William Davies
Bold moves: but can the Tories deliver
The news that the Conservative Party intend to facilitate greater employee ownership in public services is one of the boldest policy announcements of David Cameron’s leadership. Labour has already thrown scorn on what appears to be political cross-dressing, and the left-leaning twitterati have pored over the proposal for inconsistency and policy naivete. But what evidence is there out there on the viability of such schemes, and how likely is it that the Tories could deliver this successfully?
I authored a Demos pamphlet on alternative ownership models last year, and while I’m more concerned with ownership pathologies in the private sector, the report looks at the potential and precedents for employee ownership in the public sector too. Here are three sets of questions thrown up by this morning’s announcement:
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James Crabtree
Evgeny Morozov, Rishi Saha, Tom Watson and John Lloyd debate online politics, monday, @DEMOS
I’ve been meaning to put this up here for yonks—it was deadline week at Prospect HQ last week, which has the habit of getting in the way of a man and his blog—but better late than never. Tomorrow evening Prospect (along with the excellent people at Demos) is hosting an intriguing debate about the internets, and what mean for politics. It is also a chance to see our cover star, Evgeny Morozov, who is in London for one night only. (Evgeny’s piece is here, and Clay Shirky’s response here—EM will also be on Start the Week tomorrow, 9am, Radio 4). Details below, and there are a few places still left — so if you are free, RSVP to seminars@demos.co.uk.
The title of this debate is “Is the Internet Really Changing Politics?” —and it’s a debate I seem to have been having for at least a decade. It tends to involve someone constructing a nice big straw man of someone who thinks that the internet is going to change politics irrevocabily. No one actually believes this, but this point of view (which is normally dubbed “techno-utopian” by someone by the minute 3 mark of any debate on the subject) is a useful construct. So the question becomes—how far do you go? 24 hour news cycles, databases to track voter preferences, politicians with email lists and Google docs, and all this before the online chit-chat of the blog world, and this year’s “must parse” techno-political innovation: Twitter. Add to this how differently political and technological systems interact: we Brits, for instance, have less money to spend on technology but more concentrated forms of power than the US, meaning that the US is more naturally suited both as a system of government and a political cash-nexus to online innovation.
Anyway, that is just to say I think the debate is going to be genuinely interesting—in Evgeny Morozov we have one of the freshest, most challenging takes on this broad topic of the interaction between revolutionary changes in communication technology, and our maturing understanding of politics and governance. So you should come if you can. More details below the jump.
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James Crabtree
Civic service: what would Cicero do?
Britain needs a universal programme of youth civic service, as Prospect argued in a cover essay I wrote with Frank Field earlier this year. Recession-era Britain also needs a massively expensive new public spending programme—whose benefits are difficult to quantify—like a hole in the head. Discuss.
Solving this conundrum is tricky. No one has run the numbers on such a civic service programme for some time. Number 10 did cost a scheme, in secret, in the early 2000s—when they looked at doing something big and bold, and ended up doing “V” instead. While they didn’t publish the result, I seem to remember being told it was “a lot”.
Thankfully, we have think tanks to help out—and so congratulations are due to Prospect’s “one to watch 2010” think tank, Demos, for picking up the ball, and moving it well down the park. They have just produced a paper on how one variant of a civic service scheme might work. And it’s a genuinely strong piece of work.
The authors — Sonia Sodha and Daniel Leighton — have come up with a compelling new model. Their approach is informed by a fair criteria to rank possible policies, and a clear reading of the evidence (full disclosure: I used to work with both Dan and Sonia in different jobs, and admire their work.) Congratulations should also got to the Private Equity Foundation, who supported Demos—and who are currently bringing CityYear—a nonprofit organisation whose primary goal is to build democracy through citizen—service to the UK. That said, the gist of what is interesting here lies in two novelties.
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Brian Semple
This year's joint overall winners: Philippa Stroud, director of Centre for Social Justice (L) and Robert Chote, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, on either side of David Willetts MP
Richard Reeves of Demos accepts the "one to watch" prize
James Crabtree
Last night Prospect held our 9th annual think tank of the year awards, Britain’s most pointy-headed award ceremony, at the RSA in London. The awards are decided by a bi-party panel of six judges over a series of meetings in the months prior to the awards, a process greatly helped by the willingness of nearly 40 think tanks to fill in our various nomination forms.
David Willetts MP, shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills gave the evening’s key note address, making two striking statements. First, having joked that progressive think tanks like the IPPR faced a choice of whether to become part of the “official opposition” he called on traditional tanks of the left to work with an incoming Conservative government, rather than against it. Then, in a neat turn of phrase, he argued that British think tanks (as opposed to their more staid American counterparts) were the policy equivalent of hedge funds: entrepreneurial, lightly regulated, and prone to taking risks in search of headlines.
Then, following Willetts remarks, we unveiled the winners, which were:
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James Crabtree
Prog con goes on
With nominations for Prospect’s Think Tank of the Year under way, we’ll be paying ever closer attention to wonky activity at Prospect, and yesterday it was DEMOS (once again) in the headlines. George Osborne spoke there, reframing an increasingly familiar refrain that “the torch of progressive politics has been passed to a new generation of politicians – and those politicians are Conservatives.” Its been written up as being fundamentally about tax, which has already ruffled a few feathers, for instance over at the Spectator. But three things surprised me:
First, there is obviously a sense that this was a cheap summer media hit – a slow day, some free headlines on the grid, and a rehash of previous ideas. But even so its interesting that the Tory high command still thinks their is mileage in the “progressive label”. Having rethought a whole bunch of policies in the aftermath of the crunch, and executed an occasionally unwilling move from sunshine to austerity Cameroonism, one might have thought that the “progressive” label would also have been junked (along with sharing the proceeds of growth) as surplus to requirements. Indeed, one might even have expected it.
Second, its especially surprising, to me at least, that it was Osborne himself who made the speech. I ran into him once in a radio studio, where we was sceptical about the use of the phrase progressive, and especially about the “red Tory” theories, popularised by DEMOS (and also, in a way, by Prospect). The received wisdom is that Osborne is the more orthodox liberal in the Cameron / Osborne pairing. So the fact that he did the speech persuades me that the label progressive (along, for instance with sticking with Andrew Lansley on the NHS despite increasing pressure to shift him) is part of a long term strategy, which hasn’t changed because of the credit crunch. Underneath this must lie a fear that the detoxification process is not yet complete, or could be reversed.
Third, and most importantly, i was surprised by how different this speech was from previous efforts to construct a “progressive conservatism” narrative. Look at Cameron’s speech at the launch of the progressive conservatism project at DEMOS, or for instance this interview Oliver Letwin gave to leftist academic Alan Finlayson—both stress the mantra of conservative means to achieve progressive ends. But the new speech was different: a greater focus on fiscal responsibility, a new argument that fiscal responsibility is the pro-poor option, nothing specifically about “progressive ends”, and very little focus on some of the language on green issues or general well-being which often peppers Cameron’s speeches. Underlying this are two things. First, it is increasingly clear that the old Letwin argument about there being a consensus on “progressive ends”, if understood as being about the scope (if not the precise role) of the state, no longer holds in an era of shrinking budgets and government debt. Second, the more contested the label “progressive”, the more meaningless it becomes.
James Crabtree
Is Amartya Sen's capability theory the answer to dead-end Brownism?
I went along last night to see the launch of Open Left, the new project James Purnell will be leading at DEMOS. Some brief observations. I was struck by how consistent Purnell’s occasional forays into political philosophy have been. He has a reputation as a schemer; the “smooth assassin” as the Guardian put it when he resigned after June’s election. But he is also one of a handful of Labour ministers who make a habit of dabbling in political philosophy. (this small group includes Liam Byrne, who last week hosted Etzioni at the Treasury, both Milibands, and David Lammy. Its also not a group without ambitions; the perception of some philosophical depth helps politicians looks credible.)
Three years ago I sat in a mostly empty room in the House of Commons listening to Purnell give a lecture on the “aspiration society.” That lecture was pretty much the same message as last night.
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James Crabtree
Those kids in red jackets
Next month in Prospect we review Economist editor John Micklethwait’s new book about the rise of world religion, which reproduces a familiar argument that the success of faith in America owes much to the lack of an established church. Many churches, competitive with each other, win more converts. It was a thought, in a different context, brought up this morning at a breakfast seminar I went along to, jointly hosted by Demos and the Private Equity Foundation, on national civic service.
David Willetts was the main speaker, along with a visiting representative from City Year, an American outfit who send an annual cohort of a thousand or so teenagers in striking red jackets into inner city schools, aiming to mentor and inspire children a little younger than themselves. My interest in this stems from the article I wrote with Frank Field a few months back, calling on this government (or the next) to institute a mandatory, national scheme for every young person. And it was Willetts’s point that such a programme risked ending up like the Church of England—national, tied to the state, and unloved. If your aim is to develop a national culture of service, as the Americans put it, better to do so from the bottom up—following the example of American Protestantism, where many churches (or, in his analogy, charities), compete with one another to win over the faithful.
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James Crabtree
Prospect’s James Crabtree discusses our February 2009 Red Tory front cover, and its author, on Radio 4’s profile. (Download MP3)
James Crabtree
Vanilla Ice: showing Dave the way
Not since David Bowie noticed something oddly familiar about Ice Ice Baby can the influence be seen quite as clearly. It might not be mentioned in the speech. It wasn’t mentioned in the pre-trip episode of Web Cameron. But David Cameron’s remarks to the semi-chastened masters of the universerse at Davos show the unmistakable imprint of Phillip Blond’s “Red Tory Moment”, this month’s Prospect front cover; great news both for Cameron, who is showing a rare ability to pick up interesting ideas—first with his enthusiasm for Nudge, now this—but also for Phillip himself, whose ideas clearly are gaining ground.
Just to point out a few of the places in the speech. The write up in the Guardian came with the headline “recapitalise the poor, not the banks, says Cameron.” Not quite a quote, but the resemblance to Blond’s conclusion isn’t difficult to see, where he says: “the task of recapitalising the poor is, therefore, the task of making the market work for the many, not the few.” Elsewhere Cameron argues: “this is what too many people see when they look at capitalism today: markets without morality; globalisation without competition.” Both sentiments, but especially the latter, seem influenced by mid-section of Phillip’s piece, in which he argues that Thatcherism rarely coped with the market’s tendency towards anti-competitive monopoly. Then, in case there was any room for doubt, on the extract on the Conservative party website, we have:
David stressed the importance of shaping capitalism to suit the needs of society rather than shaping society to suit the needs of capitalism. He explained that that means “standing up to business when the things that people value at risk,” creating vibrant, local economies, and spreading opportunity and wealth and ownership more equally through society.
The final sentence, in particular, echoes Blond’s argument that the right should seek “to empower communities and build new, vibrant local economies that can uphold the party’s civic vision” and build “a new economic and capital base that decentralises power and extends wealth.”
All of this is to the good. Phillip’s article has already sparked debate—from Sunder Katwala’s excellent response on Liberal Conspiracy, to the christian right, the Daily Telegraph, and various more partisan ripostes in other places. And its great to see his ideas also being listened to by the political class, too. At the moment Cameron isn’t crediting Blond directly, which is fair enough. But the same was true with Vanilla Ice. Eventually, that one was settled out of court—with Ice crediting Bowie as co-author. If he keeps reddening, Cameron might eventually have to follow suit.
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