Putting on the postman's uniform - a return to local leadership

In David Brin's book, The Postman, he describes how a man in a post-disaster USA dons the uniform and, as if by magic, is transformed into that same reliable and trustworthy working-class public servant. In exploring the importance of connections between places, Brin (in common with many other writers exploring a post-disaster world) touches on different forms of organisation. We wander from self-reliant little homes with tough but loving families through suspicious and fearful villages or towns to the most dystopic world of the Big Man and the warlord.

In all the book's places we see what many would see as a crisis of leadership. In some places there is no leadership beyond the family, an entirely independent pseudo-pioneer world - a sort of Farnham's Freehold without the casual racism. In others we see safety and security achieved at the cost of compliance with oppression - Zamyatin's We with tatty leather jackets. Elsewhere we glimpse the entirely lawless where, in a world of scarcity, the utility function drives human decisions to their logical conclusion. Here's Deirdre McCloskey in "The Bourgeois Virtues":

"The economist and historian Alexander Field has based a similar argument on biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert with bread and water that you want, you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheer self-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation, and the game's afoot. Once you and he have chatted for a while and built up trust, naturally, you will refrain."

Or perhaps not if the utilitarians are right? In their world the task of the leader, or so it seems, is to decide - by whatever means - what is the greatest good for the greatest number and implement that good. Such, for all the deal-making, fancy words, thought leadership and opinionating, is the core purpose of those gatherings of great and good - Davos, Bilderburg, summits, conferences and think tanks. Such things are the manifestation, the logical conclusion of a philosophical tradition running from Plato through Mill and Bentham to A C Grayling: leadership from the wise.

The problem today isn't that we are entering some sort of dystopia but rather that the most essential part of leadership - that someone has to follow - has been lost in our desire to perfect the manner in which leaders lead and the things that they lead on. Here from the Millennium Project:




I haven't got the Davos agenda but, while the words may vary, this 'conscious leaders' agenda' pretty much covers what they'll talk about (other than how to get themselves more power and money of course - that's not on the official leaders' agenda). What we have here is the agenda but the problems for those leaders in Davos is that, especially for the political ones - plus those pompously titled thought leaders - it's the lack of followers that is the agitation. This is the 'populism' that is troubling so many of the great and good - for them it is, indeed, better characterised as 'unpopularism'.

The problem here is that these leaders, for all that they seem secure in their power, are uncertain how long this will remain the case. We were all pretty certain that Donald Trump wouldn't win the US presidential election - and we were wrong. We were less certain but assured by our leaders that the UK wouldn't vote to leave the Euorpean Union - and we were wrong. Elsewhere we've seen the President of France become so unpopular that he withdrew from any prospect of seeking re-election. In Spain and Greece social democratic parties are being replaced by radical parties of the left and the big losers to left and right in Holland, Sweden and Germany aren't conservatives but rather Europe's once dominant centre-left.

And the image above of the world and its problems? That is an image constructed by the centre-left - a reflection of big state, big government models for the future. It's not that the content is wrong but rather that the model assumes that the wise - Philosopher Kings - will provide the leadership and this leadership will be global. These are the people who Harm de Blij says live in a flat world, flitting effortlessly from place to place across the world and inhabiting a community where they genuinely feel like Tom Paine's citizens of the world. The problem is that 99% of the worlds population aren't in this flat world - they're, in de Blij's words, either locals living in the global periphery or mobals trying to get from that periphery to the core where they can have a better life.

"From the vantage point of a high-floor room in the Shanghai Hyatt, the Mumbai Oberoi, or the Dubai Hilton, or from the business-class window seat on Singapore Airlines, the world seems flat indeed. Millions of world-flatteners move every day from hotel lobby to airport limo to first-class lounge, laptop in hand, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring as they travel, adjusting the air conditioning as they go"

Such 'flat earth dwellers' understand the locals and mobals. After all they've listened to a thought leader speak, they've read a precis of the current academic research and they reviewed documents from a UN agency or two plus, for balance, Oxfam or some other NGO. The right noises about poverty, economic development, humanitarianism and growth drop from their lips. But they do not know these locals and mobals. Those people, the ones they see from the limo window, serving them tea in the hotel and marching angrily about how their livelihoods are threatened - they've stopped following these Philosopher Kings. Our 'flat earth dwellers' are no longer leaders but rather a bunch of folk who can see a lot of locals and mobals pushing against the glass of their bubble. And they are scared.

None of this is to say that enlightenment liberalism is wrong or a problem. After all, despite the best efforts of some to suggest otherwise, capitalism has made us richer and is doing the same for those locals and mobals de Blij worries about. Rather it's to suggest that we need to rethink the model of leadership that is revealed at Davos and to recognise that this approach - consultative, knowledge-focused but still globally focused and top down - no longer fits what's needed.

At a board away day recently (from where I pinched that image of the world's agenda) a couple of almost throwaway comments struck me as important. The first of these was that we're moving to a self-service world, quite literally through the power of the smartphone in our pocket. Want to know where something is? Phone. Need a picture? Phone. Want to buy some car insurance? Phone. I forget where I read it but if your business idea doesn't work on a phone, don't bother.

Many of the presumptions about public services, transport, retailing and decision-making no longer apply. It's not that we don't still need leadership but that that leadership needs to be more dispersed, connected and local than what we see today. The economics writer, Tim Worstall taked about Bjorn's Beer Effect:

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

In a self-service world we need to look more at local considerations than at the systems needed to deliver services - the phone in your pocket can deliver those services and you can work it out for yourself. But you still want advice, help - dare I say it, leadership - but this should be at your scale: local, responsive and focused. Most of the world's problems - pretty much all of them with the exception of that huge asteroid - don't require a global response but require us, at most, to change our personal behaviour. This needs dispersed local leadership rather than grand gatherings in nice cities.

The second throwaway from my meeting was about how people work - specifically Generation Y and Z but I suspect this applies much more broadly - in a world where access to knowledge (and fake knowledge) approaches being universal. We heard a description of a noisy, confused room of young people discussing the task at hand, phones being consulted, everybody talking, groups forming and unforming - there's leadership here but not in the traditional, dominant, top-down manner that our Philosopher Kings would want. And the leader on one task is different from the leader on another task - all a bit like The Apprentice!

This again reflects the manner in which connectivity - something that mobile technology is bringing to de Blij's locals - now forms the core function in leadership. The leader is no longer in that high castle and, tomorrow, may step aside because a different person has stepped up to lead. All this suggests that the established power structures of representative democracy and bureaucracy serve less of a purpose - if we self-serve we don't need that big bureaucracy and, therefore, its great leader. And if we're connected, involved and engaged we have less need to choose someone else to do the connection, involvement and engaging.

We'll still need the public servant but that person won't be a president, chief executive or civil service mandarin. Rather that servant will be Bjorn having a drink on a Friday with his friends and neighbours or Claire playing Lego with the kids in the local pre-school. Someone who, to return to where we started, has put on the postman's uniform.

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Quote of the day - the 'kumbaya' school of leadership...

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Politics matters. Even your much maligned office politics. Learn it.

“I was universally liked across the company, a team player who put in more hours than anyone else,” she said. “I was heads down on delivering results, shared my inner self and built trust…everything I was trained and even coached to do.”

With those words, I recognized what had happened immediately. Jill was one more victim of what I call the “Kumbaya” school of leadership, which says that being open, trusting, authentic, and positive — and working really hard — is the key to getting ahead. The Kumbaya school is doing the Jills of the world a great disservice, leading them to often act in ways that are detrimental to their careers.

Depressing I know. But true.

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Why political leaders are in the front row - and should sing anthems, say prayers and dress smartly

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So you're an atheist republican elected to lead a major UK political party. Nothing wrong with that - plenty of republicans and even more atheists out there. But there's a problem because we still live in a country where god and the monarch are revered - and constitutionally important. Not only this but the innate conservatism of most folk means that they'd quite like it to stay that way.

This problem is compounded because this is politics. We might not like the fact that such seemingly unimportant things like singing the national anthem, wearing a red poppy in early November and attending church services are given a great emphasis. But so long as this is the case - and, as we've seen, this is so - the politician has to have regard to these matters in considering his or her actions.

We can all recognise that the newly elected leader might choose to stick by his principles as an atheist republican. And we can even respect the integrity of a politician who accepts the inevitable criticism from elements of the essentially conservative majority but still sticks to those principles. But this still misses the point - the point is about why that leader is in the front row at events where anthems are sung, god is invoked and poppies are worn.

That leader is not, in those circumstances, an individual holding to principles but rather a symbol - in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, a symbol of nine million or so Labour voters. And I reckon that most of those Labour voters are neither republicans nor particularly atheistic. Indeed, they are probably pretty conservative in these matters.

So it is important that civic and political leaders remember that, when they stand at the cenotaph or at a service of remembrance, celebration or memorial they are not themselves. In laying wreathes the leaders of political parties recall the millions of Labour, Liberal and Conservative supporters who played their part in liberating Europe from tyranny. And they do this on behalf of the millions of Labour, Liberal and Conservative supporters not as David, Tim or Jeremy.

So political supporters should put on a good suit, stand straight, say the prayers and sing the anthems. Because it's not them it's those supporters doing that.

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Why do Bradford's schools do so badly?

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Perhaps the most worrying thing about Bradford is the continuing underperformance of the District's schools - certainly relative to other local education authorities (LEAs). This problem isn't a new one - back in the 1990s we saw the same situation and the Council then found the fault in Bradford's three-tier system of schooling and abolished middle schools. Ofsted then piled in and produced a damning assessment of Bradford's performance, closely followed by government education ministers who insisted that the Council outsource its LEA functions (this was by this point, of course, a Labour government minister insisting a Conservative-led council outsource the LEA functions).

We then had about ten years where it was, shall we say, convenient for the Council to suggest that the continued poor performance of Bradford's schools (they did get a little better but not by much) could be blamed on Serco who had won the contract to deliver those outsourced LEA functions. Towards the end of those Serco years a new excitement fell onto Bradford's education bureaucrats and the councillors they advised. We were bringing education back in-house - for at least three years the planning for this process was the obsession of the local leadership and, once complete, everything would change as we could deliver a 'step change' in the District's schools.

We're now nearly five years into this time of excitement. The LEA has been under the same political leadership - the same person - since 2010 and the situation is that, as the local paper reported, results at 16 have declined leaving Bradford joint second bottom with Blackpool in the ranking of LEA performance.

The percentage of Bradford district pupils passing at least five A* - C GCSEs, including English and maths, fell from 53 per cent in 2013 to 44 per cent in last summer's exams.

The results leave Bradford tied with Blackpool in joint second bottom place, with only Knowsley in Merseyside faring worse.

The statistics, published yesterday by the Department for Education, show that 16 Bradford schools have fallen under the Government's "floor" standards, which require at least 40 per cent of students to get five or more A* - C GCSEs including English and maths. 

We all know that this is unacceptable (or I hope we do) and Bradford's education leadership has adopted a plan to improve attainment - here's a quote from the introduction that suggests a degree of complacency:

“The Strategy was revised from the one published in June 2012 after we carried out a detailed analysis of data and it also follows discussions with leaders of school partnerships and governing bodies. This revised Strategy has a focus on accelerating our improvements."

So between 2012 and 2014 our performance got worse - across almost every measure. It's not clear at all what improvements there actually are to 'accelerate'. To give the plan its due, in its bureaucratic way it sets out actions the Council and its "partners" will be taking - recruiting the best leaders, having every school good or outstanding by 2017, targeting underperformance, annual visits to schools, improving governance, sharing local best practice, and targeting underperforming groups.

What is missing from all this is any acknowledgement that Bradford doesn't have the knowledge, skills or capacity to deliver the ambitious targets set by the Council. Setting targets is easy but there is little confidence that Bradford's schools will actually meet them  - and, as one of the targets is still to be below average but not as below average as we are right now, the targets aren't exactly earth-shattering.

There are some things we know - mostly about what doesn't affect performance. We know that whether the LEA services are delivered in-house or by a contractor makes little or no difference. We know that focusing on Ofsted assessments of school quality doesn't reflect in performance outcomes at 16. And we know that increasing resources available to schools isn't the issue - school spending in Bradford has risen by some £70 million since 2010. Moreover up to 2013 not reductions had been made in central LEA spending either.

This leaves us with several other factors. The first is ethnicity:

Putting in place additional resources to support our work with underperforming groups. We are currently revising our strategy to respond to high levels of pupil mobility and a significant increase in the number of pupils and families who are not only ‘new to English’ but also ‘new to education’, with a focus on 15 Primary Schools with mobility at or above 15% (the District average is 8.4% for maintained schools).

We are constantly reminded of how many different languages Bradford's students speak with the implication that somehow this is part of the reason for underperformance. All those foreigners coming here with their children speaking a funny language drags down performance - it's a sort of perfect UKIP argument. One that has no supporting evidence, indeed the opposite seems to be true:

...now new research suggests there is a much simpler, single, reason for a decade of improved GCSE results in the capital: London schools do better than the rest of England because they have a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils.

The report by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at Bristol University argues that the diversity of the capital's population is a key reason for the "London effect" because ethnic minority pupils tend to achieve higher grades than those from a white British background.

Back in 2011, 67% of pupils at London's state schools were from ethnic minority backgrounds - the figure for Bradford was 43%.  Tower Hamlets with 80% of its pupils from such backgrounds was 30th in the LEA rankings in 2013 compared to Bradford's 140th. For an even more stark comparison nearly half of pupils in the London Borough of Redbridge are Asian - and in 2013 Redbridge was the 11th best performing LEA. There is nothing to suggest that Bradford's poor schools result from having a large proportion of ethnic minority pupils.

So if it isn't the organisation of the LEA and it's not ethnicity then what is the problem in Bradford's schools? We are told to look to London and specifically the London Challenge as a model for improvement. And leaving aside the evidence suggesting a changed ethnic mix is the main reason for London's school improvement, this approach provides various interventions that affect outcomes:

The CfBT argues that five key interrelated factors were “critical to London’s success”. It cites the London Challenge school improvement scheme, improved performance by some local authorities, the academies programme, Teach First and good leadership.

Now there has been talk about a 'Bradford Challenge' but this rather misses the point. London has 32 LEAs across a very varied set of demographic and social circumstances and while Bradford District is a big place, London is nearly twenty times bigger. Worse still the District's education leadership is inward-looking - there is nothing in the attainment strategy about reaching out to other places or programmes, just a relentless, bull-headed Bradford machine approach (coupled with a frantic flapping around looking for other things to blame for the problem).

If we look at West Yorkshire, there is the capacity for such a programme but the two high performing LEAs (Wakefield and Calderdale are both in the top 30 nationally) will need persuading to co-operate with the two poor performing LEAs (Bradford and Leeds). This suggests several options.

The five authorities could agree a joint approach and pitch for resources to the Department for Education to deliver a 'West Yorkshire Challenge' in schools with the programme run on much the same basis as for the London Challenge. I've no idea whether the money would be forthcoming (although the tendency of political leadership in Bradford's education to focus on attacking the government rather than improving education won't help) but it would be worth a punt.

An alternative route would be to turn the Combined Authority's 'strategic economic plan' on its head and shift resource from (I would argue) pretty ineffective short-term labour market interventions into a long-term school improvement programme backed up with resource from each LEA budget. This would require the self-interest of some of the partners on the Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to be set aside but would have the advantage of being a wholly locally-owned project.

In addition, Bradford needs to look very closely and critically at leadership in the local education sector. A warts-and-all approach would examine the leadership of the LEA, in schools and in the various bodies that make up the education system. We need to be prepared to intervene to supplement weak leaderships through executive head programmes and, if needs be, through strengthening the accountability mechanisms in schools. We need to look at the recruitment of leaders - this is part of the current plan but simply appointing Schools Recruitment and Retention Strategy Lead Officer isn't the solution. Again we must be prepared to resource the recruitment of better head teachers - there's a very competitive market for the best heads and right now Bradford isn't getting a look in when it comes to getting these people to come and work in our schools.

Lastly, Bradford needs to be more creative - actively supporting new free schools rather than setting obstacles in their way, sitting down with the leaders in private sector education - Bradford Grammar School is one of the best schools in the country and this isn't just down to its intake - and drawing on the best governors at the best schools to help drive the programme. And instead of grumping about academies we should think about how to learn the lessons from the best of them - both in Bradford and elsewhere.

It don't know the answer to the question I posed in the headline - why do Bradford's schools do so badly. And I get no real sense that the political and professional leadership in the Council are any closer to the answer than I am. What we can't afford is to carry on either trying to find excuses or else simply doing more of the same over and over again in the vain hope that somehow it will work this time. It's time for something to give.

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The sleepers awake. How the left controls NHS leadership.

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Back in the 1980s the Conservative government did that very conservative thing - it decided that the way to improve the operational effectiveness of public services like the NHS was to get better leadership and management. It's very hard to argue with this principle, indeed it seems like common sense. So the government replaced local councillor led area authorities with a mish-mash of boards and panels each with people recruited to bring 'business' experience of one sort or another.

Spin forward a few years and we arrive at 1997 and the election of a Labour government. Now some on the left wanted to return to the old, pre-reform NHS where the organisation was centrally directed with no pseudo-market and no boards of 'business' people. But Blair and Brown decided otherwise - they realised that the boards in the NHS presented the opportunity to fill the organisation with people sympathetic to New Labour's aims (I'm talking about the NHS here but the same applied right across the public sector).

Once the key appointments - chairs, chief executives and so forth - were in place, Labour could rely on those people to fill the boards with like-minded folk. And, by introducing (in typical New Labour style) a control mechanism - the Nolan Principles - this could be portrayed as removing political interference from the appointment process. The board may be filled with apologists for Labour (and indeed, as we find in Bradford, with actual Labour politicians) but these supposed 'principles' allow that party to claim it has nothing to do with the appointment - the best person got the job.

When Labour left government some assumed (and to see the spat over just one appointment, Labour absolutely believed) that the Conservatives would apply exactly the same approach - chairs and directors would be chosen for their Conservative sympathies. But this simply hasn't happened because of that view, a deeply conservative view, that it's effective administration that matters - as I wrote a while back:

...Cameron’s “conservatism as effective administration” requires attachment to and confidence in institutions – the National Health Service, the Civil Service, Royal Colleges, Universities. Government should concern itself with ensuring these institutions are well administered rather than with the outcomes of the institutions work. Put the right leaderships in place and trust in their judgement is what government must do – and then act to implement and enforce the plans those leaders create.

So the urbane, professorial sorts who lead publiuc institutions remained in place despite their preference - even support - for the Labour Party. The result of this is that - especially in the NHS - the administration actively seeks to undermine the priorities and direction of government policy. And with the 'privatisation' debate the Labour-supporting men and women filling NHS boards have been activated in the manner of sleepers:

Party activists sat on board that slashed funds, doctor who is would-be Labour MP helped shape critical report and lead inspector was opponent of privatisation 

We are reminded again how the Labour Party and its supporters in trade unions like the BMA will always put the interests of power and self-interest ahead of the interests or the public and the patient. And this revelation reminds us that the biggest failure in the current government's administration of the NHS hasn't been the reforms or funding issues but has been keeping a huge fifth column of Labour supporters in place right across the system. Indeed, to allow those supporters to continue appointing their own to positions of power and influence in the NHS.

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On the accountability of public sector management

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I don't make a habit of quoting Labour MPs (they have a depressing tendency to spout nonsense) but this from Simon Danczuk is spot on:

We’re also starting to see a worrying cult of leadership. Highly paid managers are seemingly untouchable and distant from front-line workers. The rise of the unsackable, unaccountable and unapologetic public-sector manager is a trend that will only see services continue to deteriorate. And let’s be clear about what that means. It won’t be just missed targets or a poor Ofsted rating. We’re storing up huge social costs. 

I saw an article the other day, from an organisation called Democratic Audit UK, that argued (in a defence of modern politics) that accountability was greater today:

It is heresy in Britain to suggest that anything in its public life may have got better, but in terms of accountability it most certainly has. It is scarcely too much to say that over the past twenty years there has been a revolution in accountability. From human rights to freedom of information, with much else along the way, governments have been held to account in a way that was previously not the case.

Simon Danczuk's article and the reality of government, the experience of all of us trying to hold social services, police and planners to account for their decisions, is that too many of the decisions government takes are beyond the reach of that accountability. Moreover they are the result of activist government extending its regulatory and management reach ever deeper into society - chasing the shades and demons of modern society and feeding the industry of professional 'experts' that lives on the back of those broken and dysfunctional bits of our society.

We have a semblance of accountability, select committees, scrutiny panels, freedom of information requests and endless teams of inspectors, but with this comes a feeling that what those organisations do makes little difference to teflon-coated managers protected by a library of HR rules. So we aren't surprised - disappointed, even shocked, but not surprised - when David Nicholson, the bloke in part responsible for the scandal of deaths at Mid-Staffordshire Hospital crops up in ever more senior roles. We shrug our shoulders and sigh when we see Lin Homer lurch from one procurement or management crisis to the next. And we cry angrily at the pay out given to Sharon Shoesmith, who led Haringey Social Services at the time of the 'Baby P' death.

I could go on with this and I know you can add dozens - maybe hundreds -of names to the list of people who simply weren't accountable for the actions of the organisations they led. I'm not arguing here for lynchings, heads on poles or even summary dismissal but for a sense of duty and responsibility and for the idea that failure shouldn't, as if in some dark version of Dilbert, be rewarded with promotion. And for the idea that the people we elect to represent us - to make decisions on our behalf - should be able to do so and, so they can, for the activities of police, social services, courts and procurements to be open and transparent to those people.

There's a dangerous view out there among professional public sector 'leaders' that we've moved to some sort of 'post-democracy', to a world where what they are doing is too detailed, technical, specialised and private for elected politicians at any level to merit any say over those decisions. Much of the promotion of this 'post-democracy' comes from the social democratic left, from the inheritors of the Fabian mantle - they claim that far from promoting an unaccountable technocratic governance they are seeing how power has shifted to 'business'. Except they dismiss liberal, local and participatory solutions as 'populism' preferring instead to fall back on the belief in their own inherent rightness and fitness to rule.

To return to Simon Danczuk, he illustrates this problem perfectly:

Last week I received a text message from a current Labour MP saying she was disappointed by my views on this issue. I was only elected in 2010 and already I’ve found that politicians are sometimes discouraged from exploring and investigating complex issues because they’re expected to stay tethered to a dominant ideology and not stray far from the stock replies to difficult questions. This does nothing to strengthen democracy. It weakens it, and creates cynicism. The public want to see matters like this discussed and they want politicians to come up with answers, not just endless hand-wringing. 

Yet when we do what Simon suggests, too often we're told either that it's terribly complicated and involved and not quite what we're saying or worse still (and as a Conservative this is more likely) accused of racism, sexism, class prejudice or some other sort of discriminatory practice. There are a few brave souls out there (I'm not sure I qualify here, for what it's worth) but perhaps too few to crack open the edifice of modern government and shine some light into it's interior - to bring a little more accountability.

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Of course the NHS is out-of-control. It has been out-of-control for decades...

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Of course the NHS is out of control. We really shouldn't be surprised to hear this from a minister - indeed it's perhaps the first honest thing we've heard about the NHS in my lifetime. Except, of course, that's not really what the minister meant - what she meant was that the service was out of her control.

A Tory health minister was at the centre of controversy after she was secretly recorded saying that the government could no longer exert much day-to-day control over the increasingly stretched NHS.

Read that carefully - the words used are "day-to-day control". In other words, the reforms to the system introduced under this government have finally (or at least in front of 'private' party meetings) ended the pretence that government ministers and officials in Whitehall "run" the NHS. As the defensive response from a government spokesman put it - doctors are in charge of the NHS.

Now I've a little insight into the NHS as a member of a health and wellbeing board. This doesn't make me an expert (partly because the NHS uses a language that is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English') merely that I have a little knowledge. The reality out there is that there is no effective 'control' anywhere in the NHS - at least not in the management sense of control. My amazement is that an endless search for strategy has replaced any sense of actually doing stuff.

Now health and wellbeing boards are that very thing - 'high level', 'strategic', 'focused on partnership' - that frustrates us normal folk when confronted with public sector management. The NHS likes to call this 'leadership', presumably invoking some sort of sympathetic magic that says if you call something 'leadership' often enough it will become leadership. The reality is that this high level strategic partnership approach to NHS leadership is more akin to a nebulous, ill-focused exercise in projecting managerial self-interest as strategy (and this is without commenting on the use of misleading statistics on public health and health inequality as the basis for planning - mostly because they fit the ideology of NHS management).

At the mish-mash of meetings where we consider vast swathes of documentation all written in that almost comprehensible NHS language, we have been told about a thing called 'the funding gap'. This is a chthonic darkness looming over health services in Bradford - the £364 million bogieman of the care economy. And we discuss this 'gap' as if it is real rather than constructed from a combination of speculation, guesswork and spatulamancy.

So because everyone present knows that the bogieman is probably a little old man from Kansas rather than Godzilla, the aim is to direct any changes away from each person's particular interest. The truth about that 'funding gap' is that it is almost entirely founded on the idea that healthcare cost inflation will exceed general inflation, that demand will rise and that the NHS will not improve its productivity or efficiency. This is pathologised by the setting off of pseudo-panic - 'if nothing is done now then the NHS will be in crisis' or 'the funding gap presents the biggest leadership challenge since the foundation of the NHS'.

Really? Over the life time of the NHS its inflation rate has always exceeded the general inflation rate, demand has always risen and any advances in efficiency have been resisted by unions or swamped by managerial mission creep. The current crisis is the same crisis as before except for one thing - we're assuming that the magic money tree won't provide meaning that the service really does have to think about its productivity. And faced with this fact the 'leadership' is like the proverbial bunny facing the pick-up truck, completely frozen, unable to act.

This inability to act is because the NHS is uncontrollable - even out-of-control. Take the review of hospital provision in London and consider how Labour used it to run a series of egregious campaigns during an election. Why would any politician do anything but resist any change at all to health services knowing that proposing - or even agreeing to consider - such changes will result in an unpleasant, personal attack from the other side. We talk about putting doctors in charge, huge investment in 'leadership development' is made and the chairs are reorganised into a nice new pattern.

But we're not going to make the changes needed to get a more efficient health service because too many people inside the service are banking on political pressure working. These people - at the front of the crowd are the trade unions but there are others like the risible 'National Health Action Party' lined up alongside - see defending the health system's inefficiency as some sort of holy mission. And because these campaigners can press that 'Our NHS' button, get people to say 'the NHS saved my life and nothing should change', the result is sclerosis - the arteries of the system are clogged with years of indulgence.

The NHS is out-of-control because - so far as I can see - it has no leadership brave enough or strong enough (indeed with the authority needed) to face down the vested interests of unions, assorted medical colleges and NHS management. So the service will sputter on - most of the time, in most places doing an OK job and certainly saving lives every day.  And the funding gap will get lost in the running of internal deficits, in salami slicing of non-essential activity and in skimping on investment.

So yes, the NHS is out-of-control.

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Scrapping the position of Council chief executive? Well it's a thought...

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Indeed a thought that Bradford Council's Conservative Group has proposed in its last two budget submissions (more specifically we've asked that the position is included within a wider review of governance and leadership). It seems that the government down in London agrees with us:

‘The Government believes that the traditional model of chief executive, with a wide public role and a significant salary, is unnecessary and can weaken the ability of a council’s political leadership to set a direction through the executive role of elected members.'

Now partly this is all part of the "no public servant should be paid more than the prime minister" nonsense but there's a more important and broader issue here of governance. As council chief executives have drifted away from their traditional town clerk role they have become what one Bradford councillor called "the unelected mayor", individuals with an enormous amount of discretionary (even arbitrary) power. Moreover this power is exercised without the capacity of the electorate and its representatives to control or correct actions.

The intention of the 2000 local government act (for all its myriad flaws and failures) was to re-establish the authority of elections and elected people either through the introduction of a directly elected mayor or else through a powerful leader and cabinet model. The presence, especially within the latter, of powerful chief executives undermines the authority of that political executive by creating a different nexus from which policy and strategic leadership can come.

In Bradford this problem is illustrated by the fact that the chief executive has over £4 million worth of officer resource directed to policy, strategy and 'change' whereas the entire political establishment has just two and a half policy officers (less than £100,000 worth). A moment's glance at this structure tells you that the political leadership of the council, in terms of positive policy-making, is completely dominated by the chief executive. Indeed it often seems that the only action us politicians can take is to veto a proposal. Positive proposals, if they don't accord with the professional leadership's 'vision', run the risk of simply staying just that, a proposal.

None of this is a criticism of the capability of chief executives merely to observe that the position has grown to such strength that the over-riding principle of democratic leadership and accountability is undermined. We need to look again at the role of leading the 'paid service' and consider how we can - if we like the idea of democracy that is - rejuvenate the role of councillors and political leadership.

....

Politics is broken...

Finer defined politics as the means whereby dispute is resolved. As such it encompasses all the decisions that happen outside circumstances of exchange (i.e. within the market). And there have, across time, been many means employed to undertake political decision-making - from 'my axe is sharper than yours do as I say or I'll split your head' through consensual (and sometimes less than consensual) family decisions to the ever more byzantine machinations of the democratic process.

On one level politics is about how much lies within the market and how much is retained (or captured) by those with the biggest club. Partly this debate is about whether the process of exchange is 'fair' - the concept of market failure - and partly the debate concerns who is in charge, who exercises the decision-making powers. Of course, the more we delegate executive power to individuals (presidents, prime ministers, mayors and so forth) the more important the question of 'who' becomes compared to the question of 'what'.

The truth of this is revealed in Damian McBride's memoir. This is not to indulge in a kind of tribal schadenfreude but to observe that, given the nature of power in the Labour party and the winner takes all system of representative democracy, who was the boss mattered more than what the boss did. We may also observe that this principle - the triumph of person over policy - is indulged every day by the media, by opinion polling and by the political parties.

The reason 'In the thick of it' hit the spot for so many wasn't simply that it was well-written and contained a lot of swearing but that it described the shallow pettiness of politics. We see a swarm of vicious courtiers buzzing round the grand figures of politics - party leaders, pundits and pretenders. These courtiers are served by purveyors of tittle-tattle - the newspaper diarists, bloggers and columnists who report on who said what to who, dishing up lurid tales of sex, drugs and character assassination while purporting to serve some high purpose of transparency or open government.

This is not a healthy political system but one crippled by the gout of self-importance and sycophancy. But each of these courtiers' acts - their tales, their spin, their manipulation - results in a flurry of measurement. Opinion polls arrive daily, not just with answers to the 'who would you vote for' question but with an ever more personalised analysis of the 'leaders' - are they too posh, in touch or out of touch, competent or incompetent. Each 'policy' announcement is aimed at these polls rather than at making the right choice - want to 'defend' the welfare state then you must toss red meat about immigration into the pot to appease those who see people on welfare as scroungers.

What makes this worse is that because politics has been torn to shreds by the soap opera of leadership, we have delegated decision-making to people who are not elected. In local government it is - in all but a few places - the powerful chief executive who decides. And nationally, we have set up a well-paid mandarinate to which we have handed all the decisions that really affect most people going about their regular daily lives. Politicians have given up control over so many decisions to a self-serving cabal of professionals and lawyers - unaccountable, unchallenged and convinced that removing politics from political decisions is the right thing.

Nothing will change. Or at least the change will not be a consequence of us voting, electing and cheering on our team in the political game. If there is change it will be because people choose exchange as the means rather than politics. Instead of waiting on some benign bureaucrat to hand a script to the latest political leader to read out, people will simply set up ways to share and exchange, to provide the things they need (and want) unencumbered by the need to engage in a political bidding war.

Bureaucrats - and the politicians and commentators they promote - will resist the development of exchange as a means of choice-making. It does not serve their interests - for some politicians the results will be false markets, the outsourcing of services, while for others it will be to say 'everything within the state and nothing without the state'. I hope that the power of choice will defeat these people and that the ghastly, selfish and bullying world of politics becomes an ever more irrelevant sideshow as people make their own decisions about their own lives and their own families.

I hope. Because politics is broken.

....

Can we have an end to the cult of leadership?

But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry [ground] through the midst of the sea. Exodus 14:16

Since time immemorial we have been cursed by leadership. Moses, Mohammed, Mao - an endless succession of leaders taking us from our wretched existence to some glorious city on the hill. We are obsessed by the idea of charisma, of how leaders transcend the ordinary to set out a vision of some wonderful future.

Now we have the idea of the leader an an institution - that we should be concerned about the charisma of that individual and his ability to drag us from our plight by the force of his personality, dividing the seas of crisis by the merest waft of that staff of power:

For the first time, David Cameron is trailing behind his party, according to the latest polling from Lord Ashcroft. Labour has long struggled with this problem, but as the charts below show, voters now also feel more favourable towards the Conservatives than they do to Cameron himself...

We're told to worry, that without a leader who can 'rise above' partisan and tribal politics there is no hope of sustained power. And so start the whispers - replace Dave with Boris or Ed with a different Ed, dump Nick. We're told by the gossip-mongers of the media that leadership is all, that the charming smile of the true leader is the difference between success and failure.

This nonsense is indulged by the pollsters who ask questions that we would never ask each other, carefully crafted questions that reinforce the idea of 'leadership', the belief - a mistaken belief - that without leadership nothing ever happens. All this does is reinforce the idea that orders, direction and control are the way to run the world and that everywhere people should know the answer to the little green aliens request: "take me to your leader".

Well I disagree, all leadership does is create conflict, division and the subordination of one person to the desires and demands of another. Leadership is about you doing something because someone else demands it of you. And it matters not one jot whether that demand is wrapped up in persuasive weasel words or done with a whip or a Kalashnikov - the end result is the same, we do what we're told (and too often believe it is good for us).

Worse still than 'leader as institution' we now have 'leadership as bureacracy' - great monuments to the power of red tape now have active leadership programmes where the administrative lemures are taught about the leadership thing. And, rather that understand that their role is to process, to administer, these "future leaders" sign up to the cult of leadership - that bureaucracy will be better for the presence of people who have a vision of that city of the hill, that magic place where everything is good and bright and wonderful.

It is the most depressing idea I know, the negation of choice and individuality, of challenge and innovation. And its replacement with 'leadership'.

‘His Excellency the Earth Ambassador wishes to speak with you at once.’

‘Is that so?’ The other eyed him speculatively, had another pick at his teeth. ‘And what makes him excellent?’

‘He is a person of considerable importance,’ said Bidworthy, unable to decide whether the other was trying to be funny at this expense or alternatively was what is known as a character. A lot of these long-isolated pioneering types liked to think of themselves as characters.

‘Of considerable importance,’ echoed the farmer, narrowing his eyes at the horizon. He appeared to be trying to grasp a completely alien concept. After a while, he inquired, ‘What will happen to your home world when this person dies?’

‘Nothing,’ Bidworthy admitted.

‘It will roll on as before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Round and round the sun?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then,’ declared the farmer flatly, ‘if his existence or nonexistence makes no difference he cannot be important.’ with that, his little engine went chuff-chuff and the cultivator rolled forward.

Now that is the right response to 'leadership'!

....

What are politicians for...?

I appreciate that this sort of question raises an endless torrent of sarcasm, cynicism and vulgar repartee but it’s an important question. And one we don’t often ask, preferring instead to wander along in a safe assumption that somehow we need politicians. Which I think rather lets us off the hook and allows us to ramble on about “leadership” even, horror of horrors, “community leadership”.

Frankly I think leadership is a vastly over-rated element of politics. I’m not elected to “lead” but to represent, yet the debate is always about political “leadership” rather than political “representation”. This isn’t to say that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to observe that leadership is not the purpose of politics or politicians. Yet it remains the obsession of observers – who seem to want a kind of magical spirit of leadership to emanate from politicians:

Yet I couldn’t help think that there was something missing in all the talk of leadership. There were numerous real life and theoretical examples of people ‘doing’ leadership or asking others to show leadership, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was no nearer understanding what Cameron’s definition of leadership is, how it manifests/shows itself and why he thinks the examples that he used demonstrate leadership (as well as what politicians can learn). One of the problems with our body politic at present is that all of those references to leadership could have been sprinkled into the speeches of Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg and none of us would have noticed any different.

What we have here isn’t leadership (and Puffles is right to make that observation), it is representation – people want leadership so our representatives present themselves as leaders. And what we mostly want is one of two things – and often both:

1. The leaders to take away the problems of our life – be it work, health or relationships. We want it to be “someone else’s problem”; we want the magic government fairy to sort it out. This applies whether you’re a billionaire banker or a poor pensioner
2. The leaders to fix things for our benefit, to make rules that favour what we do or that stop those things of which we disapprove. Sometimes this is about economic protection, sometimes it is the projection of a moral position but it is always about fixing things so we benefit.

When politicians don’t do this – or do it for someone else and not us – we accuse them of being weak leaders. Yet the irony of such accusations is that the very opposite is true – it takes a real strength (and a willingness to risk electoral defeat) to tell people they can’t have what they are demanding.

None of this is to argue that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to say that we don’t have politics and politicians for the purpose of leadership – we have politics and (under our system of representative democracy) politicians to resolve dispute. To make the choice between competing policy options, to decide what course of action to take. And the representation bit is important – my member of parliament has the job of representing me (and the sixty-odd thousand other Shipley electors) in that process of choice.

This is representation and, if we opt instead to devolve responsibility for our economic, social and personal well-being to these people, we are making a colossal mistake – we stop being free men and women and become mere supplicants. Wide-eyed beggar brats gazing into the shiny political salon hoping they’ll notice and “do something”. Because of this, politicians have become a peculiar species of social worker – mollycoddling their electors rather than doing the primary job of representing those electors in the making of choices, in the job of politics.

Puffles suggests that the system for choosing politicians (the selection process rather than the election process) is at fault:

One of the paradoxes I find is that some of our political institutions and the practices of political parties end up suppressing leadership rather than encouraging and nurturing it.

I remain unconvinced - so long as we shuffle about like well-fed sheep waiting for the man with the crook or the dog to herd us in their chosen direction, so long as we see the problem as one of leadership, so long as politicians are expected to wet nurse the voter we will have this crisis of leadership.

I look to a world where, to borrow a Marxist turn of phrase, the need for politicians withers away. Some call this a process of apathy, the rebirth of idiots, but I welcome private strength, individual choices and people who want to be free from the “leadership” that politicians are urged to provide.

As I wrote a couple of years ago:

...the core consideration is the extent to which we are able to live as Greek idiots. Quietly, privately, without bothering our neighbours with our problems – and when such people want change they will get up from their armchairs, walk away from the telly and vote. The idea that not being bothered with voting most of the time makes them bad people is a misplaced idea – they are the good folk.

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

 ....

Why I'll be saying "yes" to an elected mayor for Bradford

Today, Greg Clark, the “Cities Minister”, confirmed the date for Bradford’s referendum on a directly elected executive mayor:

Our greatest cities can benefit from strong, visible leadership and international standing that a mayor, elected with a clear mandate, can bring.

"Around the world, including in London, a mayor has become a vital part in ensuring that a great city has a strong voice and can attract investment from home and aboard.

"Britain's success depends on the success of our great cities and I am convinced that an elected mayor, taking powers previously confined to ministers, can help realise their potential."

Now, leaving aside the slightly gushing nature of this announcement, I can say that I shall be campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote – Bradford has had long enough with behind closed doors, unaccountable, party whip controlled government. The result of this has been to create a jaundiced electorate – something noted (to the distaste of local leaders) by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

In part defined by outsiders as a ‘problem city’, individuals, businesses and groups who took part in the research often argued that Bradford’s leaders had not done enough to counter these negative images. They felt this had discouraged investment in the area and damaged the confidence and perceptions of people within the city and district.

However much we may – as those local leaders – chunter and complain about this analysis, we cannot deny that a fair old chunk of the City’s populace simply don’t think much of their leaders. Maybe they’re wrong – I certainly think many Councillors have tried hard to break through the begging bowl mentality, present a positive image of the City and provide high quality services to Bradford’s residents.

A mayor would – as we have seen elsewhere – be able to rise above the party machines through having a direct relationship with all the Bradford electorate. A mayor would set a different tone to politics in the city. Instead of an endless round of conflicted negotiations between party leaders, we would have one individual able to set a clear agenda – an agenda for which that individual would be accountable to the whole electorate.

Right now the agenda is set in the different party groups on the council; these groups choose the leaders giving the voters no say in that process. Elections are conducted on the basis of national political positions – if parties have a position on Bradford’s priorities it isn’t one that is presented to the electorate, debated and discussed, it is contained in a document read by only a few.

A mayor would break the stranglehold of professional administrators and the dominance of officer “expertise” is defining what the council does. My colleagues on council complain all the time about it being “officer-led” or “officer-controlled”. One former councillor once described the chief executive, with some merit, as the “unelected mayor”. If we have a directly elected executive mayor, we will see political direction and leadership (and I don’t mean party political here) replacing the deadening hand of bureaucratic stasis that dominates what we do today.

Above all, a mayor would provide the city with a clear, recognisable and accountable face to the wider world. Right now, I’m prepared to bet that more Bradfordians know the name of the directly elected mayor of London than know the name of the indirectly elected, unaccountable leader of Bradford Council.

So next May, I’ll be asking Bradfordians to vote for change. To vote for a system that will give the City a strong public voice, a man or woman who can step outside the now smoke-free rooms of City Hall and provide the leadership the people of Bradford say they want.

....

Not a good week for police leadership

 

We all watched numb and speechless as looters rampaged through the high streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere. And we rightly condemn those looters and say that there are no excuses for their behaviour - rioting is the responsibility of the rioter, no-one makes them do it.

But, like others, I was struck by the supine response of the police on the street. A response succinctly described by David Davis:

The single thing that has most astonished the British public was the sight of rows of heavily equipped police officers standing by whilst rioters and looters engaged in brazen acts of vandalism, arson and theft. A police officer called to the scene of a bank robbery would not park across the street and wait patiently for it to finish, so why were the Met’s riot police little more than spectators during the looting? 

We watched reports of the Wolverhampton hairdresser protecting her shop and confronting looters - while police stood by and watched. Yet the full order of riot police were deployed to respond to deal with 'vigilantes':

"...more than 1,000 officers battled with dozens of middle-aged men on the streets Eltham, south-east London."

More than 1000 police to deal with sixty men some of who appear to have committed the heinous crime or drinking some beer and singing "we love England". But police bosses really don't get it - those men, whether from the EDL or not - weren't about to riot, smash up shops or loot. It could have been handled with fifty coppers. But then the police don't like local people looking out for their own community, especially when those local people are white, male and working-class. And the top policemen still don't get it:

He said it was “ironic” that media pictures showed looting in areas where there were “no police available” while officers were being diverted to stop vigilantes elsewhere. 

Got that? The police deemed it more important to send 1000 officers to handle 200 men in Eltham who weren't looting or rioting than to send officers to deal with the actual looting? We'd watched the day before as the police ignored looting, standing mutely - clearly frustrated - because their senior officers were too scared to confront the rioters properly.

And who were those 'vigilantes' - here's a description from Enfield where 300 men took to the high street to defend their community:

On the train to Enfield, I had been reading dozens of tweets claiming the anti-riot patrol was a front for far-right organisations and an excuse for racist chants and violence. The reality was nothing of the sort. There were no weapons being carried and no violence erupted at all. Yes, the majority of people there were white and working class, but there was also a range of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Indeed I found, if anything, people on the patrol were overly awkward about the fact they were white. One guy told me he had been worried he'd be seen as a racist by taking part: 'There's no getting around the fact that a lot of the rioters are black,' he told me, 'but you can't just do nothing just in case someone calls you a racist.'

These are the people the Metropolitan Police leadership "can do without". Ordinary men with the gumption to protect their streets to act in the interests of their community - condemned for doing so by the leadership of our police.

This has to change. We can't allow the police leadership to fail us as they did on Monday night. As David Davis points out - amidst all the furore about police cuts - that there are more police officers employed today than at any time in our history. Which begs a question - where on earth were they all on Monday night?

We've always been told - as politicians - that we should have no say over the police's "operational decisions", yet we know that the decision-making by the Metropolitan Police over the past few days has been risible. And the leadership of the force should therefore be accountable - it was their decision-making that was wrong. It was not - in proximate terms - the fault of politicians.

When we had riots in Bradford, I didn't feel let down by the police - despite the poor tactics on the night. Lots of brave men and women faced a very angry situation and hundreds were injured. I suspect that many people in places hit by looters felt let down by the police. Certainly, we don't pay thousands in personal and business taxes to pay for a police force that doesn't protect us.

If one change comes from all this it must be a more accountable, more local police force. We have to move away from ever larger forces, from concentration of operations into huge, impersonal barracks and from the disconnection between the police and the communities they serve. This isn't about political control of the police - although elected police commissioners will be welcome - but about the police being of and from the community. Not "community policing" as some form of operational tactic but a real community police force - one that would welcome people who stand up for their community and not treat them as unwanted "vigilantes".

....

Not that you care of course!

Yesterday evening I was elected as Deputy Leader of Bradford Council's Conservative Group - exciting times but times that will affect the content of this blog. It's not that I'm going away, the mushrooms will remains, the occasional whimsy with flutter across the airwaves, I'll still talk of fairies but on the politics my voice is no longer my own. As a group officer, I have something akin to collective responsibility - my words may be taken to indicate group policy.

So forgive me if some of the more vociferous and trenchant of my political comments become somewhat tempered - such is the circumstance. I'll still be writing when I can - after all a Conservative having a go at socialists, statists and fake liberals isn't exactly a surprise - but it will be moderated by the need to consider the interests of the Group.

Not of course that you care!

....

Chief Executive or politician - make your choice

****

An understandable fury has come about as a result of remarks made by Bradford Council’s Chief Executive at the Bradford Professionals Network. The reported remarks include these:

“The Government is determined to dismantle the state.  That’s the basic approach. In the interests of political balance I would also say that the previous Government took a top down approach which increased bureaucracy.  Changes to funding for local authorities has seen resources diverted from urban council areas to the shires.  While Dorset has received a bigger share of funding, Bradford has seen a 14 per cent reduction and that’s not fair."

From the point of view of being a politician this concerns me – not because our Chief Executive holds views but because he can only speak on behalf of the Council. Thus when these words were spoken they became the viewpoint of the Council. And that viewpoint is set by elected members not by appointed officials. Indeed, those same elected members choose a Lord Mayor and a Leader to represent the views.

This statement represents a further erosion of the boundary between political debate and public service – characterised by the high profile roles of council Chief Executives such as Sir Bob Kerslake and the ill-judged comments of Barnsley’s Chief Executive about Eric Pickles.

However, my concern is not with these men and their public utterances. It is that senior councillors have allowed them to become the voice of the Council – have stood back so long as it suited for the smart, articulate Chief Executive to make the speeches. While it is true that many senior council officers are as politicised as officials of quangos, the fault lies with politicians for allowing this not with the officials for adopting a political position.

The problem – in the Bradford example – is that the Chief Executive made these overtly political comments while sat alongside the Council Leader. I like to think that Cllr Greenwood – on returning to the City Hall – gave our Chief Executive a bollocking for stepping beyond his remit. But somehow I doubt it. Somehow I suspect our dear leader was smiling quietly at was a great political win – made more so by the perception that Chief Executives are somehow wiser, more independent and more informed than us politicians.

At some point the Chief Executive may have to work with Conservative councillors to manage the council. Can we be confident given his publicly expressed views? Such men should remain silent and leave the politics to politicians.

 ....

Red Ed Arrives - more of the same then!

So Ed Moribund begins his campaign to be burgermeister:

Some are jumping up in the air--say "We're drowning in a torrent of blood!"
Others going down on their knees, seen a saviour coming out of the mud
Oh Mother! It's eating out my soul
Destroying law and order, I'm gonna lose control
What can I do to stop this plague, spread by sight alone
Just a glimpse and then a quiver, then they shiver to the bone
Ah, look at them go!

Labour have chosen a new leader after a process of such length and dullness that it brings to mind Paul Neil Milne Johnstone . Indeed there were moments when I feared that the body politic would revolt simply to see an end to the interminable boredom of this leadership campaign.

Now all the pundits are rolling out their assessment of Ed’s prospects – how the unions put him there and will demand a price, how the rejected Dave Moribund will become some kind of king over the water for Blairites and how there are little skips of joy and pleasure at ‘Red Ed’ getting the job at Conservative Central Office.

And Ed starts in the manner he’s conducted his campaign – with a wholly disingenuous victory speech and a cynical appeal to the electorate. All wrapped up in a wholly content-free presentation. I fear – and he has some competition – that Ed Moribund could become the most vacuous, dissembling political leader since Harold Wilson lied his way to the top.

So we have another elitist, self-serving, carpetbagger at the top of politics. Another man born with the right spoon in his gob (albeit in this case a very socialist spoon). Another man who while mouthing words like ‘community’, ‘middle-class’, ‘poverty’ and ‘hard work’ has no understanding or empathy with what they really mean. Another product of London’s metropolitan nomenklatura – effortless sliding from school, to university, to sinecure, to safe seat.

And that’s what is wrong with our politics.

.....

An outsider's thoughts on Labour's choices

Although I guess it’s none of my business, I can’t resist penning a thought or two about the Labour leadership election. I understand that, so far, we have a brace of Milibands and are expecting Balls to join in over the next couple of days. And we may yet see a candidate from the ‘left’ – perhaps John Cruddas. Game on as Labour tweeters like to say!

But catch your breath for a minute and ask yourselves a question – what sort of party do you want Labour to be over the coming few years? Be cause it’s plain that these candidates each offer a different direction. You have a choice between European-style social democracy, a tribal and cynical union-dominated approach or a real attempt to remake the party as a voice for ordinary people.

The Milibands – privileged background and education, pro-European, urbane, metropolitan – represent the shining besuited Euro-elite, the sort of candidates that Paris, Bonn and Madrid would approve. But this positioning means nothing to the ordinary working class voter who’s probably a bit doubting of the EU project and thinks the bloody foreigners should butt out of British politics thanks. The Milibands are part of that patronising Labour elite that gave us Mandelson, Harman and Blair.

Balls – despite his (well-disguised) posh background, Balls represents the cynical side of Labour politics. Lots of sound and fury followed by remorseless attacks on the Party’s enemies (internal as well as external). This is the trade unions’ party (as distinct from the trade unionists’ party), the party of group rights and the party of big government. It is the approach rejected by the electorate on May 6th

The third choice for Labour is to find again the place from which it sprung – the needs and aspirations of hard-working people employed in the private sector. These people – some are trade unionists but most are not – stuck two fingers up at the nannying, hectoring, interfering government of Brown. These people look across at public sector workers and see feather-bedded, protected employees – and worse, that comfort is achieved with their taxes. And these people want to drink beer, smoke fags, go by plane to Benidorm and Paphos, drive pick-up trucks, eat pies and give their kids a chocolate bar to go in the lunch box. They have absolutely nothing in common with the metrosexual niceness of the Milibands or with the bullying authoritarianism of Balls.

It isn’t my business but if the Labour Party wants to find its voice and place they have to get through to these voters – and to the 75% and more of C1/C2s who didn’t vote Labour – they have the chance to change the narrative. To be the party that say to ordinary folk: “you enjoy the money you earn how you like and we’ll try to look after your interests. To help protect your jobs, to support business, to provide doctors, schools and coppers and to defend the country.”

Maybe someone will step forward and make that offer. If they do Labour members would be mad not to take it.

....

Time for us to have our institutions back! Thoughts on community-led regeneration.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the rhetoric is right and that the problems the face our towns and cities must be right at the top of any regeneration agenda. Today’s comments from Grant Shapps, Conservative Housing Spokesman hit all the right buttons:

“We will send a signal to every struggling neighbourhood that instead of sitting tight and waiting for bureaucrats to come to the rescue, we will actively back local groups who demonstrate a vision to improve the place and community they call home. So a Conservative Government will give local people unprecedented new power over the future shape of their own communities.”

But this rhetoric doesn’t sound all that new. Back in 2001 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was speaking approvingly of New Labour’s regeneration policies observing that:

“Particular importance is attached to a community-led approach in which local citizens and stakeholders engage in capacity building, community plans and devolved forms of local government.”

Each new order of central government takes the view that regeneration starts and finishes with the people who live, work and play in these troubled places. And ends up with a hodge-podge of policies directing relatively small amounts of money from one central pot to another. Local communities are not afforded any real control over decision-making (we mustn’t upset the local council big-wigs must we) and are fobbed off with consultation on proposals decided upon elsewhere and for other reasons.

What we don’t need is another round of “area-based initiatives” bunging money to selected communities – whether through New Labour’s make-believe “evidence-based policy making” or Tory-style (and now pretty Brownite) competitive bidding. These approaches – as we saw in the past – merely result in ‘begging bowl’ politics.

I recall the 1990s in Bradford with each new Labour council leader speaking of how poor, sad and deprived the city was and how it needed extra special attention (and the nasty, bad Tories weren’t giving enough) – it was truly sickening and did untold damage to the image and confidence of the city. After ten years of telling us the place was a dump, Labour had succeeded in persuading much of the local population that this was the case. And we’re paying the price for this every day.

The remedy – if that’s the right word – doesn’t lie in new funds, competitive bidding or even in supporting “community leadership”. It lies in handing control of key institutions back to local people and their representatives. In taking away the assumption of bureaucratic superiority built into key local institutions such as the police, the hospitals, primary care, social services and planning.

The “professional” leadership of these organisations – Chief Constables, Directors of Social Services, NHS Chief Executives and the like - has failed our cities and all they can now do is either blame each other or blame the people who live in these cities. Perhaps it’s time give ordinary people back their institutions?