Harry

Melanie Phillips has been at the Tory party conference and has some interesting things to say about it. Basically she distinguishes two conferences — a public conference with great ideas delivered in a voter-appealing way; and a lunatic asylum of Tory MPs conspiring semi-publicly against their leader. She says that

Duncan Smith, fights for his political life against malevolent libertines, intellectual snobs, resentful has-beens, insanely ambitious opportunists and other malcontents. The parliamentary Conservative party needs to be put in a straitjacket.

I can’t share her enthusiasm for the Tories newfound localism; but am all for straitjacketing the parliamentary party. But that leads me to wonder what would be left of the Tory party if we locked up the lunatics. A handful of shadow cabinet members (well, two, Letwin and Willetts) and some old age pensioners? Is Phillips a closet LibDem?

Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his latest post (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.

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I just got back from an interesting conference in Newcastle (UK) organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and presided over by Matthew Taylor as his last big act before going to direct policy at number 10. (Actually I got back a week ago, but pressures of work and technical set-backs have kept me silent till now). Basically it was a ‘looking for a new big idea’ kind of gathering for New Labourish types – IPPR had asked a bunch of academics to present their thoughts and findings about meritocracy, social mobility, and equality of opportunity, and a bunch of politicians, policy makers, and representatives of domestic NGOs to engage with them. I confess that I anticipated a kind of dialogue of the deaf, but it wasn’t like that at all. The academics (including John Goldthorpe, John Roemer, Stephen Machin, Adam Swift, Michael Hout) made brief, pertinent, and not-dumbed-down presentations; and the in-session and out-of session discussions were to the point and thoughtful. Gordon Brown gave a talk on the first afternoon with which I, very much not a New Labour person, was very impressed. He seemed not only to have a coherent, worked out view, and a straightforward comfortableness with the language and concerns of traditional social democracy, but also to have read and understood all of the preparatory readings. (Apparently he called up John Goldthorpe the previous Thursday to ask him about some of the technical points in Goldthorpe’s paper). My brief was to respond to the minister for school standards, David Miliband’s, speech on why the government is focussing its attention on teaching and learning more than on admissions and funding. Again, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness and reasonableness of his presentation, and the care with which he distinguished issues of what should ideally be done and what is feasible given political and constitutional constraints; though, fortunately, disagreed with enough to make it worth debating him. One large disagreement among the attendees was the extent to which a society should try to reward ‘merit’ financially. Again, though, whereas I’d assumed on going in that I’d be in a minority with Swift and Roemer against meritocracy, it was striking how soft the support for meritocracy was in all the discussions, and how well disposed Brown was, for example, to prioritizing the interests of the least advantaged.
Cynics will dismiss my impressions as the consequences of either being over-susceptible to politicians charm, or (more likely) jet lag, and in another couple of weeks I’m sure I shall relapse into my own negativity. But the fact remains (as Americans I’ve described the conference to keep saying) that such a conference, in which senior elected politicians discuss the work of serious left-wing academics on their own terms, in the presence of senior policy-makers, is utterly unimaginable in the US.
All the papers for the conference, by the way, are accessible here at Ippr.

Chris Bertram pointed me to the Chronicle piece which Brian discusses below on the difference between US and UK Philosophy. One passage that struck me was the following

There are two broad models of how such engagement might best be achieved: what I call the participatory and the contributory. In the participatory model, academics engage in real-world problems by becoming members of the institutions that are directly involved with those problems. In the contributory model, academics remain in academe, but issue documents, books, and papers that are supposed to contribute to public life

Baggini claims that the ‘participatory’ model is in the ascendance in Britain, whereas in the US philosophers just write wise things as pieces of advice. This is very misleading, although I can see why it might look that way. One reason that it looks that way is that whereas philosophers can enter the British upper house as a result of patronage, the US upper house is reserved for multi-millionnaires who are willing to devote their fortunes and lives to running for office — not a mechanism likely to suit academic philosophers, even successful ones.

But if, as Baggini suggests, sitting on government bodies counts as participation, US philosophers are at it all the time. Norman Daniels and Dan Brock were on the famous Hillary commission on health care reform; my former colleagues Dan Wikler and Allen Buchanan both served time in the Federal Department of Health (and Wikler has spent a good deal of time at the WHO). Wierdly enough, the aestheticist Myles Brand is now head of the NCAA. There are more numerous examples at less exalted levels of government on advisory bodies. And, more shamefully, Bill Bennett (of gambling fame) and Irwin Silber (candidate for Governer of Massachussets, and fervent supporter of the Contras)are both trained and formerly mediocre academic philosophers. I suspect it is ignorance of the situation in the US that drives the distinction.

But there is another fact that makes US philosophers look less participatory than the Brits. The kind of political outlook found in the mainstream of analytical philosophy is left-of-center, and so far off the American political map that it is hard to engage. Baggini cites the famous ‘Philosopher’s Brief’ on assisted suicide as an example of the contributory model. But in other times, and certainly in other countries, Ronald Dworkin would have been a likely Supreme Court candidate, and hence a participant — he has been ineligible because his political outlook is completely out of the mainstream of politics. By contrast those very same views are though of as part and parcel of political debate in the UK, so that people with them have potential access to political processes.