Doing the Lambeth Walk

Down here in the former LB Leninspart on Thames we've seen a fair few political fashions come and go (Ted Knight anyone? Linda Bellos?). Sandinista and ANC flags once graced the Town Hall. Back in the 1980s I returned some overpaid Housing Benefit and got a letter back starting ," The People of Lambeth thank you...". There are people a few years older than me who swear it used to be possible to get paid a day's wages to go on strike if you worked for Lambeth - as long as it was a strike against something Ted Knight disapproved of. And that's just a taster of the directly political stuff - I won't go into the tales of former senior officers in the Housing Department making porn films in the now closed Town Hall social club after hours. Nor the homelessness funding crisis enlivened by bailiffs arrive to confiscate council property because finance hadn't managed to pay the B&B bills of the homeless families they were supposedly assessing.

But for the past few years they've all been really moderate and well behaved down in the Council Chamber in Brixton which, to seasoned observers like myself, has frankly been something of a disappointment.

So imagine my excitement when news of Lambeth becoming the 'John Lewis Co-operative Council' reached my ears at the beginning of the year. This was the model that would take on the evil 'Easy Council' of Brent and win back the people to the Labour banner! Henceforth local services would be mutual rather than municipal, co-operative rather than Council.

At first this seemed just a slogan, but now we have a 52 page first stage blueprint. It's the New Labour version of the Big Society, so it may be worth those of you unlucky enough to live elsewhere taking a glance. It aims, after all, to prefigure a 'new relationship between citizens, community and public sector'. Big stuff, at least potentially. Big enough to have its own bloomin' wiki no less.

Who on the left could be against this ? Who could argue - at the level of principle - for the continuation of state provision over community and employee controlled models? Not me. Without quite adopting AVPS's starry eyed account of the world I'd like to see, or Boffy's relentless co-operative enthusiasm, I do fundamentally believe that ordinary people should run the world, and that politics should be, in part at least, about searching for new ways in which this hope might be realised. I just understand that this might, just might, still be via some form of state provision or control at times, especially at a local level. Letting individual schools control their own admissions, for instance, just ruins things for everyone else.

But as I struggle through the limpid Web2.0/sub-Californian management prose of the so called 'white paper' put out by Lambeth Council, three thoughts keep coming back to me.

Firstly, this is a reform for austerity just as much as the Big Society is supposed to be. There's going to be less money around, savings are going to have to be made and giving co-ops control over certain services is a kind of mutualist gloss on hard choices which would have had to be faced anyway. This fact is acknowledged, but softened by a touching faith in the potential for a Total Place approach to realise savings. Well, I'm all for only processing a piece of paper once and for the NHS to share Social Services offices. I just don't think turning Council services over to potentially scores of separate organisations, co-operative or otherwise, is a particularly promising way to start. So the idea may yet share many of the Big Society's assumed problems in basically boiling down to people being asked to take on services for nowt, or near to nowt, or just lose them completely.

Secondly, this really is just a gloss on the existing default model of the commissioner state:

Strategic commissioning goals would be agreed by a single senior management team drawn from across the borough’s public services, although this group could include members of the private and voluntary sectors as appropriate. The risk of professional capture and bureaucratic expansion would be contained through collective agreement and challenge by these senior commissioning managers. The
commissioning process would explicitly involve local political leadership through the council’s Cabinet and this will ensure direct and clear political accountability for all strategic decision-making of a much broader scope than at present. Further, this would be augmented by radically enhancing the role of scrutiny by local councillors and residents to hold delivery agencies to account for their operational effectiveness. This new group would be responsible for all strategic commissioning decisions in the borough which would then be made real by a range of delivery agencies" (emphasis in the orginal)

Note the local councillors and residents are holding the delivery agencies - i.e. the mutuals and co-ops - to account, not the strategic commissioners. How very modern: the monkey is fully and transparently accountable whilst the organ grinder sits untroubled.

Lastly, though, the big thing is the paper seems to only use the word 'procurement' once. Commissioners don't just wave their hands and magically commission - someone has to go out and procure. Don't take my word for it, go check the EU regulations that Mr.Mandelson was so keen to push through before being enobled. Now, personally, I think this is classic Emperors New Clothes territory: the traditional alledgedly sclerotic local government bureaucracy that these marketised relationships were supposed to destroy have been replaced by......a vast and increasingly sclerotic procurement bureaucracy disproportionately based on various forms of competitive tendering.

But you don't have to necessarily agree with that observation to accept my main point - regular competitive procurement exercises are incompatible with giving local people organised into co-ops and mutuals control over the services which affect them. I mean, they might lose the tender, might they not? & some would say this is a good thing if their services weren't up to much, or the tender criteria were simply too difficult for them to meet on - to pick a factor entirely at random - price.

The basic question is: if co-ops are so great - and they could be, I really think they could - how do we protect them from the circling sharks like Capita? I can't find an answer in our local white paper...

What’s Left?

John Lancaster in the upcoming LRB,

"So: a huge unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialised. That is literally nobody's idea of how the financial system is supposed to work. It is just as much an abomination to the free marketeer as it is to the social democrat or outright leftist. But the models and alternatives don't seem to be forthcoming: there is an ideological and theoretical vacuum where the challenge from the left used to be. Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more – if only to clarify thinking and values, and to provide the chorus of jeering and Schadenfreude which at this moment is deeply appropriate. I would be providing it myself if I weren't so frightened."

There's too much truth in this for me to be comfortable. There have been - isolated - left commentators who have put forward emergency or long term economic recovery plans - but few who have go to the root of the matter in proposing a different kind of society, other than those who simply repeat the same old mantras of 'worker's democracy'. It's not enough.

Dr.Finlay Returns

No more Mr. Bean, no more Stalin:suddenly Brown and Darling have managed to make this government look like Dr.Finlay - that kindly and authoritative Scottish professional of impeccable probity and wisdom who knows and cares about his patients. Suddenly, improbably, they are world leaders in defusing crises of capitalism and the Eurozone and, somewhat less publicly, the States are queuing up to copy their policy proscriptions. Nobel prize winners laud Dr Finlay in the New York Times. Jackie Ashley in the Guardian is cock-a-hoop. Suggestions of a snap election to “re-affirm their mandate during the difficult times to come” can’t be far away.

Well, we’ll see. Richard Murphy is in no doubt: the respite is temporary and full nationalisation will have to follow. (He’s also warned of Ireland ‘doing an Iceland' btw).

Comrade Mason also warns that many economists say that this deal won’t hold and full nationalisation will have to follow across most of the Western world. Both of them are concerned about how governments now change previous commercial practice, whether or not full nationalisation occurs. Business as usual is what got us into this mess - so something has to change, despite Darling’s insistence on the radio this morning that the new state banks be run ‘on a commercial basis’. Murphy has a set of detailed policy proposals here which sound quite sensible to this non banker. Mason puts it thus:

“If you are, say the head of corporate social responsibility at a bank like RBS your main obsessions have been with responding to lobbyists on two of the great issues of our time: climate change and international development. I suggest that this will now lead to a reprioritisation to a third great issue of our time - ending rip-off banking.
Once the wing public realises these companies are being run in part in the public interest there will be an avalanche of campaigns: over small business interest rates, over rip off lending practices, over off shoring. The banks, in other words, will be required to show some social responsibility towards their actual customers.”

Suddenly, the efficiency, ethics and politics of running finance capital come to the fore: it’s not just a technical question any more. TINA is dead, whatever the efforts of Dr.Finlay....

Apolitical Politics

I follow a number of Leftie political blogs, notably A Very Public Sociologist (AVPS). This is a quite well informed site maintained by a couple of Socialist Party -i.e. Militant - folk in Stoke, at least one of whom is doing a PHD in Sociology @ Keele.

Once upon a time I knew quite a lot about both Militant and academic Sociology. It would be fair to say I retain a general distaste for the one, but relatively fond memories of the other. But AVPS is an unusual and interesting place, characterised by intelligent postings, not the robotic repetition of 'the line' with which I associate the Militant Tendency of the 1980s. I still disagree with their politics though - the idea of Transitional Demands always makes me groan, and I'm even further away from workerism having any appeal than I was 20 years ago.

Anyway, all this is by way of introduction. There is a posting on AVPS about an academic seminar at Keele where the author heard about work being done to investigate micro politics in the 'neighbourhood polity': largely about how interest groups intersect in a regeneration area. The spice comes from the fact that Stoke has some BNP councillors, who take part in these exchanges, and who - at the level of the 'neighbourhood polity' seem relatively innocuous. So a national call for a focus on those of a 'Christian background' translates into a local sponsorship of Easter Egg hunts.

This is fascinating. Anyone with any experience of ‘neighbourhood’ politics (or school governing bodies, ALMO boards, Tenants Associations , community groups and the like) will be familiar with the convention that everything is done in a ‘non political way’. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. First, it remains a truism that most people other than activists hate, absolutely hate, the practice of conflating the need to get something done with the making of wider political points. It seems like ‘grandstanding’, and it pisses people off. Second, it is genuinely true, in most of these situations, that the choices on offer are severely constrained by funding arrangements or limited powers – no matter how much a, say, school governing body might want to change the curriculum it’s actual power to do so remains minimal. So this foregrounds consensus, or ‘professional’, ‘de-politicised’ type decisions. This doesn’t mean the Left should simply ‘let it lie’ in respect of the BNP, nor that we should eschew involvement in such community groups. It means when we operate in such contexts we should seek examples of apparently ‘professional’ good practice which make the racists – and others on the Right - more likely to reveal their true colours and leave them outside the apparent ‘apolitical’ consensus of such community politics. For instance, if there is a youth club on an estate that is being regenerated we should ask for figures not merely on how well used it is, but whether there are groups of young people who aren’t using it (which might generate a discussion on how the club might better serve, say, Muslim girls). If the headteacher presents figures on SATS results we should ask for some kind of breakdown by obvious categories (ethnicity, gender, class indicator proxies like Free School Meals etc), and inquire about the school’s plans for dealing with any obvious disadvantages. (Actually, this might well mean concentrating resources on White working class boys at the moment, but that’s another story). This is not easy - it can backfire and make it seem that the Left are the ones outside the 'apolitical' consensus. But we have to try to bridge this gap between 'politics' - seen as sterile name-calling and windy generalities - and 'getting things done'. We have to make people think there is a point to Leftism.

Is this reformism? Perhaps AVPS would say so. But even someone more convinced than me of the relevance of the reform/revolution distinction might want to think a bit more deeply about why the Left are primarily seen as either posh newspaper op-ed columnists or street corner propagandists with nothing useful to offer 'on the ground'.