centralised system, and the certainty of that continuing without some kind of major decentralisation.

So stuff the BBC, I say – and the idea that decisions can only taken, under close guidance, by Oxbridge types with Masters in Public Administration. And only then, very occasionally. What the Localism Bill sets out is a means by which neighbourhoods can begin to take charge of their own destiny.

Yes, many of them won't.  Yes, there are also cuts. Yes, many local authorities have dismal jobsworth cultures after decades of recruitment on the basis of obedience to process. But this is the beginning of a way out of dull, clone town mediocrity, which impacts far more heavily on poor people than rich ones, and I’m excited about it.

Introducing the vampire squid

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

That was how Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi introduced his article on Goldman Sachs last year.  There was something rather thrilling about the words, as if someone had finally told the full truth about the banks.  Every generation has its own blind spot about moral outrage.  In the eighteenth century, it was slavery.  At the beginning of the twenty-first, it seems to me to be financial services - the huge and inflationary rewards, the corrosion of the real economy.

To celebrate the occasion, my colleagues at the new economics foundation have released a short animation about the vampire squid, and I thoroughly recommend it:
http://www.neweconomics.org/press-releases/who-will-tame-the-giant-vampire-squid

Green MP Caroline Lucas has tabled an early day motion in the Commons drawing attention to it, and three Lib Dems have signed already (Leech, Russell, Hancock).

Eminent Corporations gets review

This is kind of immodest of me, but how can I sell my new book (Eminent Corporations) if I don't pass on the review in the Financial Times this morning?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67413078-009f-11e0-aa29-00144feab49a.html#axzz17KnIDlNz

OK, it is the other side of a log in (which is free).  OK, they call me Daniel not David.  But it is good to be noticed, and I can't help feeling - what with Caroline Spelman's outrageous decision to allow the sale of cloned meat and milk without labelling - that the strange history of Britain's big companies needs telling now more than ever.

If I ask nicely, could we rethink the euro?

A decade or so ago, when we were all very exercised about the euro, there were two kinds of people who were against it.  One was nationalist head-bangers; the other was the people - including Liberals - who were afraid that fluctuating exchange rates played an important role. 

I was in the second category (definitely not the first), and felt somewhat alone in the Lib Dems.

Those in favour of the euro at the time, though otherwise charming and sane, took on a kind of Napoleonic certainty when it came to discussing currencies.  Which is a way of saying that they didn't engage much with the exchange rate argument.

There seemed to me to be a danger that one interest rate could not possibly suit the whole of Western Europe.  It was bound to suit the cities at the heart of Europe, but prevent those peripheral places and nations from devaluing when they needed to. It would trap those poorer cities and nations in a currency which was too valuable to suit them, and would usher in fierce populist right-wingers in their devastated cities.

Unfortunately, that is what seems to be happening - and, sure enough, in the outlying nations like Portugal and Ireland.  Before the euro, Ireland could devalue and balance their economy by doing so.  Now they have to cling to the mast, cut everything in sight and hope - like Phineas Fogg, chopping up the train to feed the fire that drove it - that there will be something left at the end.

That is an illiberal disaster and it should not have happened.  None of which suggests that the euro should be abolished.  We need more international currencies.  But we can't survive without other currencies that serve our needs alongside them.

There is still a Napoleonic tendency that doesn't really believe in economics.  I'm hoping maybe, maybe, if I approach them very delicately, we might have a rethink on the euro...

Why Liberals might like a good royal wedding

The prospect of another royal wedding makes me feel old. The last big one seems like yesterday – my first few months as a reporter on the Oxford Star – but it is actually, by definition, a generation ago.

Not quite sure what I’ve been doing in the intervening years. Washing up, I think.

There are Liberals among us who believe their political beliefs lead them inexorably into being republicans. So let’s mark the occasion by explaining why Liberals really ought to be constitutional monarchists.

I suppose the reason I would describe myself like that is history. It is the antidote to the kind of utilitarianism imposed on us from New Labour, where their ignorance of history led them to make the most extraordinary mistakes (invading Iraq, for example) - plus an all-pervading dullness and technocracy which is fast becoming the main thing I remember from the Blairbrown years.

Citizenship is a key Liberal concept, and – to be citizens – we need to know who we are, as Simon Schama said in the Guardian last week. The continuity of the institution of head of state provides an absolutely vital factor in this. We don’t have to navigate our self-identity via President Blair.

But the real reason is that the monarchy is the antidote to fascism and extreme nationalism. Monarchies take those emotions and render them harmless in a little bit of ceremony, flag-waving and tradition. Without that lightning rod, the inevitable forces of nationalism - which are powerful in former empires - can become fierce and demanding, because there is no monarchical tradition you can compare them with and trump their patriotism with.

Throughout the twentieth centuries, former monarchies which became republics invariably became fascist states, with disastrous consequences for us all.

It is all very well to somehow tidy away the monarchy, because it somehow seems more equal to do so. But then it won’t be us that will suffer first from fascist violence. It is cheap at the price.

Traditionally, monarchs are supposed to be bastions against the tyranny of the executive. That was why the Peasant’s Revolt appealed to the king. We have the worst of both worlds – the monarchs powers are used by the Prime Minister to bypass Parliament. It isn’t the monarchy we should worry about as Liberals – it’s the powers of the monarchy.

Tough on inequality, tough on the causes of inequality

Well, I have scraped back onto the Liberal Democrats' Federal Policy Committee.  Rather by the skin of my teeth.

So thank you so much to everyone who voted for me. 

Every time I get re-elected onto the FPC I feel a little bit more strongly that I didn't try hard enough to shift things over the previous twelve months, and I feel that even more strongly now I have been on it for twelve years.  So I shall try very hard not to let any of you down this time...

Because everything is changing now.  For the past twelve years, the policy committee has been about agreeing safe policy that ruffles no feathers, and that fits neatly into a small box marked 'bright ideas, not too dangerous'.  Heavens, that has to change now - at least if the Lib Dems are to survive their encounter with government.

The policy committee isn't really designed for achieving anything else, but we have to somehow make sure it does.  Starting with a distictively Liberal vision of public services - which are human-scale, effective and preventive (rather than inhuman-scale, ineffective and symptomatic in the New Labour model).

But what strikes me most about our policy failures over the past decade, and our failure to spell out a distinctive public service vision is one of those, is that it is way beyond time we rid ourselves of the old Fabian legacy.

Fabians have put tax and benefits at the heart of their policy, and have led Labour to do the same.  The result is that the causes of inequality - of the stark divisions between rich and poor - have been left untackled.  They are happy just to pick up the pieces after the damage has been done, and ameliorate it a little.

No more.  If I have anything to do with it (and maybe I will), the Liberal Democrats will be constructing radical policies that deal with the causes - which means tackling corporate privilage and monopoly power.  The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Why someone might say 'bring on the cuts!'

I’ve had a fascinating day in Wales yesterday, talking about co-production to the voluntary sector in Pembrokeshire – meeting some amazing people, and getting what was, to me, a new take on the spending review and the cuts.

I was taken aback by how frustrated so many of the people there seemed to be with the county council, and with local government in general. For its slowness, its risk averse caution, its silo-based bureaucracy, its lumbering lack of imagination.

There was a great deal of fear about the cutbacks, but that was only half the story. I don’t come across the other half of the story so much, until I go outside London, and this was no exception. There was a feeling that only extreme austerity had any chance of re-creating the public sector in a way that was genuinely flexible, bottom up and – most important this one – able to use the resources effectively that people represent.

“Bring on the cuts,” said one of those at the conference I spoke at. I’m sure that isn’t the attitude of everyone; the surprising thing was that it could be said at all.

The theorists of ‘co-production’ argue that, at neighbourhood level, some social problems may actually be solutions to others (for example, lonely older people and children who need reading help – you could tackle them separately, but it might be most cost-effective to link them together).

But being in Pembrokeshire reminded me of the gulf that may now open out between the imaginative local authorities – using their newfound powers – and the unimaginative ones.

The director of one local organisation told me that they had re-organised their various programmes for older people so they could feed off each other. No more separate silos for fire prevention, befriending, visiting and other services.

The response of the local authority? As soon as they heard that the member of staff did not have ‘fire prevention’ in their job title, they cancelled their contract for fire prevention advice.

Don’t waste a good crisis, says Richard Kemp. And maybe, just maybe, the financial crisis is so huge that we can carve out a public service system that not just works, but works on a far more local, responsive and humane level.

But that requires a little imagination from the statutory sector, and in some places – thanks to two generations of recruitment for bone-headed obedience – that is in very short supply. The danger is that we will keep all the bureaucracy and hopelessness, and lose a great deal of valuable, civilised institutions as well.

What we need, politically at least, is a discussion about how we can make sure – given all the constraints of localism – that what we actually get is the other way round.