Jonathan Todd

Tonight sees the launch of an RSA project that should produce important results for public service provision in South Lakeland and Cumbria. Working in partnership with Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council, the RSA (of which I am a fellow) will implement a wide range of projects that will help citizens become more self-reliant, resilient, altruistic and creative. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, notes:

“If public agencies are to improve service outcomes in the difficult years ahead they will need to forge a different type of relationship with citizens. This is one of the assumptions behind the partnership.”

I couldn’t agree more. I make related arguments on the importance of active citizenship here and here.

This is also the thinking behind Labour’s bold move towards co-operative councils. As the co-operative council model develops, the lessons of the RSA’s partnership with Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council will be valuable.

I’ll be pushing the District and County Councils that serve Westmorland and Lonsdale to take on board these lessons, otherwise my expectation is that public service users in the constituency are likely to have to endure falling service standards over coming years.

Matthew Taylor argues with good sense and strong social conviction:

“It would be better both for schools and for wider society if middle class parents put less energy in trying to get into ‘good’ schools and more in supporting their children and being active parents in more socially mixed schools (which, as it happens, is what I have done with my two boys). There is a marginally greater risk of a child failing in a more mixed school but people (and media comment) exaggerate this danger hugely; as I pointed out, 90% of the performance of children can be predicted from the resources and support they get at home. But, while going to a mixed school is a small risk for the well-off there is clear evidence that greater social mixing and a wider range of ability in a school are most definitely good for children from poorer backgrounds”.

However, as Fiona Millar and Melissa Benn have well illustrated the truth about state schools is twisted by journalists who educate their children privately.

Decisions about the schooling of children are always best made by the parents concerned but we should all try to see beyond the media froth that Millar and Benn highlight towards the truth that Taylor speaks.  If the left leaning middle classes, who are rightly concerned about social mobility, were all to do this then they would truly be the change that they want to see in the world.

Charlie Brooker is typically pugnacious and amusing when he writes:

“Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there’s nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn’t matter what they’re made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects”.

Denis MacShane may not be rushing towards his knitting needles. He wrote to Michael Martin in May to say:

“The great historian Macaulay wrote that there was nothing “so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. The British public is in one of its fits of morality right now but this will pass”.

Thomas Babington Macaulay may have been an historian but he was once described by John Stuart Mill as an intellectual ‘dwarf’. Perhaps, Mill would not have been so quick to dismiss as ‘ridiculous’ the collapse of trust in institutions like parliament and the City that Brooker lampoons. He was a genuine progressive and may have seen the spirit of our age as a harbinger of something more profound than that which can be dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. He might have agreed with Matthew Taylor, who writes in this summer’s RSA journal, that “our political model is broken”. He goes on:

“The polls-driven, triangulating nature of modern politics, exacerbated by the Westminster electoral system, encourages politicians to promise we can have our cake and eat it too. Having been told that anything is possible if we only elect the right guy, we are quickly disillusioned, and so the gulf between us and our leaders widens again. In my first RSA annual lecture, I spoke of the need to move away from a government-centric model of politics in which we demand that politicians solve all our problems (while all the time expecting them to fail), to a citizen-centric model in which we, the people, try to agree what we want while recognising the responsibilities and trade-offs involved”.

As Taylor writes elsewhere, ”we find ourselves unwilling to be governed but not yet willing to govern ourselves”. This is the essence of our times. This is the next step on what G. W.F Hegel – a truly great nineteenth century historian – called “the long walk through the institutions”. It is far from ‘ridiculous’. Knitting needles may or may not help. But we must think imaginatively and boldly to create the new politics that we need.

Newsnight’s “Ethical Man”, Justin Rowlett, spent one year doing all that he could to reduce the carbon footprint of his family. He went to more considerable lengths to do so than, I think, the overwhelming majority of people in this country would even contemplate, as he discusses in the video below.

The end result of all of this sacrifice? A 20 percent reduction in his total carbon footprint. So, a gain, but enough of a gain to justify all of the pain? There was certainly more pain involved than, I fear, the average Brit could tolerate. Some might shrug their shoulders in the face of this and say: “What the UK does doesn’t matter anyways, as the key to averting climate change is what happens in China”. 

It’s certainly true that it would be possible for everyone in the UK to go through the pain of Ethical Man and for all of the consequent gains to be more than cancelled out by legion upon legion of dirty power plants and similar in China. However, it’s also true that China is less likely to cut back on its emissions while it continues to feel that the west is not making serious attempts to do so, as Ed Miliband recently said:

“China used to think the developed world is not serious. That’s what they were saying [at UN talks] in December. But now they know the US is on the pitch and ready to engage with them. It has made a real difference to what China is saying”.

President Obama seems to be changing the terms of engagement. He’ll only be able to continue to do so, however, if he is able to begin to deliver reductions in US emissions. China will doubtless judge him by his actions as well as his words. How will he deliver such action?

He might expect every American to ape Ethical Man tomorrow or he might think that his government’s decisions are at the crux of things. As Gavin Esler says in the introduction to the video below: Ethical Man’s “experience raises profound questions about how far individuals really can do much and how far government decisions on coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like really are the key.”

Matthew Taylor has discussed government-centric and citizen-centric models of change. Ethical Man, obviously, offers a citizen-centric model but if Obama decides that every American is unlikely to ape Ethical Man, he will prefer a government-centric model. Certainly, there is much that governments can achieve on “coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like” but, equally, citizens live in communities.

What might Ethical Man have achieved if he had attempted his experiment on the scale of a community? The village of Ashton Hayes, Cheshire, has actually attempted something similar; so, the notion isn’t an entirely fanciful one. Ethical Man’s reduction in his direct carbon footprint was a more impressive 37 percent. The difference between 20 and 37 percent is explained by the carbon contained in services that he used – schools, hospitals, etc - which he did not directly control. But, collectively, his community probably did control, at least to some extent, many of these carbon emissions that weren’t under Ethical Man’s direct control.

Surely Ethical Man’s total reduction in his carbon footprint would have exceeded 20 percent if he could have convinced his community to change their behaviour in certain respects? Citizen-centric models of change can’t simply mean the lonely endurance of pain but must also encompass an attempt to change the behaviour of those around you. That, ultimately, must lead to greater gain. It makes me wonder what the citizens of East Dulwich, the part of London where I live, might achieve if they worked together.

If communities across the west did this, then it would be that much easier for the likes of Obama and Miliband to make the case to China. That’s not to say, however, that our leaders won’t need to make some tough choices on “coal, carbon taxes, plastic bags and the like”. It’s simply to say that the pain of being ethical will be minimised and the gain of being ethical will be maximised if citizens can make their communities, rather than simply their households, ethical. Be the change that you want to see, as Obama didn’t quite say.

“A week is a long time in politics, but four years is a very short time”, as Michael Barber once told Tony Blair’s Cabinet in a misquotation of Harold Wilson. Alistair Darling will be hoping that the first part of this is true and that next week’s Budget allows the political focus to move on from the Damien McBride-affair. This affair has undermined the momentum that Gordon Brown built at the G20 conference and Darling will attempt to recapture this.

However, he might reflect upon the second part of Barber’s observation, as he draws up his Budget. Anatole Kaletsky may have him question its wisdom, while Dieter Helm would praise it. An energy crisis may only be six years away, argues Helm. The recent comments of Lord Browne may cause us to wonder about the proper role of energy markets in both keeping the lights on and meeting our climate change obligations. Helm makes a convincing case that government decisions made now will massively bear upon our ability to keep the lights on in six or so years time; with the possibility that we will be diminished in this ability far more real than we might imagine. While Kaletsky joins Samuel Brittan in encouraging Darling to focus on economic growth in 2010, not the state of public finances in 2015. The later only deteriorates without the former, even if focusing on the former involves more borrowing now, which inevitably has implications for public finances in 2015.

The McBride-affair has made the political challenge facing Darling even bigger. But, as Matthew Taylor has noted, there are some “huge choices to be made” on policy. These are such that the policy-making and economic dilemmas facing Darling are, arguably, even bigger than the political dilemmas.  They are certainly more important. This isn’t a time to play political games but to face up, as honestly and as fully as possible, to the real challenges that we face as a country. Ironically, to do so might also be the best political response. This would be to place political strategy above political tactics; the reverse of what Taylor claims is the defining trait of Gordon Brown’s administration.