1 Season in 1 Day

After a morning planning with HQ leaders up at Women's Division Leader Caroline Joyce's (SGI-UK can feel like the civil service for numbers of meetings, hoffenlich we are moving society forward in a better direction faster, that has to be the hope) caught up with Kerri (who'd bought tickets as a New Year present) in King Street and spent a jolly hour on a number 9 bus from Hammersmith to Hyde Park corner.

So yes, whilst Glastonbury was like the third battle of Ypres with casualties aplenty up to their chins in Somerset mud I, with the bold elan of Alan Partridge donned a literal Crowded House T-shirt, to, er see Crowded House play Hyde Park.

And rather pleasant it was too in a feelgood unabashedly corporate rocky way in the company of Diane and her brother William. Fortified by a high street picnic of those rather good M&S jumbo sized drumsticks (surely the foundation of their recent revival?) mini scotch eggs and other comestibles the afternoon proceeded with refreshing bouts of
Tuborg (lager of choice normally only found in Denmark or African airports).

Of the support acts, The Ghosts's set was driven with a sense of easeful gusto which even the ADD afflicted support guitarist couldn't quite deflect.

The Feeling were dressed for the big stage as a white or black combination eerily suggesting 'Modern Romance' fronting Smash Hits circa 1982. But they were natty all the same and in Dan Gillespie Sells have a front man of matinee era looks, think Errol Flynn in the Adventures of Robin Hood. Musically very adept and wearing it well, they bring to mind Terry Pratchett's asservation from a few years back that any cassette tape left in a British car would by a process of magical osmosis eventually become 'Queen Greatest Hits Volume I'. Less musical inspiration than cognitive musical therapy but as mentioned they dressed smartly and put on a strong show.

A reformed Crowded House appeared just when it seemed that the hubristic challenge that we were dry and they were wet and muddy could reap no Nemesis. Neil Finn's timing was such that inevitably the sun broke through refulgently only once the call and response to 'Weather With You' was at its peak. After a trawl through the back catalogue and a new song the inevitable downpour did its worst with Neil rushing for an acoustic guitar to belt out Mary Hopkins' 'Those Were The Days My Friend' as roadies lashed the stage with bin liners to prevent electrocution.




And so home to Hammersmith by way of a taxi driver aware that we were too sodden to care he was taking the long way round to warm house, hot food and an escape from headline act Peter Gabriel and whatever beard/hair combination he's confronting the world with.

Through the eyes of children

Catching up with old friend Chris George, a professional photographer by professio (now he's ditched the world of telecomms sales for that of a fulfilling life) and walking from London Bridge station across the South Bank we came into a gut wrenchingly moving exhibition 'Through the Eyes of Children' .

Through the Eyes of Children began as a photographic workshop in 2000, conceived by photographer, David Jiranek, and inspired by the founder of the Imbabazi Orphanage, Rosamond Carr - an American woman living in Rwanda since 1955. Using disposable cameras, the children originally took pictures for themselves and to share with others, exploring their community, and finding beauty as the country struggles to rebuild.

I'd recommend you see the exhibition for yourself - it's close to the Oxo Tower. It moved me to a degree of anger and tears that having just come in off the pavement I hadn't prepared myself for. The plight of a family of five having to share a single thin blanket for warmth at night, a single bucket for food, washing, cleaning and other functions, young lives ruined or stunted beyond measure is a crime against all humanity.

And yes, we have seen it all before and are inured by and large to continued failure or neo-missionary despair when Sir Bobs and Bono do their thing for widescale media coverage.

But human life is not played out in front of cameras and TV crews; it lives as it is viewed through our own two eyes and perceptions. I guess that was the point of giving disposable and then digital cameras to the young children of the Imbabazi orphanage.

When you realise this is the daily worldview of lives that should be awakened every morning to a thousand possibilities for living, and yet glimpse the sheer humanity shining through poverty of a bleakness we simply can't imagine or even believe what is being presented to us on the walls of a Southbank gallery on an evening in June, when you realise this you understand that such human injustice against the happiness of all humanity must not be tolerated.

Mayor Culpa

So it appears (according to Peter Riddell) that Blair's great desire to restore accountability to local government (remember the glory that was the 1999 Modernising Local Government White Paper??) which resulted in Ken Pigeon Hater, Robocop and H'Angus the monkey restoring sanity to Peter Mandleson's beloved Hartlepool is hated by HM Treasury and therefore another one victory for the Brown wreckers.

So far, with the exception of Ken Livingstone in London, only 12 elected majors have been approved out of 32 referendums held throughout the country, but they have proved to be popular. Nine of the eleven mayors who have so far sought reelection have succeeded, including four independents.

Mr Blair sought to revive the idea after the 2005 election, but the Treasury has never been enthusiastic and last autumn’s White Paper was distinctly cool. Mr Blair, however, remains optimistic.

Which does invite the question as to how exactly do they self express enthusiasm at the end of Horseguard's road?

A difficulty of local government has been the perception that it is the province of weirdo busybody jobsworths put up by national parties. Restoring personal accountability for leadership has given us fun and the chance to indulge in chapeau munching the size of London.


Cameron is right to be heading down this path of liberation from fear and complacency which is local government administration. Long live the people's republic of Tooting indeed!

Great post on the soap opera and sheer downright fun that was the 1999 London mayoral election .

Richard Rorty RIP

Observed in the Times obituaries that philosopher and literary theorist Richard Rorty has passed away. Although someone confessedly interested in ideas on life I normally struggle through actual works (other than say Fontana series on thinkers, Betrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy) and swiftly end up falling into that somnolent land effected on a glum winter's day on the blue covered area of the old overheated British Library reading room. My mind can take endless facts, dates etc but theory after theory after theoretical framework in dense sentences sometimes is too much.

I was encouraged, however to read 'Contingency, Irony and Solidarity' a few years back and it did enliven me through its argument that literature is a surer way to revealing truth than any other art or science. Addressing the theme of human cruelty, how it arises from our rational facility to posit metaphysical questions and the ability for each of us to believe our own self-justificatory narratives, the work came alive when touching on the work of Orwell and Nabokov. Rorty urged that the acknowledgement of another's suffering is sometimes the greatest act of compassion we are capable of.

Building on the concepts of pragmatism set out by his hero, Dewey, he argued that instead of seeking ideas which correspond to some fundamental reality, we should settle for ones which help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.

Rorty noted that his initial hope of achieving a single vision of an historical truth by becoming a philosopher had ultimately proved to be “a self-deceptive atheist’s way out”.

Rorty did not regret becoming a philosopher though. It prevented him, he thought, from imagining that there was “a luminous synoptic vision” of the truth. His own vision of the truth, like Dewey’s, was of a community in which everyone thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not really human, that mattered.

“There are no transcendent answers,” he insisted. “Each of us must reach our own conclusions about life, and try to respect the differences among us.”

Characteristically, Rorty took a close interest in conflict. He thought that when groups found themselves at odds with each other, philosophical discussion would usually not help in resolving their differences. It would never “convince bullies not to beat him up” or “capitalists to cede their power to a co-operative, egalitarian commonwealth”.

Groups had very different vocabularies, he suggested, and the best one could do was to show the other side how it looked from your point of view while at the same time imaginatively identifying with the other’s pain.

It was, then, the artist and the poet who could best elicit peace between groups by demonstrating that there was vulnerability to which all human beings can relate.

Hear hear. Or in Auden's words:

"What they call history
is nothing to vaunt of
being made as it is
by the criminal in us.
Goodness is timeless."

Government 2.0 - anyone buying the data-mash up??

To that sad small minority of anoraks interested in the reuse of government information as a means of providing better, more effective, accountable and and demand shaped public services, the Cabinet Office's paper 'Power of Information' makes a valuable contribution.

The BBC report gives a good outline of the main issues of the report co-authored by Tom Steinberg of Mysociety.org fame and Ed Mayo of the national consumer council. Good to see in the index that they were adeptly assisted by James Crabtree.

The principle of keeping up the pressure on public bodies to make available for public benefit the various datasets that are created and stored as part and parcel of their public service remit is a good thing. The continued and complacent presumption prevalent in public service life, that information created at taxpayer expense must be paid for over and over again is one to be fought and won.

If the report leads to the folding or decommission of one further '.gov.uk' website it will have served more than its purpose. For my money, the value added repackaging of public sector information can only be demand led from a bottom up approach. The main publishers are only looking for a big hit idea, or more reasonably for one big idea that works for somebody which can be endlessly imitated (or they'll go home sulking with their football, vide the gnailing and washing of teeth caused by the Dr Foster contract with Department of Health).

Something simple in design and execution that serves a need and actually empowers civic leaders or those with a commitment to improving their communities, enabling them to communicate with, connect and further assist those in their midst whom they don't even know should be the vision. And where, for example, users need help navigating central government functions, an overlaying level of support could be delivered through electronic fora.

As a tool in support of genuine and popular localism guaranteed by trustworthy individuals and information, maybe the more parochial the better, provided that the data-mash ups of public sector information (health/education/crime/benefits/amenities) can drill down to the postcode level as they have demonstrably done for upmystreet.com and uswitch .

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.

Rehumanising Public Services

Have just finished reading Simon Jenkins' Thatcher and Sons a witty and engagingly abrasive account of the public service revolution of the past 30 years or so.

Recasting the drive to increased centralisation and in many cases nationalisation of previously autonomous local institutions of health and education in the familiar Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the progenitor of the Millenium Dome (it goes to prove that nobody is immune from public sector quicksand, the 'Euan effect anybody?') makes in his final section a strong and persuasive case for a further transformation focused on stronger local accountability of public services .

Given all that was heard but not seen of ‘New Localism’ and the adopted vocabulary of communitarianism pre ’97, it could be questioned as to whether after ten years of further entrenched central government control and consequent emasculation of local authority discretion and autonomy it is worth the candle of calling for a more humane devolution of powers.

The big unknown is the extent to which Burke’s small platoons of Englishmen and women are capable, after 70 years of welfare statism, of taking responsibility to stand up for their local communities and fostering the qualities of leadership, trust and accountability that government at central, regional and even district level is simply incapable of engendering.

In the big picture, Jenkins is best in rationalising the enigmatic spirits that drove Margaret Thatcher's, her own formidable courage in breaking the mould of economic defeat by overthrowing Heath, weathering the storms of opposition and aided by Geoffery Howe at Treasury the dire and painfully necessary monetarist budgets of '81 is balanced by a striking absence of gratitude to her family let alone party or any other rung of society climbed in the progress of her life and career.

Major, Blair and Brown have further ntrenched the Thatcher revolution in public services, extending privatisation and triangulating between the citizen an increased involvement of the private sector in the delivery, running and infrastructure of public services.

Striking also is the fact that none of the leaders of the country over this period have had sufficient understanding of how to operate the levers of power or feel comfortable in utilising the collective wisdom of successive Permanent Secretaries and Cabinet Secretaries.

Unlike the French 'enarques' and maybe just as well, there has never been any danger of the United Kingdom being competently run to mediocrity by an all powerful technocratic caste of political administrators.

Sir Humprey has in the main been sidelined. Until Blair and Brown found a servant they both felt happy working with in the adept form of avowed Manchester United and lifelong Labour voter Gus O’Donnell, the role of Cabinet Secretary was a bypassable redundancy. Sir Richard Wilson, the seemingly placidly equine successor to Butler was incensed enough to bark, ‘You've merely led, never managed' at Blair when the sofa government of unminuted meetings led to another Whitehall paralysis.

Instead the centripetal power of Central Government has propelled the public services into a vertex of perpetual growth, continual change, creating an enormous and dissatisfied workforce regimented by a culture of Gogolian audit and inspection.

In consequence ministerial responsibility encompasses to the minutest degree success and failure of what in the rest of the world would be local matters for local people to decide.

This omnipotence when twinned with a deliberately stunted level of local accountability has engendered a scenario in which the villain of the piece, a paranoid, inhumane and overbearing HM Treasury, unceasingly delivers the worst outcomes for all concerned.

Convinced that local government, NHS trusts and the wider public sector are incapable of delivering efficiency and savings, a ‘know it all’ Treasury has itself proved to be a most hapless negotiator: susceptible alike to being hog-tied by blue collar unions into national pay settlements, so distorting regional pay-scales to the disadvantage of local economies to signing off GP significant salary increases without producing any discernible benefit in patient services.

In Jenkins’ words ‘The consequence has been the remorseless march of big, intrusive and incompetent government’. How best to bind the Leviathan of central state control that through ID cards and other measures purportedly in the name of foiling Al Quaeda terrorism, seeks to devour the freedoms it was established to protect?

The dynamic localist revolution if it does succeed will have to break through at grass roots level the consciences of individual mired in the current political status quo, in which the British tolerate ‘warm compenstated servitude, slavery mitigated by the welfare state’ and have a choice of elected dictators to centrally manage the levers of government every 5 years or so.

Citing de Tocqueville, Jenkins invites parallels between the atomisation of British society today and post revolutionary France where: “Every man is a stranger to the destiny of others. His children and personal friends form for him the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them…while above them rises an immense and tutelary power, that of the state.”

The public service revolution is like its Marxist predecessors virtually unceasing. Cameroon and Brown would both be equally capable of further delivery focused reform, calibrating finer a range of performance indicators, targeted ring fenced grants and passported funds, and all at the politically acceptable cost of 40 pence in the pound of centrally raised tax and the subsidised cowardice that is council tax.

Whatever the outcomes of the Lyons consultation, it is unlikely either politically for the fear of another Poll Tax fiasco, or fiscally on account of HM Treasury’s paranoid control freakery that funds for the delivery of local services will be locally raised and targeted.

A restoration of the link between accountability for the funding and delivery local services is the main plank of a putative localist revolution.

If the people of Britain are as keen as their peers in Western Europe to assume control for determining how public services, including health, education and elements of social services are funded and delivered at an accountably local level, will require a sizable leap of civic faith into civic action.

This does require the vision thing, the rediscovery, in daily public life by people of different backgrounds, holding individual aspirations and interests the ability to learn to work in unity to ensure that public services common to all are simply the best they can possibly be.

Not a return to socialism, not a continuation of failed absolute statism but a recognition that people can be trusted to take responsibility for the best interests of themselves and their immediate environment. In essence a repersonalisation of public services and reconnection with the concern, compassion, wisdom and courage that make life in human society fully worth living.

Aside from finding willing and capable community leaders, the present division in local authorities between unitary county councils and district will also require redress. Town councils may be given greater powers and unitary city and metropolitan authorities might be redrawn but with structures largely intact.

It is more than likely that the nanny state will shriek down the inability of power to be devolved, of the perils of waste and mismanagement inherent in devolution. Given the £6bn Working Family Tax Credits fiasco, £26bn Connecting for Health and more answers lie closer to central government’s door than they’d care to notice. But more to the point, the remote outsourcing to regional agencies to deliver Whitehall’s will has simply not led to happy outcomes in delivery, efficiency or accountability.

The future delivery of successful public services will entail going back some way into the past of civic and local pride to deliver public services that are both personal and accountable.

The risk averse, arse-covering of Whitehall audit committee culture must end and responsibility be devolved down to communities and groups capable of accountably ordering, managing and delivering services. The personalisation of public services will be based on humane qualities of elected accountability, personability, responsibility and trust.

And the reason for this is that small platoons of organised people, entrusted with responsibility will invariably stand up to do their best for their communities. They do so admiralbly well enough on the continent, and in those parts of the world wherein English government was transplanted, namely the United States and white Commonwealth, so why not return to its roots here?

Jenkins opines: “Democracy can only be based on tiers of autonomy, on people trusting people who trust other people, on a hierarchy of trusts. Only thus will we allow others to exercise judgments and accept risk on our behalf. Otherwise public service degenerates into a miasma of league tables and statistics.”

And as Onora O’Neill writes in the 2004 Reith Lecture: “When individuals and the professionals are denied responsibility for risk a part of their humanity is diminished. The individual is socialised. You may increase openness and transparency in government, but this does not increase trust. Indeed if anything trust had receded as transparency advanced.

“Perhaps we should not be surprised,’ said O’Neill, ‘that the technologies that spread information so easily are just as good at spreading misinformation and disinformation;. Trust in self government depends on trust in confidences, even secrets, bred of personal acquaintance and professional respect. People long to trust others but if they have bred in them a ‘culture of suspicion’ they will not do so.”

To rewrite WH Auden, ‘We must trust one another or die’

Wise men say, Only Fools Russian??

Not wanting to steep my toes too much into the threatening complexities, weapons pointing, dialogue avoiding evil into which Russian/Western relations seem to have been given by our diplomats permission to degnerate into, I'd like to hope that my behind the scenes activities last week in supporting SGI Russia will have been helpful in fostering the much needed human revolution in a land which has suffered so much from every other Western imported revolution to date.

The Russians were having their first ever national course at SGI-UK HQ Taplow Court .
It being a dank holiday weekend, a hardy group of some 40 pioneers exchanged the glories of an early Russian summer with temperatures in the high 30s for what was at times rain so unremittingly bad as to make one question whether global warming could ever shift the perception expressed by Lord Byron that the English weather is a quaint idea occurring annually for a month between July and August. Suffice to say the inner sunshine won out through vigorous, vibrant chanting of daimoku 'nam myoho renge kyo', gongyo and what seemed to be a most intense series of lectures, training and instruction.

It is my sincere wish that SGI Russia continues to grow and thrive in transforming into medicine the poisons of a society that, as much as any other throughout the world if not more so is crying out for a humane and active life philospophy capable of leading people to happiness.

The geopolitical hurly burly over targetting parts of Europe (probably as simple as using a TomTom SatNav) as exchange for the US independently stationing a missile shield against Korean or Iranian ICBMs reminds us once again that in a nuclear age the stakes for mankind's tendency to mindlessly wander down the three evil paths of anger, greed and foolishness are as high as ever.

As Robert Service (admittedly dressed like one of the Wurzels in a less than fetching rustic scarf and mustard suit number) counselled on Newsnight, a bit of the Michael Winner realpolitik 'Calm Down Dear, it's only a Chechnya/human rights/beating up the neighbours smokescreen' is in order.

Russia would prefer to sell us petrol, minerals and buy up the more exclusive areas of West London than turn Central Europe into a radioactive dustheap. The West in return would prefer peace, stability and the ability to focus on coping with the ever increasing pressures of globalisation and public service reform. After all we have learned and absorbed from the dark century that was the 21st, it is rather pitiful to see what should be maturing societies who are demographically moving downstream squaring up to each other. It's as dignified a spectacle as a punch up at the local Gala bingo hall - am I alone in thinking we could do with better global leadership than this??