Open Left at Demos

The fact that an odious reptile such as James Purnell (google “James Purnell” “Liz Davies” for verification) is heading it doesn’t inspire confidence. Check out his reasons for believing himself on the left:

“Second, I believe that governments succeed more often than they fail.”

The government in which he has served is, of course, a miserable failure at achieving the ends he claims to believe in.

I certainly have a number of comments to make about James Purnell, but I think I’d probably better keep them to myself.

odious reptile such as James Purnell / I certainly have a number of comments to make about James Purnell, but I think I’d probably better keep them to myself.

Oh. I’ll, umm, take this as compelling evidence that attempting to tease further ambiguities out of his Open Left essay is not a good use of my time. (Thanks.)

So… Is this Billy Bragg fellow as excellent a human being as his Open Left essay would imply?

Salient, with respect to your #2, the hidden principle here is Birtism (Purnell was John Birt’s right-hand man at the BBC). What he means is that there needs to be strong central control of large institutions rather than delegation to individual units (managerialism), and that this control needs to be exercised through a sort of playing-at-shops pseudo-market mechanism. I keep planning to do a long essay about Birt, who I think is a much more interesting and important intellectual and political figure than he’s typically given credit for, but every time I start I realise that I could use the same time to do something either more interesting, or more remunerative, or both.

Salient—as far as I can tell, disappointingly, yes.

I guess the “No True Leftsman” fallacy category lives on.

I especially liked the last paragraph, for that peculiar definition of the word liked that gets reserved for bad logic: “However, in a time of great mistrust and cynicism about our political institutions, it is strong, clearly defined principles that will grab the attention of the electorate, not mere better presentation.”

The word “mere” has an awful lot of work consigned to it, there.

Oh gawd. As if I didn’t have enough reasons never to vote Labour again.

One choice sample plucked more-or-less at random — Peter Hyman (‘Political strategist to Tony Blair 1994-2003 and now Deputy Headteacher’) on Thatcher:

At least Thatcher was attempting to change things. The one philosophy I could never understand was conservatism – why would anyone spend their life trying to defend the status quo.

“At least Thatcher was attempting to change things.” Amazing. And it does seem to encapsulate a certain mind-set rather brilliantly, doesn’t it? And what changes we have seen over the course of this government: the shredding of the UN charter on the orders of George Bush’s White House, the dismantling of the system of free higher education in the name of ‘personal responsibility’, the continued re-shaping of the benefits system according to blueprints devised by the New Right, trashing of centuries old liberties in the name of a never-ending war, the privatisation of practically everything under the sun with the sole exception of RBS’s bonuses and James Purnell’s fridge magnets. But what really ‘angers’ a man like Hyman is ‘the nonsensical traditions from Britain’s past – an absurd honours system, largely unreformed House of Lords, archaic House of Commons, unmodernised civil service’. It’s a sad day when a significant part of the energies of those who are–unlike Hyman–actually on the left are taken up with–contra Hyman–precisely defending those mildly progressive parts of the status quo which haven’t yet been ground under the wheels of Hyman and Co’s neo-liberal juggernaut, but that is where we have been for some time.

#12: yes, this particular fallacy is the specifically Birtist contribution to managerialism. It is a great shame [1] that Sir John only produced “The Harder Path”, rather than following his original plan of publishing his autobiography in three volumes (Life, Work and Management Theories) so I could have a definite reference to this.

[1] for some values of “shame”, obviously, presumably his publisher considers it a financially disastrous bullet dodged.

dsquared: I, for one, will chip in for remunerating that essay (apparently the going rate in the US for such things is less than a dollar a word — a bargain!). I loved John Birt in The Thick of It and the question of whether Birtism makes sense seems very interesting and relevant.

Back in the summer of 1998, I saw Billy Bragg play the first Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, OK. After the concert, he wandered over to the nearest bar and joined a bunch of us concertgoers for a few beers. He certainly seemed like a great guy! He was still there when it was time for my wife and I to head back to Norman.

Important point there, Daniel.
Where he saved money, he got to deploy it elsewhere.
Not a luxury other public sector managers tend to have.
It’s the advantage of a hypothecated income stream.
I remember ITV making some kind of an effort establishing an online presence. There were some interesting signs of life coming out of ITN. Then the dotcom crash happened and their budgets disappeared overnight. Subsequent efforts to catch up the ground they lost (buying Friends Reunited!) have been a bad joke.
By contrast, the BBC was able to plan their internet investment far more coherently, with a dependable multi-year timeframe. (Something that doesn’t seem to have been disrupted when BBC Technology got spun off – to Siemens? – and the contracts outsourced a few years ago.)
That kind of independence is something the incoming Tories – and, apparently, ex-BBC NuLabour archetype Ben Bradshaw – now seem determined to reverse.

Slightly OT, but #19,#20, what are your views on the future of the licence fee?

#12: ” “My experience is that government normally works better when the individual has the power…to choose…between providers in public services.”
I don’t know how many members of the public these guys actually know, but very few people actually want to choose these things.”

At the risk of defending Purnell, aren’t you and he are saying slightly different things? Many of the advocates of choice in public services argued that only a few people had to be willing to make use of their right to choose for services to improve. (This line was widely used in the debate over NHS Independent Sector Treatment Centres.)

You may disagree with the argument, but it is compatible with your observation that most people don’t want choice.

My concern about this “power to choose between providers of public services” theory is that it focuses on individual choices but says nothing about collective choices and how they get made. The risk is that the important collective decisions get made by a managerial class with little transparency and accountability while giving the public the opportunity to make trivial individual choices.

I wish Bragg could avoid getting conned by centre-right turds who see “Left” and “Right” as nothing more than labels like the “Blues” and “Greens” of Byzantium.

Collective choices are the macro-level choices about, for example, how many hospitals are needed, where, in what size hospital with what services. Individual choices provide only weak signals to inform this kind of decision. If people are choosing Hospital A because Hospital B has a poor reputation, it is usually already known by decision-makers that there are problems at Hospital B and they don’t need to wait for the public to tell them. The result isn’t always that services are improved at Hospital B; what often happens is that Hospital B gets closed because nobody is using it. And for many places, and for many services, there aren’t realistic alternatives to choose from.

Individual choice isn’t the only way in which the public can influence the supply of services: there are the democratic methods of voice and direct influence. My concern is that peole like Purnell are talking about individual choice instead of voice and direct influence, rather than in addition.

Re: comsumer choice, the point (or one point among many) is surely that in a market economy, where people are enthusiastically making choices, the market responds by throwing money at production and improvement of the type of goods they’re buying. It doesn’t just shift a proportion of a fixed quantity of resources from unpopular good A to popular good B, it does much more than that. And without that, the goods-improvement, customer-choice mechanism just doesn’t function properly.

By chance the latest Private Eye has a small item about a report from the consultancy company Ernst and Young sugesting that patients should be encouraged to move from one General Practioner to another so as to create an internal market for health service providers. The problem is that there are already other better mechanisms for monitoring the quality of service of GPs, and continuity of care by one practice improves health care.