I went to Potlatch, a Typepad blog, and was mildly interested in this article and wanted to comment. I've commented there before, but only occasionally. I never had any trouble in doing so under my 'internet name' of Charlie McMenamin before. But I did tonight.
I have an 'internet name' as I am self employed and do work for local authorities, not-for-profits and charities. I have a personal website which advertises my wares under my real name. I also have a Facebook page, a Google+ presence and a Twitter account in my real name.
I don't want folk Googling me and finding all my disgraceful political opinions popping up. I can separate my work life and out of work life, but I don't want to leave a trail on the net behind me . Hence the nom-de-plume. I know, of course, that anyone with a scintilla of IT savvy could break this light disguise in a matter of moments. But the folk I work for aren't like that: they just don't want anyone with baggage. I try to keep my baggage separate.
Tonight I tried to comment on Potlatch and found that this was the new understrap of the blog
So I pressed 'more' and got this:
I used the drop down box which gave me the opportunity to sign in using Twitter or Google and lots of other options as well as Facebook - or to registered with Typepad using the same spread of options - but all of them reverted to my real identity, presumably picking up on my registrations under other platforms. I suspect there must be a way to make some comment on Potlatch's blog as Charlie McMenamin but, blimey, its not obvious and its very, very hard to find.
Now, I suspect Potlatch can live with the pain of not reading my response to his post. To be frank, I've already forgotten what I was going to say anyway*. But this has been a mildly sobering moment for me - all that stuff about the disappearance of privacy suddenly came home to roost.
Small stuff, perhaps. But then my impact on the internet world has been precisely small stuff. I just want the space to do it privately.
* But, hey, Will, for the record, I'm a big admirer of your style of writing and width of reading. But a sentence like,"A perceived virtue of neo-classical economics, as a tool for public decision-making, is its simplicity." really won't do, at least not without expansion. Neo-classical economics' 'simplicity' is shrouded in Maths which most of us find very, very complicated. Perhaps it is there to disguise the underlying simplicity?
I wrote last week about my dismay at finding my children didn't know the words to the Red Flag; Rab said he used the tune as a lullaby to his kids when they were small. & this set me thinking about the role of emotionally charged symbols - be they musical or flags or whatever - in the passing on of political and moral perspectives.
Let me share another anecdote.
This summer I went to the funeral of a man I hadn't seen for
the best part of 20 years. He had been General Secretary of the old Communist Party of Great Britain and, in the 1980s, I was a lowly rank and file member in
the same branch as him. I simply wanted to pay my respects.
There was a fair crowd at the funeral. A lot of faces I half
recognised and one or two much missed friends. We were all much older than my
mind's eye recalled us being, some very much older it seemed
to me. A certain amount of shuffling around went on as, first, the forty
somethings gave up their seats in the overcrowded hall for the sixty
somethings, and then the sixty somethings gave up their seats for the eighty
somethings. Most funerals are like that I suppose.
Anyway, we had the speech from the Son-who-is-a-Professor on
his father's personal and political life; we had the (rather beautiful) acappella
Burns ballad from the Grandson-who-is-the folk-singer ; and we had the warm
appreciation from the (non Communist) woman who had worked with him on
pensioners’ campaigns after he retired. I braced myself for the final moments,
certain that I was going to find it unbearably sad to hear these gathered
extinct volcanoes of British Marxism warble uncertainly through the Internationale
for one last time. Somehow the sound of their ageing larynxes were going to
confirm the passing away of my youthful hopes of socialism.
But Gordon, or his family, had thought of that. We didn’t
end on the Internationale,nor on The Red
Flag or Bandiera Rossa . We ended on Louis Armstrong’s
‘What a Wonderful World'. An expression of hope and
confidence in our fellow human beings’ capacity for wonder now and in the
future, not a ritualistic reminder of a past world fought for and lost by the
greyheads in the hall. It's taken me a few months to fully appreciate what a good decision this was.
Those old songs - like the Red Flag and the Internationale - are for
teaching the children so they don't die and so the kids have an imaginative window into how the generations that came before them saw the world.
The sentiments they were meant to
contain need to be passed on in other ways as well though. & any tradition which is something more than merely a tradition will find new ways of capturing the here and now and a contemporary sense of the socialist possibilities pregnant in the future. Because, for all the fact that music or flags and banners can't represent a politics in its entirety, we do need to be moved and reassured and warmed at an emotional level - but by a vision of hope for the future, in words and images and melodies that speak to where we're going, not where we've been .
So I walk into the kitchen and there is young Ms. McMenamin, aged 12, doing some nonsense free-form rapping about squirrels or whatever. It was the tune that caught my attention: dum-dum-de-dum/dum-dum-de-dum/de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum. I asked her if she knew what the tune was called, and she searched her memory and came up with a rather hesitant,".. something about trees?".
"Well... sort of", I say:" ... but there are other words as well". A veil of blankness descends. I called her 14 year old brother and asked him the same questiononly to get the same blank response. Now this depresses me, as he is by far and away the most politically aware kid of his age that I know.He wrote to Searchlight magazine asking to do his work experience next year FFS. But, no, he didn't know the words to that tune either.
Of course, my kids are not on their own: I see that whole conference halls full of people who might be expected to know the words need laminated cards to remind them. But when I was 12 or 14 everybody knew them. & I mean everybody, not just those who identified with the words in any way.
I find it desperately sad to see something slipping away from popular cultural memory. It's not that I think either the words or the tune itself are that wonderful per se, but the idea that they're losing their status as widespread cultural reference points, something almost like a nursery rhyme, obscurely upsets me. Even when one gets to the stage of doubting , even distrusting, any simplistic identification with 'flags and banners' of any kind, including musical ones, one has to be able to know which 'flags and banners' one is distrusting, or making ironic reference to, or whatever.
So the kids are on a programme of 'repeat after me till you get it word perfect'. The rest of you can make do with this.
Here's the lead story from the front page of my local free sheet newspaper:
"A disabled 11-year-old girl has been rejected by an academy school because she poses a “health and safety risk” to other children.
Idayah Miller, from Norbury, was told she could not go to the elite Harris Academy in Crystal Palace because her wheelchair would restrict the movement of other children in the crowded corridors.
In a letter to her parents, headteacher Steve Kenning also said the little girl would suffer low self-esteem because her “academic ability is quite low” and Harris is “a high pressure, high performing academy” where she would struggle to keep up with her friends"
The school's primary admissions criteria seem to be based on a banding system structured by distance, although the precise nature of the banding test, and what proportions of clever/middling/less clever kids they take, is not very clear. 10% of places are reserved for those with a 'aptitude' for technology, the school's specialism. The admission of kids with Special Education Needs (SEN) is described as 'a concession', even though all schools are legally obliged to take a certain proportion of such children unless they can show good reason otherwise.
Plainly, this case would seem to be a decision which offends against the Disability Discrimination Act. But I'm aware of the perils of making legal judgements on specific cases based only on newspaper headlines, so I'll leave that one to the lawyers.
I want to ask a broader question about admissions. 'Banding' is, in certain defined circumstances, especially in big cities, a perfectly reasonable way of allocating school places. It just means you test them and then, assuming equal proportions of kids with different ability levels have applied to different schools, allocate them places which leave each school with a broadly similar entry cohort. It can be a way of attempting to slow down the drift back towards a covert form of the old Grammar/Secondary Modern divide which is so evident in so many inner city areas.
But doesn't this case illustrate that if you let individual schools do the banding that they'll just use it as means of covert selection and rejection of 'low ability' pupils? As someone comments in the local newspaper article - would the school have rejected Stephen Hawking if he was in a wheelchair?
Meet the Academy Sponsor: Cameron's favourite carpet fitter it would appear.
I'd quite like it if one of the more mainstream leftie blogs picked this up, so I'm going to link to Liberal Conspiracy, Hopi (who, like me, doesn't live that far away), TCF and Don Paskini in the hope of attracting more coverage of this case and the general issue.
Coming to a status conscious household near you: a chance to spent $1000 preparing your 4year old to get into the kindergartenof your choice. (via). These people are the market leaders it seems:
There are so many things to worry about when applying to top public and private schools in NYC. We, at Bright Kids NYC, will take away the anxiety associated with prepping for the appropriate tests so that you as parents can focus on the rest of the admissions process.
It is brutal out there for parents with young children. The public gifted and the private school entry in New York City is getting increasingly competitive, particularly for young kids. If you are serious about gaining admissions to a top school, you must get serious about preparing your child for the appropriate tests.
They say social mobility stopped more or less dead with the cohort born in 1970. That makes a kinds of sense - those were the last people who grew to maturity as the West went through the shift from needing lots of both skilled and unskilled manual jobs into a world where there are many more white collar workers, more and more layers of which get deskilled or simply routinised into 'call-centre type' work experiences as the years tick by. The opportunities for advancement out of routine or dirty or dangerous or simply boring family work traditions are not widening as they were when I grew up - they're narrowing. & no amount of guff about 'the knowledge economy' coming to save us is going to change this fact.
So education becomes a frantic, scary, elbows-out-push-your-neighbour-aside scramble to get on that ladder. 'Cos now it's one-in-and-one-out for the class with the nice life.
& 4 year olds start studying for tests - and the class that can afford it bribes its way to the top.
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...
Basically it argues that the British military have ignored their own rule book and Military Doctrine ("concentrate your forces'') in the field in Afghanistan; engaged in showy tactical operations that have put their troops in danger due to inter-regimental rivalry and a deep set disdain for anything - like peace building,for instance - except war fighting; and sought to carry out certain missions simply to justify - presumably to the other services - that their shiny new Apache helicopters really were worth it. And all written by someone with an obvious deep sympathy and respect for the British Army....
Now, at this point, one would normally be reaching for hoary old thoughts about Lions being led by Donkeys or looking up Orwell on that thing about the British Army always being prepared for the previous war, or even the one about England being a family with the wrong members in charge.
But think about it a bit more: none of those over familiar tropes actually fit the situation being described. It calls, I think, for more the sort thing that Tom P and Chris Dillowworry away at- agency theory. I've argued elsewhere that this paper suggests:
(i)No one in New Labour ('the owners') had the faintest idea of how to challenge the Army ('the Executives') at a professional level, or inject any political/strategic perspectives in the campaign; (ii) The Chiefs of Staff (Head-honcho Executives) didn't have effective control over the middle managers leading the killing on the factory floor, all of whom seem more interested in making a name for themselves than, ahem, following the company strategy agreed by the shareholders.
Now, one quick read of a Chatham House paper does not somehow make me Mark Urban. I'm quite aware of my limitation in thinking about this area. But I have to say that the one thing more scary that an Army being sent to fight a purposeful imperial war is one where no one actually knows what they're bloody doing, and it's all a series of disconnected episodes that boil down to attempts to fight bureaucratic turf wars and climb the greasy pole....
I finally catch up with the exciting news that our Oxford PPE mafia are to be challenged by two horny handed scions of the soil: Burham and Abbot, both of whom struggled up through the despised academic backwater of Cambridge. Now there's diversity in action for you.
Oh well, it probably doesn't matter as John Lanchester nailed the result back on May 6th:
As is well known, it was decided a long time ago that the new leader will be a Miliband. It is less well known that in addition to the two Milibands we know about and show no signs of warming to, the party has several other Milibands in reserve. Fenton Miliband is one. He worked for Goldman Sachs, made a lot of money then had a moment of moral revelation and went off to work for the World Bank, then founded a non-profit to study the work of other non-profits in the developing world. His strengths are compassion and maths but focus groups dislike his beard. Another strong choice is Sholto Miliband. He has a beautiful singing voice and was given his own think-tank as a christening present. His special area is Scandinavian health care, and he is so popular in Norway that they named a fjord after him. Foreigners and working-class people have been shown to be reassured by him in statistically measurable ways.
There are plenty more Milibands where they came from. They are made in a lab. It took a while to perfect the process and some of the early prototypes were hideous, unelectable mutants. Most of them were melted down and used for parts, but one escaped and by the time he had been caught he had already found a job working for Gordon Brown and was building a power base in the party, so it was too late. The prototype was called ‘Ed Balls’ but in private the Milibands refer to him as ‘Igor’.
Contra quite a lot of the instant reaction I suspect novelty value alone will give this coalition government something of a honeymoon. Even the instant cuts programme we're promised in the emergency budget will, in all probability, be weathered as it will take a little while for the implications to work through to operational budgets.
Yes, it is entirely possible that there will be rebellions on either the Tory or Lib-Dem side which threaten the coalition. But, actually, I thought I saw the cold logic of political professionalism on show from both sets of negotiating teams over the last 4 days and I reckon those clever folk in both Central Offices will have game played their way through such troubles. Or at least the troubles that are predicable at this point anyway. Finkelstein was interesting on Newsnight - he clearly said both sides were playing for bigger stakes here: they want a permanent re-alignment of British politics to freeze out Labour. More prosaically, it may be in both sides interest to actually respect the agreement to have a fixed term 5 year parliament as it would allow the initial opprobrium coming towards both sets of party leaders to die down before another test at the polls.
In any event, let's face it, Labour is really not going to be in a position to exploit any such difficulties in the coalition for a while is it? At 29% in the polls, broke, defeated and hemorrhaging C1/C2 votes it is in a terrible position. There was even a suggestion yesterday that it might have to delay its Leadership contest whilst it raised the necessary money to conduct it. So rhetorical calls for 'left' Lib-Dems to join Labour may fall on pretty deaf ears.
Most of all, despite what the Labour Left are now going to claim, New Labour isn't dead. It may be running on empty in ideological terms, its' leading lights may be exhausted by 13 years of government but the Labour Party is about to conduct a Leadership election in which all the serious candidates will be, in one form or another, representatives of New Labour. Sure, McDonnell and Cruddas will briefly fly the flags of 'hard' and 'soft' Left respectively. But McDonnell will lose badly and Cruddas will fold back into the traditional posture of (internal) loyal opposition. No: the Labour Party will continue to be led by the New Labour clique.
So if/when industrial unrest or social disorder develops as the cuts bite Labour is unlikely to be able to channel the anger. It will be striving for a position of 'responsibility' : it is, after all, now essential the party of public sector managers - a technocratic entity whose prime function is to tweak the system through endless box ticking regulatory exercises.
But one thing missing from this morning's coverage is any sustained focus on the third happiest man in Britain. Step forward Alex Salmond, the man who promised a referendum on independence. The odds on him winning it must have just shortened considerably.
James Kwak asks 'Why do Harvard graduates go to Wall St? He says it's because they are easily led ('....very intelligent recruitment programs...'), are blinkered about the world and - if you're very academically bright - it is allegedly easier than getting a job in the public services using similar skills.
Do you know, I'd almost rather they went for the money pure and simple than because of a lack of imagination and an lack of moral fibre. Because that's what he's saying it is. These clever kids become bankers because they're only used to doing stuff which tells them they're clever kids. Trying to relate to the world in any other way is too frightening. Only then, says Kwak, once in the belly of the beast, do they get hooked on the money.
I never thought I'd say this, but it is almost an argument for compulsory (non military) national service. Let's help these poor, emotionally stunted young people grow as human beings. Let's make them do two years in, say, a pig farm or a sewage works before they go off to make their millions. Let's give them the equivalent of that metaphorical wartime foxhole which so many of the officer class had to share with the hoi polloi of the other ranks - and which made them better people for it.
Meanwhile, let's send the under-achieving graduates of Bash St Comprehensive off to Wall St and the City and their 'imaginative recruitment programs'.
I can imagine that our pig farms and sewage works might register a notable efficiency gain. & I'm absolutely bloody certain that the management of our financial markets would.
I know about certain stuff that not a lot of other people know about – or at least, not in such mind numbing detail. And I make a living out of it by hiring myself out to local authorities and other bits of the state. It’s cheaper for them than actually employing someone who knows about the Stuff I Know About (SIKA). So, yup, I’m a consultant.
You remember all that stuff about ‘Waste’ in the Leader’s Debate? That’s me, that is.
For 25 years I was employed in the not for profit sector where I did a range of things, including developing my alleged expertise. But I had to do other stuff as well – the meat and potatoes business of managing people and stuff. Let’s get real here: I was never a Captain of Industry or a Hero Innovator of the Managerial Classes. I fell into that dread category, Middle Management. I really never liked it – like a lot of folk I found managing people basically either stressful or boring 90% of the time. But I did it because that’s what you do if you get restless working at the coal face – you look for something more ‘challenging’ to occupy your time. It wasn’t that I was a bad line manager per se, it was just a role that never really fitted and I always felt like that proverbial dog walking on its hind legs. But somehow along the way I developed a certain grounding in the SIKA. I like my SIKA. & it is genuinely technically useful and necessary, not one of those faddish cult-things like Change Management or Systems Thinking.
So, in my late forties, I thought ‘sod this for a game of soldiers’ and tootled off to my back bedroom to become a self employed consultant. Everyone, it seemed, was a winner: my former employer found a younger, more energetic person to do my job, I got to work on stuff I actually liked and other organisations could hire me without getting stuck with some moderately expensive but not often used technical skill on their payroll. I could be a Charles Handy case study.
I’m not alone: pop down to the Royal Festival Hall or the British Library cafe anytime during a weekday and you’ll find little groups of self employed consultant-y type folk like me sitting round with their laptops having meetings. & a good half will be out sourced Public/Voluntary Sector types like me. A lot of low-mid level consultancy is retail, rather than PWC-style wholesale.
So, anyway, here I am in my early fifties now and I’m targeted as Waste. The only question seems to be whether I’m Waste to be cut out this year as Mr.Cameron thinks, or at some point in the next four years as the other two main parties think. Oh well, I suppose I could aim to be the oldest holder of those coveted five stars on a McDonald’s staff badge.....
Ah – but what about my SIKA? Think of it as a kind of specialist oil which, in its own little way, helps the bit of the public sector I’m concerned with work better. You don’t need a lot of it, but without any of my SIKA the whole engine begins to work less effectively – and more expensively.
I'll leave you to join the dots in terms of the political implications of all this for any cuts programme.
Jamie has noticed how political language tends towards the cutting off of alternatives, the 'shepherding down a desired path'. But I think he's wrong to see this in the context of mental health.
It's just bloody treating us like children. Look at the icongraphy.
Last time I said this I got accused of being a closet Spiked fan - trust me, I'm really, really sooo not - but Rob asks the grown up questions.
Yes, I've got John B's range of problems plus a few more, but once my family sorts itself out I'll start blogging properly again. Meanwhile check out Angie Androit on Sociological Images:
Some geographers at Kansas State University recently did an analysis of the spacial distribution of EVIL in the United States. Which part of the country is most afflicted by sloth? Lust? Greed? Envy? Wrath? Gluttony? Pride?
That’s right, folks – these geographers have operationalized sin, quantified it, then measured and mapped it. Pride is the aggregate distribution of all other sins, since it is supposedly the root of all evil (though one could also make a good case for apathy). Here’s how the sins are measured (and here’s a good view of the maps):
Greed: Average incomes versus total inhabitants below the poverty line
Envy: Total number of thefts (robbery, burglary, larceny, and stolen cars)
Wrath: Total number of violent crimes (murder, assault and rape) per capita
Lust: Sexually transmitted diseases per capita
Gluttony: Number of fast-foot restaurants per capita
Sloth: Expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation versus rate of employment
The last fortnight or so has been a time of anniversaries: the outbreak of WW2, 9/11, the collapse of Lehman Brothers. All of them lovingly covered in depth in the Press and on TV. After all, it's easy copy. You don't have to do the spadework of a real news story, just gently remind everyone of what happened in Event X, list the plans to commemorate it and get a few talking heads to intone on Event X's significance. Happily for our media friends you can usually rely on a new someone or other each year to come forward with a different perspective. So this year we've had 'WW2 -The Polish Version' in the mainstreammedia. (I'm as one with B& T on that one by the way).
Except the Credit Crunch/Financial Crash of course. We haven't even agreed what to call that, much less decided what it means. Peter Clarke expands on this point in the Guardian today with the help of a variety of the allegedly Great and Good: Skidelsky, Keynes biographer, says Keynes is back; Peston admits he thought things would change faster; David Hare wants to know why no politician has thought all this through as yet; Fay Weldon gives us a plug for her new book. And so on. Meanwhile Wiliem Buiter in the FT says, almost in the style of Manuel from Fawlty Towers, that he knows noooothing, albeit in a very erudite way. Krugman in the NYT says the whole economics profession got blindsided - but other economists seem to believe that their profession didn't pay enough attention to their own nostrums. The Crash is certainly a Great Event, worthy of an anniversary - but no one has a convinicing narrative, there is not yet an established Myth to reinforce or to attempt to knock down.
It is, in short, as yet a Phoney War that no one quite knows how to characterise at the moment - because it isn't finished and may yet have barely begun. Who knows if we're about to bounce, 'V' style, into a sunny upland future of a new Long Wave upswing or be seduced by a false dawn ? What will come to be seen as the defining moments of the financial crisis have yet to occur. Sure, unemployment has risen. Sure, some familiar firms have got belly up. Nonetheless, we're told that on all sides that the formal conditions that indicate a technical end to Depression are looming on the horizon. Perhaps. The real story - the anniversary signifier, the thing our children will remember it for, the Dunkirk, Barbarossa, Kursk and D-Day of this economic crisis as it were - lies ahead.
I can't help but believe that this story, when it emerges, will focus on the three re-negotiations of power:
The inevitable one that will occur in my lifetime between the 'West' as we have traditionally understood it and the BRIC countries, especially China. People who make things aren't going to put up with not getting anything but a fraction of the fruits of their labour for ever and a day;
The renegotiation of power we need and which I hope for, but which may never materialise - the one between the merchants of relentless growth, and the planet. This can only be done through re-distribution - because, as Chris points out, just stopping economic development per se kills babies. But more babies - and toddlers, and other children, and adults - will die unless we act to stop the potential for runaway climate change. So redistribution is key;
The renegotiation between state and civil society and the organised power of Capital. This is the most complex of all in some ways - and perhaps even less likely to happen than a coherent response to climate change. But we need such a renegotiation if all this is not to happen again.
So I get back from whatever it is I've been doing to find the long shadow of my favourite TV show still bugging the blogosphere- and indeed mainstream journalism. Chris Grayling'scomparison of inner city Britain to the version of Baltimore peddled in the Wire is the gift which just keeps on giving.
He's been given such a hell of a kicking on all this that I thought it might be fun to try to sketch out some ways he might, inadvertently, have stumbled on something. Not, obviously, in terms of crime. The local Manc paper dealt with that :
"[Baltimore], home to about 600,000, was blighted by 234 murders last year. That compares to 35 in Greater Manchester, which has a population of around 2.5m."
No, the real comparison is about how our lives - like the lives of The Wire's drug dealers, police, dockers, politicians, schoolkids and journos - are haunted by an imbalance between agency and structure. Or just by structure, actually.
The whole series could have been written by Talcott Parsons or Louis Althusser: no one, or almost no one, escapes their circumstances for any length of time. Structures call forth successions of individuals - Avon, Stringer, Marlo - to fulfill essentially the same roles. People change in all-to-predictable ways: just as Daniels, who makes Commissioner, has a guilty secret from his time on Narcotics, so Carver, originally a kind of joke, puts his days of petty corruption behind him and rises up the ranks as a reliable officer. But you just know he won't leave his past behind, any more than Daniels manages too. Individual initiative is, ultimately, crushed, be it Bunny'sHamsterdam or Carcetti's new broom in City Hall. Even the great symbol of individualism - Omar - loses, and I reckon we see in Michael's trajectory a proto Omar in the making, so even the individualism at the heart of the American Dream is structurally produced.
Yeah, that strikes me as being quite like Britain today - even before one gets into in business of 'public service reform', performance targets and the near universal 'gaming' of these things. There is no real social mobility, no real opportunity for individualism. Chris Grayling is right, inadvertently.
The Observer leads to day with the – oh, so shocking – news that quite a few of the Tory front bench, including that nice Mr.Gove, have endorsed Daniel Hannan’s call for the NHS to be replaced by a new system of health provision in which people would pay money into personal health accounts, which they could then use to shop around for care from public and private providers. Those who could not afford to save enough would be funded by the state.
Which rather sets the stage for health being a central election issue, this time, no doubt, with Labour tying a big pink ribbon round the NHS and claiming to be the ‘patriotic’ party in defending it not like those horrible market obsessed US-wannabees in the Conservative Party. Oh no, no like them at all.
Except of course, in the small matter of social care, where Labour Ministers never miss an opportunity to big up their commitment to individual budgets and self directed care.It's basically the same idea, just transfered to a not-that-dissimilar sector.
Back from my hols and I find Will on cracking form, not only on progressive conservatism but on its conjoined twin, Blairism:
I can well envisage a version of progressive conservatism that is too 'progressive' to ever conserve anything and too 'conservative' to ever achieve anything that might look like progress. That would be one harsh description of Blairism. If there is an alternative to this, it will be founded on that amorphous sense, felt by many, that calculation, competition, surveillance and comparison are scarcely achieving their stated goals, let alone supporting happiness and social stability.
Slugger led me to a long, long debate on American Healthcare Reform over at Reddit. My favourite comment is about 1000 down, from a Canadian coming to terms with the US system now he's living south of the border:
If you're American and have grown up used to the idea of a private health-care system, try picturing this: Imagine going to a new country and finding out that to call the police was for-profit, and you had a variety of options for licensed police services. If you paid for a good plan, you'd get sub-5-minute response times, you'd get detectives assigned if your car was stolen, and you'd have a cop patrolling your neighborhood on a somewhat regular basis. If you were on a budget, you'd only get a 10-minute response time, and no detectives assigned for major threats or patrols
Well, yes, most of you might think. But as another poster warned, there can be hidden dangers to thinking this way:
But aren't you glad that the government didn't tell you what doctor you had to go see? Like they don't do in any socialized medicare country that I know of? Haven't you considered the various imaginary problems that socialized medicine could cause? You know even talking about it could turn you communist like every other western nation. I'm a Canadian and I've seen people come out of hospitals drop to the ground and suddenly become communists, happens all the time.
Update: Sean at The Soul Of Man under Capitalism has a brilliant Fox TV clip where they seriously discuss the idea that socialised medicine encourages jihadist doctors...
