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Joined up thinking?
Excerpt: One of the irritating phrases New Labour threw around when they came to power was "joined up government". I don't think they have managed it much - but joined up thinking is necessary.
One of the irritating phrases New Labour threw around when they came to power was "joined up government". I don't think they have managed it much - but joined up thinking is necessary.
Over on the excellent Liberal Democrat Voice, Alex Wilcock has a piece about the Meeting the Challenge Paper (a chance to think in a joined up way, in principle at least...).
Alex complains that the paper defines inequality purely in economic terms:
If you think I’m exaggerating, just read it. Non-economic inequality simply doesn’t exist in Chapter 3. The very first paragraph claims “One of the most serious outcomes of the past 25 years of failed government has been the reversal of the trend towards greater equality that characterised the 1960s and 1970s.� So the last quarter-century has been entirely bad, but Mr Callaghan was a total, brilliant success? Quite. This tunnel vision ignores other inequalities, and applies Eeyore-like gloom to positive progress that doesn’t fit into its world-view: how about the status of women, the social acceptability of racism, or the rights of gay people? Apparently all these have made no difference to people’s lives, yet I’d hate to imagine life without them. I look around my own life, openly gay, loving and living with my partner for twelve years so far, and I see the paper’s assertion that things have become more unequal since 1980 as monstrously idiotic.
Alex is right on this. Rather than diagnosing economic inequality as cause we might do very well to think about as a symptom. That might lead us to the question: what would a liberal do to improve relative economic outcomes?
And this is a question we should be asking and making the centre of our narrative. To be fair many Liberal Democrats are doing so. Here is Liz Barker talking about the objectives of her working group:
"We aim to produce practical proposals to ensure that if somebody has potential and is prepared to work hard, their life chances will not be limited by where they come from or who their parents are".
And here is Lynne Featherstone
I think our distinctive ideological approach is to be found in our suspicion of big government. Far too much of government - especially that within the paws of Gordon Brown, master of the complicated innovation and baffling regulation - is riven with complexity, confusion and bureaucratic waste. Brown is highly vulnerable on this I believe - the complexity of tax credit forms, the profusion of paperwork families need to fill out and the plethora of new rules and regulations may not attract much mainstream press coverage at the moment (a few glaring scandals aside), but ask any low-income mum sitting down to try to work out how to claim what she needs to keep her kids fed and clothed - and they'll most certainly know what a bureaucratic mess Gordon Brown has made of so much of the financial system.
Putting it crudely, the defining vision of David Cameron is the traditional Conservative concern that posh people should have top jobs (him first, of course), and top jobs should be filled by posh people. Brown's vision is of a working class incapable of any action without a State scheme (carrot, sticks, and a plethora of pink offical forms). There is plenty of ideological space for us to occupy - in a way that puts us on the side of ordinary, aspirational people. But there are only glimpses of it in the conference motions.
And if you want an example of non-joined up thinking, then you have it in F21. While Meeting the Challenge decides that economic inequality is the only one worth talking about, F21 (titled Equality and Diversity) does not mention it at all.
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Thanks, Peter, and you're spot-on about causes, symptoms and where our approach should be coming from.
Ironically, the only speech at a Federal Conference for which I've been howled and jeered* at was against all-women shortlists, in which I raised the point that, yes, economic inequality was a bigger problem for women getting selected than Lib Dem sexism, and that all-women shortlists would make seats available only to quite a narrow social group. I may have more to say on 'Equality and Diversity' in a few days.
*It was a pretty poor speech, but I suspect the angry hecklers weren't critiquing its quality ;-)
Alex - I had a debate once on a similar theme with Marcus Woods. He said he couldn't see that there was any problem for women entering parliament as there were plenty of female candidates. He failed to notice my point that the majority of them came from very secure backgrounds with access to nannies and the like.
Alex - thanks for the kind words. I'll have something more to say on Equality and Diversity myself. (I'm not against the proposals as such, but scope and rhetoric are both questionable).
Peter
'I think our distinctive ideological approach is to be found in our suspicion of big government. Far too much of government - especially that within the paws of Gordon Brown, master of the complicated innovation and baffling regulation - is riven with complexity, confusion and bureaucratic waste.'
Lynne Featherstone needs to have a look at the big government her party has been co-creators of in Scotland.
She really thinks that the elctorate hasn't noticed this,or is just a case of saying one thing north of the border and the opposite south of the border?
She would be better off keeping her mouth shut.
If she thinks that the Scottish Executive is committing some of the same crimes that she accuses Brown of, she should say so - nothing's to be gained by keeping quiet. Whether you can pin everything the Scottish Executive does on the junior partner in the coalition is another matter.
I certainly agree with Alex's gripe that equality in society should not only be measured in economic terms - certainly the 'diversity' element would seem to have little to do with economics, though 'equality' points more in that direction.
Firstly, I have to say that I don't regard economic inequality as necessarily a bad thing in society. A much more important question is how easy it is to climb from the bottom to the top - i.e. social mobility. Unfortunately, this doesn't get the UK off the hook since social mobility has fallen since the 1960's and 70's and continues to be moving in the wrong direction. This is concerning in itself, but I wonder if any Party, even the Liberal Democrats, would really propose or even impose the policy measures needed to correct it. I say this because I believe that the root causes of inequality and social immobility would have to be reformed through a series of measures that are in parts both left and right wing, and therefore not entirely within the ambit of any one Party.
From my viewpoint, the principle cause of inequality and social immobility is the lack of a good education. I'm sure that there are other factors, but I would call this one determinative in the long term. In my opinion, the social mobility of the 1950s, 60s and 70s was largely the product of the educational system of that period, which was a very different mix of right and left wing ideas from the system we currently have.
To briefly summarise, I would characterise the defining elements of the education system from a political perspective as follows:
Firstly, what methods of assessment does the state impose and what is their purpose? Secondly, what role does the state play in providing education? If we answer those questions from a 1950s perspective, the methods of assessment used were primarily 'selective' and their purpose was to divine who was in the academic elite and who was not. In answer to the second question, the 1950's state was there to provide a universal education and would fund it according to academic ability right up to the tertiary level, so that bright students of whichever background could take part in it as far as their academic abilities would let them. Moving forward to the present day, there has been huge shift away from 'selection'- viewed as a nasty right wing idea - towards 'accreditation' as being the purpose of assessment. The awful irony of this idea is that it has set in motion two extremely regressive trends; tuition fees to cope with state funding of student numbers, and exasperated universities and large firms devising their own entrance exams to sort through the hundreds of applications all bearing 3 As at A Level or 2:1s at Degree level. Enter the private schools, who promise (for a fee) to specially prepare their students for just such entrance exams as part of their overall education. Class thus hardens into caste - good news for the thick but rich, bad news for the bright but poor, and social mobility disappears down the drain of accreditative good intentions.
It seems to me that to tackle social mobility and equality we need to return to a different mix of right and left wing ideas. State exams need to be about selection as well as accreditation, if for no other reason than other organisations will (have!) started devising their own to counter constant grade inflation. But selection is not all bad news, because it would allow a return to meaningful governmental support of further education. I expect that there are elements of this that both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats might agree to, but it runs contrary to every instinct within the current Labour government.
James
You make some very good points, but hardly consider the economic context.
The 1950s and 1960s were a period in which the middle class grew. This was largely to do with economic changes, expanding the number of people who had white-collar professional jobs. One of the problems is seeking to increase social mobility is that it is hard to expand this sector continually. Many people with degrees now enter occupations that needed few credentials twenty years ago.
Peter
http://pigeon-post.blogspot.com/
The issue as I see it is not so much whether the number of very high paying careers which have high educational barriers to entry has expanded as an absolute proportion of all jobs, so much as how accessable those high status careers are to those who are low down on the socio-economic scale.
I'm something of an economic pessimist since I believe (though I can't prove) that the proportion of people earning £2,500+ in the 1950's is probably about the same or only a little smaller than the number of people earning £90,000+ today - the same figure adjusted for average earnings growth over that period.
My contention is that the total number of highly renumerated jobs probably hasn't changed all that much. The issue is who gets them, and that's the essence of social mobility.
Someone must be able to answer that question!
But I don´t think that the 1950s and 1960s were a time when the children of well-rewarded people started stacking shelves int he coop. So I guess there was a real increase in the number of such jobs.
Peter
The other aspect that you miss in your argument James was the very different social circumstances in that period - i.e. 1)Britain transforming from an imperial giant with rigid Victorian class structures to a modern western European state and 2)the importance in popular politics and society of the nation fit for heroes.
You are right of course to lament the ossifying of social mobility in British society, but surely it would be logical to note that this goes hand in hand with a widening economic gap. Alex is right to point out the positives in the last quarter of a century, but I can't quite grasp the thrust of this vis a vis the growing economic discrepencies. Are you arguing that society would not have liberalised / progressed in those ways you mention in a more economically equitable society? The evidence is that there are those who can enjoy the positives of a more liberal social society and those who can't, and those who can't are economically excluded.
Progress must surely have economic measures as well. A liberal society surely is one that everyone has an opportunity to enjoy.
Paul, towards the middle of my initial piece I concede that there are other factors at work here, however I stand by my contention that education is the single most important.
There were as you say different social factors at work such as the gradual unwinding of the social hierarchy. However, Britain remained far more openly class bound and conscious in that period than it is presently, but somehow nevertheless achieved greater mobility between those more openly declared class boundaries. To me, the answer to this paradox seems to be education.
On your second point I certainly agree that the consensus politics or 'Butskellism' of that time was friendly towards the aspirational working class. A succession of Education Acts from 1944 onwards and Harold Wilson's modest (by todays standards) expansion of the universities allowed people from modest social backgrounds to aquire the education they needed to fill senior positions in industry or in public service. This happened against a general background of economic expansion and social equality as the dominant political discourse - though neither of these things actually guarantees social mobility in the same way as good educational opportunites for all elements of society in my view.
I'm probably wrong to blithely ignore widening economic inequality, but it strikes me that it may be easier to make it more palatable by genuinely diversifying those who attain it than to try and quash it by using punitively high levels of taxation.
I agree on your last point, James. OTOH I think housing has more to do with this than we might acknowledge.
The expansion of university education has meant that just about every child of middle class parents now gets a degree.
Peter
James. I wholeheartedly agree that good education is a bedrock for a progressive, socially mobile society. However, it would be foolish to ignore the science that demonstrates that good education, good health and economic well being go hand in hand. The difficulty for progressives has always been where they emphasise the breaking of cyclical poverty / education / health deprivation.
Unfortunately for New Labour, they will probably not ever know whether their experiment was entirely successful. Their main programme was genuinely from the off based on education, education, education - particularly early years. Will my son's generation (he was born in '98) reap the rewards of that early years education that had almost disappeared in the 80s and 90s.
What appears to be obvious is that Labour have failed to tackle present day poverty, and it is the current adults who are stuck. It is ironically the underclass groups that do not vote, are less engaged in society and who are not taking advantage of the freedoms that Alex was discussing.
It is the blind eye / blindness that many are now showing to this underclass that both surprises me and worries me. An abandoned, ignored group of people are the ones in this country and in others who are seeking out alternative, perhaps more radicalised options.
We therefore, need to tackle this problem now. People deserve opportunity and society needs opportunity. Not necessarily to make money, but to live meaningful and fulfilling lives.
Paul:"James. I wholeheartedly agree that good education is a bedrock for a progressive, socially mobile society. However, it would be foolish to ignore the science that demonstrates that good education, good health and economic well being go hand in hand. "
As a former Historian and Philosopher of Science, I must take hyou to task on the use of the term in the way you've done it.
What exactly do you mean by science? Do you mean that its been arrived at using "the scientific method"? If so, then you will be aware that this only ever fails to refute; it does not prove positively.
Furthermore, any sociologist of science would challenge the allged bedrock of the "hard" sciences as being as contingent as any other human activity!
Mr Tabman. A fair, if somewhat cheeky point if I may say so. There are however few, if any studies that I have seen that have not found that areas with people with lower average incomes are more likely to have lower educational attainment and lower than average lifespans and higher incidences of physical and mental disabilities.
There are also few if any studies I know that show that people with some form of physical or educational difficulty are more likely to succeed if they are from more wealthy backgrounds.
Mr Lloyd - as you know, I support your sentiments for social justice, but I am also somewhat sceptical of studies like that. I am sure it is possible to construct a link that would show, given the same data set, that relative povery is "caused" by poor educational achievement. You see the difficulty?
I do see the difficulty - and I think I acknowledged it in the original piece. I was thinking about the cycle and breaking that cycle - as a behaviourist would by intervening at some point in the cycle. New Labour made their intervention at early years education, with the hope that by breaking the cycle early then the poverty, poor health etc will not blight their lives.
My point was, that I buy the analysis that these problems cluster, and that a period of increased educational attainment after the war coincided with a period where the economic gap lessened and health improved. I was not trying to claim cause and effect.
PS And I was arguing - a bit obliquely - in my original original piece, that it was James who was simply claiming cause and effect of the post-war education system, and not taking into account other socio-economic factors which may or may not have been greater influences.
I also failed to tackle Alex's point properly, by pointing out that if the groundwork of the 50s and 60s had not been laid in a period of greater social mobility, and progress regarding economic equality, many of the freedoms that he said were won in the 80s and 90s would perhaps never have been on the agenda.