Culture
I had this on Labour Uncut last week.
There is a piece of land registered on Landshare in every postcode in the UK. If you stacked every film shipped weekly by Netflix in a single pile, it would be taller than Mount Everest. The value of goods traded annually on ebay is more than the GDP of 125 countries. Bike sharing is the fastest-growing form of transportation in the world.
Something is going on here. And Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers think they know what it is: collaborative consumption. Defenders of the big society have latched on to the decentralised, networked mega-trend that Botsman and Rogers describe in their book, “what’s mine is yours – how collaborative consumption is changing the way we live.”
After Botsman gave a version of her stump speech at the RSA last month, I asked whether this trend contains any lessons for Labour. She was, understandably, reticent to politicise her baby. The big society shouldn’t be owned by any political party, nor should collaborative consumption, she told me.
Of course, she’s right. The civic institutions that are supposed to make up the big society were around long before David Cameron tried to destroy them. And collaborative consumption is too nebulous a concept for any politician to convincingly declare it their passion. I’m not even sure that it adds up to a unified idea. There are, however, elements of Botsman and Rogers’ argument that hit upon some truths that Labour should absorb.
They claim that people are sharing again and creating three distinct kinds of consumption: product service systems (PSS), redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles. Both what we consume and how we consume are changed by these systems. But do not worry. We are not all turning into hippies. Self-interest remains the prime driver, with improved social outcomes a mere by by-product.
Netflix is a popular PSS model because people want to watch films, not collect DVD boxes. Access is the privilege; ownership is the burden. As Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, another PSS variant, says: “It’s the car your mother said you could never have. When you are not using it, it is someone else’s problem, and who cares”. As well as being more fun, access tends to reduce carbon emissions. Think of the carbon saved from all the DVD boxes not manufactured for Netflixites and cars un-owned by Zipsters.
Ebay, freecycle and craigslist are well-known illustrations of redistribution markets. It is the desire to buy, sell and swap used goods which creates these markets. But, as this occurs, carbon is saved that would otherwise be emitted in manufacturing new goods. These markets also build trust amongst strangers, because market participants know that their behaviour today will affect their ability to trade tomorrow. Ebay buyers, for example, want to buy from sellers with positive feedback ratings, so negative ratings limit the ability of sellers to trade.
TimeBanks USA, an enabler of collaborative lifestyles, has been described by its founder as “a time machine taking us back to an age when we knew each other and trusted one another”. Time banks exist all over the world and all apply the same principle. For every hour you spend doing something valued by someone in your community (cleaning their gutters) you earn a credit to be banked at an online portal and spent on things you value (Spanish lessons). Participants are incentivised by accessing something they want. But 72% of time bankers report that participation gives them a stronger sense of community.
Irrespective of the collaborative consumption model, people are sharing because it serves their self-interest. Our bread should never depend on the benevolence of bakers. Enhanced sustainability, trust and community spirit can, however, be achieved, as people follow their self-interests through consuming collaboratively. This isn’t to say that people are completely uninterested in these social outcomes, as the MyBO activity tracker illustrates.
This tracker was designed by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook. He only works on projects that will have “far-reaching social and life-changing impact but that are also fun, modern and smart”. Those who opened trackers shared a belief in a particular outcome: the election of Obama as US President. But they also wanted the fun of the interactive game that was enabled by the tracker. The more fun they had the more campaigning they did. If we want to change the world, we may not succeed unless we make the journey fun, modern and smart (does this sound like your latest Labour party meeting)? Total abstinence and a good filing system were never the right signposts.
Labour is increasingly winning the argument that the big society cannot fill the gaps left by the government’s cuts. We are right to stress that it isn’t an either-or choice between state and society, but a question of what state and society can achieve together. However, to fully win this argument we need to paint a more vivid picture of the kind of reformed state we favour.
Such a state would harness the tools of collaborative consumption and direct them towards our Labour goals. Libraries could incorporate hubs for time banks. Transport authority websites might put driving commuters in touch with others making the same commute and interested in car sharing. Sure starts could host markets for exchanging used children’s clothes and toys. Local authorities might open up public land to community groups through Landshare.
Many small changes of this sort will be required to make the state fun, modern and smart.
Earlier this week I wrote with Alison McGovern for Labour Uncut on next steps in the governance of football.
Blood, sweat and tears have spilt recently in Liverpool. Too much by supporters anguished at the financial plight of a great institution and the grim reality of listless defeat at Goodison Park; more by millionaires who gained control of this institution than by the millionaires responsible for this loss.
The illusion that Liverpool FC would emerge fighting fit from the Tom Hicks and George Gillett era was shattered by Everton. While the reds battled to victory against Blackburn yesterday, much needs to improve. But it isn’t only on the pitch that the lessons of recent years need to be learnt.
The promise of New England sports ventures (NESV), the new owners, to listen to supporters is welcome. Talk, however, is cheap. Fans have been left jaded after previous commitments have been reneged upon.
Now this promise should be backed up by institutional reform. This should mean, at least, a fan on the board. More ambitiously, this might mean taking up Rogan Taylor’s proposal that NESV look towards fans holding a significant minority of shares in the club; perhaps, as much as 25 percent. While the dream of full mutualisation and Liverpool FC being owned and run such that it embeds Scouse pride in a similar way to the fan-owned FC Barcelona in Catalonia may be distant, this proposal would have radical consequences.
Shareholding fans better integrate the views and interests of fans in how the club is run. The alarm bells about Hicks and Gillett are likely to have rung earlier and more loudly had fans also had shares in the club. Such shareholders would have become the focus of agitations against the ancien regime.
That’s one reason why the Taylor proposal may not be taken up by NESV. It would diminish their power. It would also dilute what profits they hope to glean from the club. In the real world, few corporate battles have ended with the victors giving their spoils to their customers.
John W Henry, the major investor in NESV, has been reading up on his “customers”. He’s been spotted with Taylor’s book Football and its fans: supporters and their relations with the game, 1885-1995. This will have taught him that football fans are a different breed from the consumers of most goods.
While the average cost of a cinema ticket in the UK in 2009 was £5.44, the average price for an adult-sized, half-sleeved premier league replica shirt is £40.89. You can still, for now, visit museums for free. But the average ticket price across all divisions (premier league, championship, league one and league two) is now £24.84.
That the average cost of supporting a premiership club in 2007 was £1,331 is testament not only to the money to be made from owning a club but also to the loyalty of fans. This financial investment is more than matched by fans’ investment of time and emotion in their clubs.
This dedication shouldn’t be abused by unscrupulous owners. “Respect the club”, Alex Ferguson told “the boy”. He has never had any need to make such requests of Manchester United’s fans. Through wind and rain, thick and thin, football fans keep coming back. Why?
Manchester United was here a long time before Wayne Rooney and will, as Mark Lawrenson observed last week, be here a long time after Wayne Rooney leaves, no matter when this happens. Football clubs are beating hearts of civic pride nourished through the ages by their fans. It isn’t the Sky Sports hype machine, with its incessant self-congratulatory tirades about “the best league in the world”, that keeps fans coming back. It is to be part of, and to sustain, this lifeblood of social capital and meaning. There’s a Coles Corner in every town and there’s a football club. And they are there, and will continue to be so, for important reasons.
This importance resulted in the parliamentary debate secured by Steve Rotheram, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, on the role of football supporters in the governance of professional football clubs being one of the best attended Westminster Hall debates ever. Political engagement must be maintained. Not least because wider football governance issues, in addition to further fan involvement in the running of clubs, are vital.
Both Barcelona and Real Madrid are fan-owned, but dominate la liga both financially and on the pitch. They earned 51 percent of la liga revenues in 2008-09, largely due to an uneven split in broadcast revenues, and last season these two finished 25 points above other teams in the league. If Liverpool and Manchester United, say, were wholly mutualised, but had a similar relationship to the rest of premiership as Barcelona and Real Madrid has to the rest of la liga, all would not be happy with English football.
It is the German bundesliga, not la liga, which we should take as our inspiration. While bundesliga clubs are required to be 51 percent owned by fans, it is the extent of regulation in Germany that distinguishes the bundesliga from other leagues. Politicians should tune out the complacency of the Sky Sports hype machine, acknowledge that the turkeys of the Premiership are loath to vote for the Christmas of the Bundesliga and make efforts to take forward regulatory reforms, as well as other policy initiatives, that properly acknowledge the real reasons for and meaning of the fidelity of football fans.
Some obvious conclusions on the future of English football that follow from the really quite decent show that Gary Lineker has put together for the BBC and which is finishing on BBC 2 now:
First, the English team would benefit from cutting the Premiership to 18 teams and a winter break. I’d also shed no tears for the Carling Cup while we are scrapping things.
Second, we need to produce more and better young players. Why aren’t we already doing this? English kids play 11-a-side too early on large muddy pitches and are trained almost exclusively to win. In other countries, in contrast, they are trained to have skills and to have a football mind-set. “The control of the game is everything”, as Terry Venables said of the Spanish style. Kids would better learn how to control games and balls by playing more 5 and 7-a-side than they tend to in the UK on better surfaces. This wasn’t said on the Lineker show but I’m sure I heard somewhere that at Ajax kids only play on concrete pitches until the age of 14. The Dutch way doesn’t always have to be the Nigel De Jong way. Indeed, few countries in the world have more football brain per capita than the Dutch. This brain is developed by kids growing up as footballing jacks-of-all-trades; not just having the big lad being the central defender and the quick one being the winger. It’s important to develop an appreciation of the game in the round.
Third, in different ways, both Spain and Germany have been through crisis periods in the past 20 years. But they used these crises to step back and review the way they organised their football. We, too, now need to have the courage to admit where things are not going right and take appropriate action. Sadly, I fear that the English game is institutionally and culturally incapable of really doing this.
I wrote for Labour Uncut with Alison McGovern about how Liverpool FC is a Big Society.
As Ed Miliband was unveiled as Labour’s leader in Manchester ten days ago, Liverpool were drawing with Sunderland 30 miles away. Which disappointing result was of secondary concern for many compared with protesting against the club’s misrule by Tom Hicks and George Gillett.
Yet even with the possibility of administration hanging over the club, Jeff Stelling of Sky told the protestors to “concentrate on what’s happening on the pitch.”
But this “let them eat cake and drink warm lager” attitude misses the point.
As the clock ticks down to the club effectively being publicly owned, we should ask whether David Cameron has a better grasp of the issues at stake. In spite of the ownership bid from New England Sports Ventures, Robert Peston continues to see control of the club by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) as a live option. RBS, 84 percent publicly owned, could assume ownership on 15 October when loans taken out with them expire.
While it may be that RBS avoids this outcome by finding new owners capable of servicing the debt in the next week, an RBS takeover is close enough that questions must be asked about how they would conduct themselves as custodians of the club. A publicly owned bank taking on such a role raises new issues.
These issues are larger than the club; even than a club as great as Liverpool. They cut to the core of what we want our post credit-crunched country to be.
There is a worry that the practices which contributed to our troubles may be returning to the financial sector. This concern undermines the hope that there may be opportunity in the financial crisis; opportunity to re-evaluate what kind of economy and society we want to be and to recalibrate ourselves accordingly.
This spirit has inspired calls for the Northern Rock to become a mutual. Co-operation is an entirely different ethos from that which led Northern Rock to become involved with some of the rummest practices of recent years: frenzied property speculation, securitisation, rewards for failure.
Of course, government shares were taken in banks – invariably in the teeth of opposition from George Osborne – to avert the collapse of a sector upon which the whole economy depends. These shares should not be relinquished, however, until this sector and the way it interacts with the wider economy has been recast. There are a range of important considerations: containing systemic risk; preventing banks being too big to fail; increasing competition between banks; and creating a financial sector that is most complementary to manufacturing and other industries.
This isn’t about banker-bashing, but about creating an institutional architecture for our economic life that works for as many of us as possible. The Conservatives have appealed to the national interest in their conference slogan this week, but there is no greater national interest than this.
We’ve also heard much from David Cameron this afternoon of the “big society”. But he does not realise that Liverpool’s has met at Anfield at 3pm on most Saturday afternoons for over 100 years (and similar groups meet at Goodison and Prenton Parks). It is a society which, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, is a partnership not just between the fans and staff – whether players, coaches or burger flippers – of today but the players and staff of yesterday and the players and staff of tomorrow.
Arbitrary power was seen by Burke as the gravest threat to the health of society. If Liverpool FC is simply a business then Hicks and Gillett are guilty only of poor business practice. If, however, the club is its own Big Society, then they have used their arbitrary power to wreak violence on this society. In legal terms, it is the former. But that view would not be accepted on the Kop: a culture with rhythms and rules quite detached from any on the statute book.
It is cultures such as these which must be embraced and their power tapped into if the Big Society is to mean anything. Conservatives find it easy to embrace civic groups, which incubate these cultures, and argue that they are more effective than the state at tackling social problems. But to tap into their power and fulfil their promise does not require simply a diminished state. What is needed is that the state act intelligently and as a partner to civic society.
As, effectively, an extension of the state, the question to be asked of RBS is whether it is capable of acting in this way.
If the publicly owned banking sector really were so behaving, it wouldn’t just be Northern Rock that would be mutualised. It would also be Liverpool FC. That this seems unlikely says much about how hollow and inadequate is David Cameron’s understanding of the big society and the challenges facing post-credit crunch Britain.
Who is Blessing-Miles Tendi? He’s a DPhil student at Oxford and he writes for various publications, including the Guardian. He reviewed the film Mugabe and the White African for the Guardian and I commented on my blog upon his review. Apparently, I “wholly misunderstood” this review, according to a response to my blog made by Blessing-Miles. This sparked a debate between us, which you can read below my original blog. I’m not sure I have ever been so publicly and strongly put down by a budding public intellectual. But, then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a public intellectual with whom I disagree as much as Blessing-Miles. While I feel I have contributed as much to our debate as I feel inclined to, it has been quite an experience to lock horns with him.
