Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

 business, community, finance, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, regeneration, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 242013
 

Of course, the rot set in well before David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed the Coalition Government in May 2010. Public Sector BorrowingAs the Public Sector Net Borrowing chart shows, it was during Gordon Brown’s ill-fated premiership that the deficit increased massively. (The Public Sector Deficit is the difference between what the Government spends and what it takes in via taxes to fund that spending - that difference being borrowed.) To give them some credit, as the chart shows, the Coalition did bring the deficit down quite markedly in their first couple of years primarily via swingeing cuts in the public sector.

However, there are significant signs that the rate of decrease in borrowing may be slowing down. In December’s Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne predicted that borrowing would be £108B this year, and £99B next year and just £31B in 2017-18. In his Budget last week, just 3 months later, Osborne revised those figures to £114B this year, £108B next year and £61B in 2017-18.

Hand in hand with this, Osborne was forced to revise December’s estimate of growth this year from 1.2% to O.6%. While it looks like the UK may just about avoid a triple-dip recession, the outlook for growth in the British economy is poor, with 2014 revised down from 2% to 1.8%. With the ‘Age of Austerity’ now officially extended from 2015 to at least 2018, it’s no wonder Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls shouts repeatedly that austerity isn’t working and that his Labour leader, Ed Milliband yesterday, in a speech in Birmingham, spoke of the Government having resigned itself to a ‘lost decade’ over the economy.

Of course, it isn’t Cameron and Osborne’s fault that the UK’s borrowing requirement spiked so highly in 2008-09 and 2009-2010. Nor, strictly speaking, is it Gordon Brown’s - other than that he and Tony Blair, in their spending review of 2000, moved away from the tight fiscal policy they had adopted from the previous Conservative Government and allowed public spending to increase. The result was that the mild surplus they had created was quickly reversed. Thus, when the world went into financial meltdown in 2008-09, Brown had no recourse other than to go to the markets and borrow heavily to keep the country in the style it had been accustomed to…and more than double the Public Sector Deficit in the process.

By 2010 no leading UK politician, other than Balls, was in any doubt that public sector borrowing had to be reduced. Even outgoing Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling championed cuts. The debate was not about whether to cut but how far and how fast. Labour, with their concern for the impact on the less well-off, advocated a slower reduction than Cameron and Osborne who opted for as fast and as deep as possible. Their concern was Britain’s reputation in the financial markets. Last month the UK lost its Triple A rating with leading credit agency Moody’s Investors Services. Balls was right: austerity isn’t working.

Austerity or growth?
Moody’s cited ‘subdued growth’ as one of the reasons for the downgrading.

A major problem with austerity – and something Cameron and Osborne don’t seem to get - is that you can only cut so far. What happens when there is little or nothing left to cut? This is part of the problem faced by Ireland, Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Italy as they struggle to meet the stringent reductions in debt reduction demanded as a condition of bailout by the German-dominated European Union. Since a large part of the bailouts come from the German taxpayers, it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should attach conditions to them. But how far does it go? Will a number of European governments end up stealing their citizens’ private savings to finance debt, as the Cypriot government proposed doing until its parliament was ringed with angry savers ready to commit violence upon their MPs if they had approved the proposal…?

Some see the Cypriot government proposal as a test for how such a strategy might be received elsewhere in Europe!

Last year new French president François Hollande proved a keen advocate of economic growth, daring to challenge the German mantra of austerity. (Since the Germans tend to prudent spenders anyway and their juggernaut economy is said to be pulling back from a relatively minor slip in growth of 0.6% in the last quarter, the impact of an austerity programme on others is something they might find difficulty in appreciating.)

The problem is Hollande, the socialist, doesn’t really know how to stimulate growth. The French economy remains stalled.

Neither, it seems, does Ed Balls. Since 2010 he has championed such strategies as investment in infrastructure and housebuilding as stimuli for growth. Lately - and perhaps surprisingly! - Confederation of British Industries director John Cridland (2013a) has come to agree with him, calling for an investment of £1.25B to build 50,000 new affordable homes. After the Budget Cridland (2013b) castigated the Government for not doing enough on infrastructure.

The problem is that neither strategy in itself is a wealth generator - and it’s surprising, given his position, that Cridland doesn’t champion wealth-generating measures more vociferously. As he points out, investment in housing is a surefire way to kickstart the economy. It creates jobs, workers and their families are more likely to spend in the consumer society and affordable housing meets a huge social need. And certainly investment infrastructure is necessary if the economy is to grow, enabling people and goods to move around more easily. But neither strategy in itself will create sustainable growth.

Henley modelThe graphic above is adapted from the Henley Centre Model for Regional Competitiveness (2001). It shows clearly the relationship between the institutions of society and wealth generation through an export-driven economy. For sure, it’s a neat and overly-simplistic Functionalist model that addresses none of the social, moral and philosophical issues that a society faces such as distribution of wealth amongst its citizens. But, if a society in a late-Modern Capitalist world, doesn’t create wealth, then it is effectively dysfunctional. Road-building and house-building may create a trickle-down effect of people feeling more confident about spending which can have powerful short-term effect…but, in the long-term, like hairdressers, it is recirculating the same money within a closed economy.

For the institutions of society to be sustainable in the long-term, that society must earn as much as it spends. For it to grow wealthier in a sustainable manner, it must consistently earn more than it spends. In a chain of such economies - as shown in Marxist Critiques of Development - inevitably there are winners and there are losers - the poor and the exploited. But the morality of that is for a discussion on the nature of Capitalism. Until Capitalism is superseded as the dominant economic system in the world, the UK needs to ‘play the game’ which means generating wealth to support its people.

A deficit in thinking
The big problem for the UK in playing that game is the poor quality of its leadership. Cameron and Osborne seem to be dominated by the BLUE vMEME in thinking in that efficiency is the only way to manage the deficit. Growth, for the most part it seems, can be sacrificed on the ‘Altar of Austerity’.

That Moody’s disagree with Cameron and Osborne on the importance of growth clearly hasn’t undermined their determination to stick to Plan A: austerity. Perhaps the reports of a second agency, Fitch Ratings, being about to take away Britain’s AAA on their scoring might give them pause for thought. Though probably not!

The unfortunate thing is that their much-vaunted Tory predecessors understood the importance of growth. While Margaret Thatcher reined in public spending viciously - in the 1979 election campaign she famously said: “You cannot spend what you do not have!” - she also liberated and encouraged business to make money. Indeed, wealth creation might be said to have been her mantra! Thatcher, at least in her public persona, was dominated by ORANGE (with a dash of RED ruthlessness and power-lust). There was, of course, a truly-terrible social cost outside of the South-East to her policies and it may be that she made the UK over-dependent on the financial services sector - and that in itself was a factor in the internal crash of 2008-2009. However, in overall terms, Britain recovered from the near-bankruptcy of 1976 and was on its way to becoming a wealthy country again - policies Tony Blair clearly saw fit to continue initially after being elected in 1997.

Perhaps a better model for Cameron and Osborne would be Thatcher’s sometime-nemesis Michael Heseltine. He clearly agreed with Thatcher that Britain’s old industries were unsustainable in a changing world increasingly influenced by transnational corporations who would site their manufacturing operations in the cheapest labour source – see The New International Division of Labour. But he understood the crux of the Henley Model – that export is king in the world of buying and selling and so championed niche and specialist manufacturing, arguing that British design was amongst the best in the world. While doubt has been since been cast on just how effective some of his strategies (such as the DTI Enterprise Initiative) really were, there can be little doubt that Heseltine’s championing of industry and exporting enabled an element of British manufacturing to change, survive and prosper. If Cameron these days sometimes talk up manufacturing as playing a role in any growth that might occur, he has Heseltine to thank for that. While he may have had some very different beliefs to Thatcher about strategy, Helsetine clearly was driven by ORANGE, innovating against the odds to further British industry.

The paucity of quality thinking amongst the Tory strategists these days is shown clearly in Cameron’s delusion that the private sector would grow so fast it would give jobs to all the public sector employees made redundant in the cuts. According to David Blanchflower in March 2012, in the previous year 44,000 more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. In the 3 years of the Coalition Government, little has been done either to increase inward investment (from abroad) or to boost exports.

Cameron and Osborne’s BLUE strategies to cut public spending may be successful to a notable degree so far in cutting the requirement for public borrowing; but, in addition to doubts about how much further it is possible to cut, there is the ‘elephant in the room’ that hardly anybody is talking about and which the Cameron-Osborne tactics are not going to even scratch: the size of the National Debt. Both Moody’s and Fitch have expressed concern about UK debt. National Debt

As seen from the chart left, this was stable but not decreasing under Blair. However, it has grown considerably since Brown’s spike in public sector borrowing 2008-2009 and has continued to increase under Cameron. This, put simply, is because each year of deficit and the interest that goes with it increase the overall size of the debt - estimated in December 2012 to be around 89% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some commentators, such as MoneyWeek magazine, believe the size of the National Debt is simply unsustainable and that Britain going bust sometime in the next decade is inevitable. This is probably unlikely, given that other Western or ‘westernised’ are carrying far higher debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, Japan has a national debt of around 194% of GDP whilst that of Italy is more than 100%. The US national debt reached 100% of GDP in November 2011. In the aftermath of World War II, the British National Debt reached 180% of GDP.

What is clear, though is that, if the National Debt can’t be reduced in the short term, then British GDP has to increase.

The social cost of debt reduction
BLUE cut-back thinking on its own is simply not enough for the economic problems Britain faces. It requires at least ORANGE thinking. So, if Cameron and Osborne can’t manage that, they have to go.

There are certainly signs that a number of Tory MPS are profoundly dissatisfied with Cameron’s leadership. There is even talk of a leadership challenge prior to 2015. There will certainly be one if the Tories are unable to form a majority government the day after the election. While Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to have formed a reasonable working partnership, many Tory backbenchers hate the alliance with the Liberal Democrats. Their natural preference under pressure is to lurch to the right and try to appeal to voters on xenophobic issues such as immigration and the testy relationship with the EU – appeals that hit on PURPLE’s susceptibility to prejudice & discrimination against those not-of-our-tribe.

A slide down the Spiral is not, however, what the UK needs. Such slides on a macro-cultural level tend to lead to extremist groups gaining ground - eg: the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-fascists in Greece. In a country like the UK, where there are large Muslim populations, a slide down the Spiral may also lead to increased fundamentalism amongst such communities.

What the UK needs is at-least ORANGE thinking in economic issues. However, there needs to be thinking more complex than that if a real economic recovery, along the lines, Margaret Thatcher piloted, is not to produce the kind of huge social costs British society is still paying for more than some 30 years after Thatcher first started implementing her policies.

While ORANGE is well-suited to driving economic performance in a Capitalist global system, its workings need to be managed from a 2nd Tier perspective. This meta-thinking can anticipate the effects of economic and fiscal actions on communities and modify them and/or compensate for the unavoidable side effects. 2nd Tier overviewing is also necessary to keep ORANGE on the right tracks and prevent it deviating into the kind of loans and investments which led to the burst bubbles of 2008-2009.

Unfortunately there seems to be little sign of 2nd Tier thinking amongst our political leaders. Without it, regardless of which party is in power, the mess is likely to get worse, not better.

‘Britishness’ at the Regent’s College Summit

 community, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, regeneration, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  27 Responses »
Jun 302009
 

Down in a basement meeting room of the Holiday Inn Oxford Circus…that’s where the Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) was born on the afternoon of Friday 26 July 2009. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck, Jon Freeman (author of ‘God’s Ecology and the Dawkins Challenge’), Rachel Castagne, Lynne Sedgemore CBE,  Ian MacDonald of the Integral Centre,  the veteran activist and author Rosemary Wilkie and myself harmonising an intent – creating a spirit, if you will.  That intent is to build MeshWORK alliances to design natural solutions to local problems in the context of a globalised world.

The next 2 days, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th, saw CHE-UK host its first event, ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ at Regent’s College. Don, Rachel and Jon led the event and old HemsMESH colleague Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke flew in from Switzerland to lend his talents to a task-and-feedback session on the Sunday.  About 50 people joined us to get a feel for what the real issues are confronting the UK and what we might do about them.

The general consensus was that in the UK a lot of the positive influence of the BLUE vMEME has been diminished by the emergence of GREEN (a not-uncommon pattern in much of North America and Western Europe).  This weakening of BLUE has had a number of negative effects – ones especially noted were:-

  • the lack of discipline in our culture, particularly amongst young people – resulting in RED excesses such as binge drinking and violent rowdiness on our city centre streets at weekends
  • the collapse of effective regulation in our financial markets, resulting in toxic ORANGE taking the kind of foolish gambles on debt and investment which have brought the banking systems to their knees
  • the RED, thoughtless greed of many politicians milking the expenses system to and beyond its limits – with some clearly having committed fraud

The ‘expenses scandal’, it was generally agreed, served as the tipping point for so much anger amongst the general population that has been building up, suppressed and simmering, for so long.  The occupants of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the cradle of modern Democracy, are now perceived far and wide to be ‘on the take’ just like the officials of those corrupt regimes our government used to be so fond of criticising.  That only about a third of MPs have been exposed in this way and the actual sums involved are piddling in the grand scheme of things –  eg: National Debt estimated at £1.3 trillion!! – are beside the point.  As a kingdom, we are humiliated and in one hell of a mess.

As Lynne commented, people are now genuinely outraged.

A deeper malaise?
There was a recognition that there was a lot of variation in just how far the recession was affecting people in different parts of the country. Ali Gibson made the point that in leafy Buckinghamshire £200-£300 on a new handbag was still a ‘normal’ purchase while in a neighbouring health authority hospital waiting times were way below national targets due in part at least to lack of funding.

As a northerner I was keen to stress the ‘disappearance’ of much the traditional male working classes in the north of England, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands and the effect on the health of PURPLE and RED that was having in their communities. For many in those classes, the recession began in the 1980s and has continued more or less since. (See my previous Blog, ‘The Thatcherite Era is ended. Whither Britain?’, for more on that.)

But, interestingly, in our discussion groups the sense of an even deeper malaise began to emerge as we talked about what it mean to be British…the nature of the British identity. The source of that malaise, it was felt, was the loss of Empire. Britain through the16th-19th Centuries was an invader and a conqueror. With our Empire eventually stretching over a third of the habitable globe, much of the world’s story in that time was our story. There was belief in ourselves and the religions we espoused – all those Christian missionaries! – which fed a stream of great innovations, from the road building of Thomas Telford to George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the medical breakthroughs of Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner to the astounding engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A sense of: “We are British. We can do.”

As a trained historian very aware of the horrors of colonialism – knowing that many of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are rooted in the European boundaries which cut right through tribal territories and made artificial nations of unwilling tribal slices mixed with unwilling tribal slices – I found the thought that there could be any good in ‘Empire’ initially quite a challenge to my GREEN.

However, as Don pointed out, the rights and wrongs of what the colonialists did, in the context of our current discussion, were only relevant in that GREEN was still castigating us for the evils done. The question, then, is: does this castigation actually obscure the damage to our RED pride and BLUE nationalism by the loss of Empire…?

Add to that the fact that the once-mighty conquerors are increasingly looked upon as a liability by our military allies. Our army, having relied on American air support in Helmund province and still being unable to suppress the Taliban, American troops are now flooding in to do the job we can’t.

Discussion then raised the issue that, as an island nation, not invaded since 1066, do the recent waves of immigration constitute an invasion of sorts? Thus, the mighty invaders and creators of ‘Empire’ are now themselves diminished and invaded. For me, this was all a series of challenges that became ‘ah-ha moments’. I had previously tended to see racism and ethnic hatred as simply PURPLE’s rejection of those ‘not our tribe’ – especially when security (jobs) are threatened. But, for the British at least, is there also an element of invasion and loss of national pride involved?

What made these discussions particularly astonishing were that there were people in the room from the former Empire – Asians, West Indians, etc – whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been subjects of British rule and its many indignities. But nobody got upset. Nobody got overly-emotional. Nobody wanted to decry the Empire and rake over the ‘evil coals’. Everybody was completely focussed on the collective character of the British psyche, where it was now and why and what needed to be done to lead that British character to a new place.

These were truly 2nd Tier discussions that transcended personality and history. Truly, truly astonishing!

Of course, not everyone there was well-versed in Spiral Dynamics. But a couple of brief-but-potent presentations from Don gave everyone enough of a flavour to contribute to the discussions. Another pleasure of the weekend for me was seeing so many people get turned on to the power of the Spiral Dynamics model to explain human motivation.

Hope from the mess
In discussing the nature of the British character, we also identified many positives. We are and remain:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric – often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threat – eg: the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being rediscovered in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombs in London. (See Dave Lowe’s comment on the Blog ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’) Under pressure, the identity of the tribe expands to include all on our side.
  •  Humour-full – we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

These exercises  gave us the sense that there is still much Britain has to give the world; but, to do that, we have to sort out our current problems and believe in ourselves again. As Rosemary put it: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”

We need strong RED proud in the BLUE frame of responsibly  ’doing your duty’ as just the start of creating that new story.

But our new story has no place for the prejudices, discriminations and abuses that have sometimes sullied our past. One of the most interesting tales of the weekend was one with which Rachel effectively closed the summit. She had been to a folk festival recently. One of the performers, the traditional singing legend June Tabor, had asked the audience what it meant to be English. After some repartee and banter, Tabor answered her own question: “If you love this land, then you’re English.”

Of course, there is no single homogenous English identity. And there certainly isn’t a British one – just ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish! But there is a sense of being English…and there is a sense of being British, whichever of our 4 constituent countries you come from. And, using Tabor’s definition, if you’ve just arrived in this kingdom for the first time but you love this land, then you’re one of us.

At the end of the 2 days, we hadn’t come up with magic solutions. We didn’t have an agenda to present to Government. Those things will come in time; but we had made a start on serious work.

And there were a lot more of us at 5 PM Sunday than there were at 5 PM Friday. Welcome. Juliana. Welcome, Denise. Welcome, James. Welcome, Jon (Twigge). Welcome, Willa. Welcome, Ali. Welcome, Faheed. Welcome, Richard. Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome, Carragh. Welcome, Dave. Welcome, Julian. Welcome, Laura. Welcome, Eileen. Welcome, Shaun. And so on…and so on…and so on…and so on…..

There will be 4 more summits to follow on from this weekend and then there is the EuroConfab at Gatwick 23-25 October – the first time the Confab has been held in the UK. If you’ve a mind to understand and a heart that loves this land, then please join us!

[For a more formal description of the founding of CHE-UK, see: ‘From Rule Britannia to Cool Britannia to Integral Britannia’.]

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

 community, government, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  11 Responses »
Jun 062009
 

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this….

The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end.

Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of market economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

But, behind this apparent ‘miracle’ lay a country torn asunder geographically, socially and economically. The new wealth, built on technology and financial services, was concentrated primarily in London and south-eastern England. Most of the traditional ‘heavy’ manufacturing industries in the Midlands, northern England, the Scottish Lowlands and South Wales were allowed to die in the face of competition in the emerging global market. Some, such as mining, were deliberately dismantled as a means to break the power of the trades unions which had so undermined the economic viability of much of British industry in the 1970s.

Many still argue that Thatcher had little choice if she was to enable Britain to be competitive in the embryonic globalisation. I’m not much of an economist to argue that point and I can see the rationale behind much of what she did. (Hey, she made so much sense to me in Spring 1979, I voted for her!) But the social costs of her policies were horrific. The traditional working class, as emerged in this country since the Industrial Revolution, was largely disoriented and, to some extent, disenfranchised by the results of her policies.

The dissolution of a social class
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the traditional working class in Britain was mostly dominated by the PURPLE vMEME. Some of the attributes of PURPLE are its attachment to the land and its demarcation of kinship roles by age and gender. Thus, the male ‘breadwinner’ of the house with his wife in the mother/housekeeper role, with parents (usually hers) in the next street who were there for support (from advice to babysitting). The work done by the males was largely unskilled and manual in nature – so not much need for formal education beyond the basics. (Though schools, as the place where the young of the community learned these basics, were often treated very respectfully.) These working class communities were often centred socially around the pub or the working men’s club which many of the males would visit most nights and take the wife to (as a treat) on either a Friday or Saturday night.)

The RED vMEME, as a cultural entity, was relatively low profile except clearly manifest in the corner shopkeepers, the union radicals, the ward councillors and political activists and other community leaders. However, the RED of most men took pride in being the breadwinner for their families.

For sure, this is an incomplete picture and a stereotype – but it’s a stereotype that largely held true for millions of working class families from the end of World War II through into the early 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies allowed such communities to be devastated. With the traditional heavy industries in terminal decline and mass unemployment of unskilled males by the late 1980s, the very notion of the working class as it had been was in question. The RED self-esteem of those former male breadwinners was trashed, leaving many of them with nothing but nihilistic self-destruction in booze, cheap drugs and gambling their redundancy money and benefits to obliterate their misery, hopelessness and sense of uselessness.  Small wonder that the small former mining town of Grimethorpe was the first place in Britain you could buy a bag of heroin for £5! Small wonder that male small-time crime and the black market for short-fix cash-in-hand jobs have mushroomed!

What was left of British industry – the new light techonology-driven businesses – by the end of the 1980s tended to prefer low-waged part-time female workers. This resulted in many women holding down 2 or 3 such jobs. Paradoxically such determined enterprise was the making of a number of their daughters who saw hard work and initiative at school as a potential way out of their dire circumstances. With the sons modelling their fathers’ sense of ‘no future’, it’s perhaps one partial explanation of why the daughters of such communities have tended to do better at school than their sons over the past 15-20 years.

The ‘Shameless’ TV programme gives us an exaggerated version of such dysfunctional communities and the way they survive in spite of what society has done to them. What many in the affluent middle classes in the South East may not have realised is how true much of ‘Shameless’ was – and in how much of the rest of the country there were/are Shameless-style estates

As a member of the HemsMESH team working in the former mining villages in South East Wakefield in 1999-2000, I still remember the palpable sense of hopelessness on the streets. Working on projects on Hull’s mammoth Bransholme estate in the early 2000s, I was amazed initially at the poor take-up of train-to-work schemes available in other parts of the city or the surrounding parts of East Yorkshire. Then I realised that, in their heads they were still fishermen or factory workers or manual labourers, their PURPLE keeping them trapped in their traditional identities stuck on home turf. There might have been low-paid government training schemes galore; but nobody was working with the identities and values of these people imprisoned in their own minds.

In the early years of Tony Blair’s government especially, when it seemed the opportunities for more wealth for the middle classes might actually be endless, this underbelly of the dysfunctional remains of the traditional working class was largely ignored. Yet these communities were often in real poverty. The former steel towns and mining villages of South Yorkshire and the deserted docklands of Liverpool actually met European Union Objective 1 criteria – which meant they were amongst the poorest places in the EU which was then obligated to help them financially. Hull would have met Objective 1 criteria but for the affluent East Yorkshire towns surrounding it; ditto poverty-stricken south Leeds but for the wealthy financiers in north Leeds.

I’m not sure I can argue with Thatcher’s policies economically; but she either didn’t anticipate the huge social misery her government’s actions would lead to…that or she simply didn’t care.

And now the middle classes are fallen
While the increasingly large middle classes grew ever more affluent, the successive governments of Thatcher, John Major and Blair could get away with making token gestures to help the remains of the working class communities devastated by the loss of the traditional heavy industries.

But the bankers and financiers who took what, in retrospect, were clearly ridiculous risks in the interests of personal gain – those incredible 6 and 7 figure salaries and even bigger bonuses! – were even more Thatcher’s children than the ‘Shameless generation’ trapped on sink council estates.

ORANGE, shorn of BLUE regulation and understanding little of GREEN’s concerns beyond making the odd token gesture towards environmental issues, pursued personal wealth ever more relentlessly, recklessly and ruthlessly. And they have brought Capitalism to its knees. Banks bust or sitting on huge amounts of public funds to prevent them going bust but not daring to lend. Businesses going into liquidation in truckloads. House prices collapsed. And fortunes wiped out in repeated stock market crashes – all those ‘little people’ Thatcher talked into buying shares now without their retirement ‘nest eggs’ or nothing to fall back on to pay the mortgage now the jobs are gone.

In terms of the amount of money involved, the MPs’ expenses scandal is relative peanuts – but, for so many, it symbolises the personal-wealth-regardless-of-cost ethos of the Thatcher legacy. And it provides a focus for the anger of the middle classes either becoming economically disenfranchised like their working class brethren or potentially faced with it.

Now, it’s too big for the government to gloss over with train-to-work or back-to-work schemes. It’s now no longer a small  but significant disoriented minority in poverty. Now the entire country faces poverty!

Gordon Brown’s government has cushioned the country from the worst so far by a phenomenal level of borrowing. When it seems no one has any real idea how to resolve the global financial crisis, clearly no one has any idea how this country will pay back what it now owes. Even with a relatively buoyant economy, it would take several generations to get the National Debt back to where it was when Blair stepped down from government.

It’s a principle long ago established by Abraham Maslow (1943) that, under pressure, thinking reduces in complexity to tackle lower-level needs.

Thus, under pressure, with the survival of the little you’ve got threatened, dysfunctional PURPLE forms a survival harmonic with BEIGE – and PURPLE’s dislike of those who are ‘not of our tribe’ turns ugly. It goes from a latent fear to active hatred. Thus, the increase in electoral support for the British National Party, with its near-explicit racism. But xenophobia is not exclusive to the working classes. As ORANGE’s personal wealth programme stalls or fails completely, BLUE springs up to form a harmonic with PURPLE against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Thus, the United Kingdom Independence Party have been able to steal what should have been guaranteed votes for the Conservatives.

Expect more and more RED-led demagogues who will exploit PURPLE fears, feeding racism under the guise of nationalism. It’s in contexts like this that the extremes of politics – Fascism or Communism  - do well, as indeed do fundamentalist religions.

Whither Britain? – a call to intellectual arms
So Capitalism – or, at least, the unrestrained Thatcherite version of it – is finished. Bankers are now rated even more lowly than politicians, journalists and estate agents. The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s house earlier in the Spring was applauded by many. Don’t be too surprised if eventually a leading financier gets assassinated. An awfully lot of ‘little people’ have lost an awful lot of money due to the likes of Goodwin. Those with RED strong in their selfplex, particularly if they are of a Psychoticist temperament, will need someone to be avenged upon. (Of course, with the current media frenzy over expenses, it might well be a politician who cops for it!)

But what’s to replace Thatcherite Capitalism – and how will it work? No one seems to know. It appears we’re in uncharted waters.

And what happens to a debt-saddled Britain, with its disenfranchised poverty underbelly being added to every day, its economic rationale no longer viable and its leaders openly despised by a public increasingly ready to listen to the extremists? The bulk of our manufacturing industry was disappeared long ago and the replacement economic ‘fool’s gold’ of financial services has been shown to be just that.

Of course, the picture I have painted of our kingdom’s malaise is somewhat simplistic – what else could it be in such a short space? – but it does sum up a great deal of what we are faced with and how we were got into this awful mess.

So, what do we do? Whither Britain?

When the old ideas clearly aren’t going to work or are just going to make things worse, then it’s time for some, new fresh thinking.

Thankfully we have in London town 27-28 June 2009 Dr Don Beck, one of the foremost experts in the world on large-scale societal change. A veteran and partial architect of the early 1990s changes in South Africa which led to the dismantling of Apartheid, Dr Beck is currently working on a number of key  initiatives, not least the development of a Palestinian state sufficiently mature to  be a viable partner to Israel in the Middle East Peace Process. Along with a team of UK-based seasoned Spiral Dynamics practitioners (including myself), Don will seek to establish new opportunities for the UK at this critical juncture in our modern history, using some of the most advanced sociopsychological tools in the world.

Effectively this is a summit to find a way forward for our kingdom.

The 2-day sessions are open to anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of Spiral Dynamics and sociopsychology tools. What matters most is that you care about our planet and about our country, for the future of our children and developing a viable culture in which wealth and responsibility are balanced in the interests of all.

I truly hope you will be motivated to be there. The more voices we have and the more commitment, the more likely we are going to be able to make a telling difference.

To find out more about this critical workshop programme, click www.spiralworld.net/html/don_beck_event.html

Behaviour in schools: more needed than Steer proposes

 Africa, community, education, government, Psychology, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Feb 212009
 

So the government’s ‘behaviour tsar’, Sir Alan Steer, has now published the fourth and final part of his review into behaviour in schools in England. And Secretary of State Ed Balls has signalled that he will support Steer’s recommendations. Among these are the ideas that schools should club together to provide social workers for disruptive students and support groups for the parents of such students.

The first response of National Association of Headteachers general secretary Mick Brookes was to point out that 3/10 of teachers leave the profession due to student behaviour problems while NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates has criticised behaviour management training as being ‘inadequate’.

Clearly student behaviour is a major issue that the government is not tackling successfully.

My own experience in the 9 years I’ve been back (part-time) in teaching is that there has been a general collapse in standards of discipline right across the secondary sector and reaching deep into Key Stage 2. In many schools, classes below the topmost sets in Key Stages 3 and 4 are often little more than battle zones.

There is, of course, in the popular imagination, a mythical Ealing Films-style ‘golden age’ when young teenagers were only mildly pranksterish in their misdemeanours and primary school children were uniformly well-behaved ‘little darlings’. In reality, that mythical golden age never existed and researchers from David Hargreaves (1967) on have been fairly consistent in painting classrooms – especially secondary – as places where there is a significant difference between what the teacher is charged with accomplishing (ie: a learning environment) and what the ‘students’ will accept as relevant to their existence.

Beyond the recent lurid headlines – even in the ‘serious papers’ – of primary students being expelled for bringing knives to school, is student behaviour actually getting worse? Are things more problematic than they were in Hargreaves’ day? If union statistics on teachers citing behaviour problems as their principal reason for leaving the profession can trusted, then the answer is Yes. Things are actually going from bad to worse.

It needs to be stated that there are schools where the majority of students are well-behaved and motivated to learn. Healing on the outskirts of Grimsby and Frederick Gough in a lower middle class/upper working class district of Scunthorpe are just two schools I’ve taught in and been impressed with the behaviour and attitudes of students. However, even in Harrogate, the affluent middle-class town I have called home for the past 4 years, all the schools experience some degree of behaviour problems and students being temporarily (and sometimes permanently) excluded is not exactly uncommon.

What’s going wrong?
8 years ago I created ‘A Downward Spiral…’ as an analysis of what was going wrong in Britain’s classrooms. As an overall view, it stands the test of time extremely well. Nothing it has to say about the roots of bad behaviour amongst children and the effect that has on classroom discipline and performance has dated at all. That I can say that with confidence is an indicator of how much the government has failed to get to grips with problem behaviour amongst young people – in spite of all the money they have thrown at it.

Of course, ‘A Downward Spiral…’ deals with themes and makes generalisations. So individual circumstances and individual qualities such as temperament are not taken into account.. The big omission is the gender difference in behaviour – boys tending to have some degree or other of the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism (attributed by Hans J Eysenck (1976) to the effects of high levels of the male sex hormone, testosterone.). Of course, girls do behave badly and some develop strongly habituated patterns of bad behaviour. However, it is boys who cause the bulk of disruptive behaviour in schools – it tends to be boys populating the school isolation units and boys who get excluded more often than not.

In children going through puberty and beyond, the RED vMEME, usually after playing second fiddle to PURPLE throughout early childhood, comes into its own as the driver to assert self and move the individual towards independence from their parents and old family as a prelude to establishing their own, new family as part of the next generation.

However, RED’s desire to assert self can be a real problem for others attempting to inhibit that person’s self-expressive behaviour. If, in a boy, RED settles into a Psychoticist temperament and forms a RED-Psychoticism centre of gravity or ‘lock’, then the self-expression will be impulsive and compulsive. 12 and 13-year-old boys are often at a loss to explain cognitively – in any way that makes any kind of rational sense – why they thumped the child next to them or persisted in shouting out the answer despite the teacher demanding the standard hands-up-in-silence routine for answering questions. What they’re experiencing is the unholy alliance in their psyches of RED and Psychoticism. They are truly, in that moment, effectively out of control.

It’s also worth noting here that, the more pre-puberty PURPLE fails to get its safety-in-belonging needs met, the more RED will emerge in an unhealthy way, perceiving the world as a ‘jungle’ where no one is safe and the only the strongest and toughest survive. Thus, it’s no surprise that the first ‘knifers’ in a school often come from one-parent homes suffering poverty and deprivation. The meme gets modelled and spread and more and more knifers appear as emergent RED in other kids fastens onto the knife as a means of asserting power.

And, as a final factor in our all too brief analysis of what’s going wrong, we need to consider the values parents give their children about school – the memes they infect them with. Since, pre-puberty, parents are the primary socialisers of their children, it is hardly surprising that, if parents don’t have positive values about school and education, their children don’t.

What to do?
Sir Alan Steers has recommended social workers for unruly students and support groups for their parents. On the face of it, this sounds expensive, bureaucratic and unlikely to be very effective. In fact, it seems like more of the GREEN vMEME’s failed policy of trying to create understanding and consideration – from which insights will presumably lead to respect and co-operation. It usually doesn’t. How many ‘problem children’ already have social workers attached to them, with little positive effect…?

Steers’ GREEN might just be blinding him to reality. In an interview in the Guardian last September, he said: “The vast majority of children don’t arrive at school in the morning thinking: oh, good, I’m going to get into trouble.” No, some actually do because of the kudos it brings them from other ‘bad boys’ – Nicolas Emler (1984) called this ‘reputation management’; if they can’t get esteem from academic success, their RED will lead them down other routes to get it. Plenty more drift into disruptive behaviour via that potent mix of RED and Psychoticism. All it needs is a few minutes of boredom and the child next to them gets kicked or otherwise provoked – a move made without thought of consequences other than to relieve the brief tedium. And bad behaviour easily becomes habituated if it is rewarded by other students. (Research – eg: P R Constanzo & M E Shaw (1966), A Palmonari, M I Pomberri & E Kirchner (1989), T O Harris (1997) – has shown consistently that teenagers are socialised more by their peers than anyone else.)

Steers rightly places great emphasis on improving the quality of teaching and learning and engaging students with interesting and relevant topics. However, making topics interesting and relevant can be an almighty challenge given what the ‘system’ says they should learn and what is actually really relevant to the lives of many children.

A personal anecdote…

Several years ago when teaching History at a secondary school in a highly deprived area of a town where the main industry, fishing, was mostly gone, I was tasked with teaching Year 8s (13-year-olds) about the Reformation. How was this relevant to teenagers whose fathers, uncles and grandfathers had worked the trawlers until the fishing industry had all but collapsed…teenagers, most of whom had never left that part of town and fewer even who had ever been in church??? (I polled one class and found that only one student had ever seen a Bible!) Even an attempt at turning the story of Henry VIII’s wives into an Eastenders-style soap met with only very limited success. My proposal that we should develop a local history module around the town’s fishing history – which would allow the Year 8s to collect personal anecdotes from family members – thus feeding PURPLE’s love of the oral tradition – along with the more standard ways of doing History was rejected on the grounds that we could only teach what the National Curriculum specified.

Most of the students at that school didn’t want to be there – saw no value in it because their parents saw no value in it (memetic infection) – and tried not to be there. Truancy rates were extremely high and the school’s Education Welfare Officer was forever cajoling and then threatening parents, to force them to send their teenage children to school.

To return to Steers’ recommendations, support groups for parents generally have a better track record than social workers attached to problem children – especially where there is an element of training in parenting skills involved. The biggest hurdle seems to be actually getting the parents of problem children committed to a support group and sticking with it. Such parents often have social, emotional and economic problems themselves and are already known to the police and social services in their own right.

Sir Alan Steers is one of the most successful headteachers of his generation and there is much of merit in his report. Undoubtedly there are major roles for social workers and support groups in improving behaviour; but, much, much more is needed. When we consider just the brief, partial analysis I have offered it is obvious that social workers and support groups are like trying to use high quality, expensive sticking plaster on a massive, gaping wound. If applied correctly as part of a raft of other measures, it might help make a difference. And so it is with Steers’ reported proposals. On their own, they are nothing like enough.

8 years ago I created ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ as an action-oriented companion piece to ‘A Downward Spiral…’. Again there is nothing I would change…but there are a number of things I would add.

The strategies in ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ need to form the core of a full-scale MeshWORK.

The MeshWORK concept was delineated retrospectively by Dr Don Beck from his part in bringing Apartheid to an end in early-mid-1990s South Africa. By using what was shortly thereafter termed Spiral Dynamics, Beck helped turn the focus from colour of skin to who thought in what way. As was once put to me (perhaps over-optimistically?) by some white undergraduate students from the Boer-dominated Transvaal, Beck succeeded in taking racism out of South African politics…?!?!?

Put rather simplistically, Beck’s MeshWORKS concept involves bringing together all interested parties to look down the ‘spine of the Spiral’ at the relative health of each vMEME as a cultural operator – ie: at the relevant macro level – and then decide what to do about it in the interests of the Spiral as a whole.

The MeshWORK concept is at its most effective when designed through the 4Q/8L construct!

A MeshWORK will address the needs of each vMEME of all players in all contexts with regard to the health of the Spiral as a whole.

Making OFSTED useful
If Sir Alan Steers and his team really want to resolve the issue of disruptive students and the hellishly damaging impact they have on both teachers and other students, then they need to undertake a full MeshWORK process with all interested parties – teachers, police, social workers, parents and students, etc. They need to look at the health and well-being of each vMEME through the lens of each Quadrant and also how the vMEMES in each Quadrant relate to the vMEMES in the other Quadrants.

Strategies can then be developed to meet the needs of each vMEME in each Quadrant in a way that is conducive to the well-being of the Spiral as a whole.

And, because each school in each area will be unique, each school will need its own MeshWORK. Certainly, methodologies and strategies will be transferable between schools but the working assumption will need to be that every school requires a unique diagnosis and unique treatments.

Developing the mechanisms to put in place a MeshWORK for every school in the UK , obviously, would be very expensive. But, surely, the positive effect of learning how to inhibit the stimuli for negative behaviour and create positive classroom environments that will enable the vast majority of students to engage with the learning  process is a key part of the Government’s much vaunted Every Child Matters policy?

Plus, there are cost-savings to be gained in terms of reduded stress-induced absenteeism amongst teachers and reduced levels of crime and vandalism amongst children and teenagers.

Plus, the kind of network of MeshWORKS I’m proposing needn’t be that expensive. In OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services & Skills) there already exists a body and a framework for conducting a MeshWORK in every school in the country. After all, OSTED already have huge amounts of valuable data on every school and they are responsible (in terms of oversight) for ensuring that every educational institution and children’s service enables the children who use it to maximise their potential.

Of course, there would need to be some expansion of OFSTED’s remit beyind inspection and regulation to include support and guidance – but many OFSTED inspectors offer this informally anyway. The mindset of OFSTED would have to move way beyond BLUE to gain the holistic sense necessary to understand how learning really happens and what motivates people to learn. But the benefits to our young people – indeed, society as a whole – would far outweigh the costs of putting the mechanisms in place.

Are the Tories sitting on an Election Winner?

 education, Neurological Levels, regeneration, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jan 012005
 

The received wisdom of the political pundits is that 2005 will be an election year. It doesn’t need to be, of course. Constitutionally Tony Blair can go on to May 2006; but prime ministers often like to put themselves to the vote after 4 years – especially if they think they are ahead of the Opposition and/or they think things are likely to get worse.

The Labour Government looks tired and no longer so sure of itself – particularly in terms of  policies. (For example, House of Lords reform is bogged down and the fox hunting ban is a mess.) Blair is unpopular with much of his own party and much of the country – tainted by his unremitting support for the American war on/in Iraq. The media continue to speculate on just how sour relations are between Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown. And the Prime Minister’s unequivocal public support for Home Secretary David Blunkett right upto the morning of his forced resignation has once again brought into question his judgement.

With the Government seeming to stumble from one poor/unpopular decision to another, you would think Blair would want to hang on as long as possible in the hope of things somehow improving. That to go to the polls sooner rather than later would invite sure defeat.

But, like Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in the 1980s, the mess the Government is in is balanced off by there being no credible Opposition. For sure the Liberal Democrats are talking up a lot and behaving more like a serious political party than at any time since the end of the Second World War; but they still seem unfocussed and lacking policies that are both distinctive and populist. As for the Tories, Michael Howard may be a sharper debater in the House of Commons but he’s no more a leader who’s captured the popular imagination than his two predecessors, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.

So, bad as things may be for the Government, they could still be a lot worse. The pundits may be right and Blair might be tempted to go to the country a year early while there still is no sign of a credible opposition policy.

But, in fact, the Tories do have at least one credible policy and one that could do Labour a lot of damage were the Opposition to learn how to exploit it.

A Real Debate?
I realised this from listening to several broadcasts of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme back in November.

You might recall then-Education Secretary Charles Clarke caused quite a kerfuffle one morning by lambasting Prince Charles for views expressed in a supposedly-private memo. Clarke called the Prince “very old-fashioned and out of time” for writing about a “system which admits no failure”.  

HRH had expressed concern at the education system encouraging young people to aim at careers beyond their natural capability. The memo had gone on to say, “This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.”

The Minister’s unprecedented attack on the heir to the throne played on the Prince’s own theme by making an indirect reference to the desire to be king being an example of over-ambition.

The ensuing media furore culimated in HRH backing off and making conciliatory noises of an egalitarian nature and the Minister saying rather grandly he hoped that would end the matter.

Whether he had intended to create this furore in advance or he had merely seized opportunistically on the flow of the interview, Clarke’s comments and the media-fuelled public row they created benefitted him in 3 ways:-

a) They were so startling they actually distracted interviewer John Humphrys – a rare thing! – from the point he was pressing home;

b) They presented the Prince’s views in such a jaundiced way that the outcomes of any debate he was interested in generating were automatically prejudiced;

c) The media speculation about a potential consititutional mini-crisis effectively ensured the ‘new’ Tory education policies launched publicly the following week were given little in-depth coverage.

It was a piece of grand theatre on Clarke’s part that, to all intents and purposes, stifled real debate.

The Minister had gone on ‘Today’ to talk about the Government’s new policy of obliging schools to share out equally between them the unruly and disruptive students in their area – including those permanently excluded from one or more schools and those placed in secure units. An underpinning principle, it appeared from Clarke’s rhetoric, was that everyone should play a part in reintegrating these students into mainstream education.

The point John Hymphrys was pressing when the interview suddenly/miraculously/fortuitously diverted onto Prince Charles’ memo was that the ‘Middle England’ voters Labour needed to retain to win a third term would hardly be impressed with this policy. Competing with each other to buy houses – often at grossly-inflated prices - in the catchement areas of the best-performing schools, Humphrys contended that these voters would be hugely disappointed at Government policy dumping highly-disruptive pupils into these best-performing schools and causing mayhem.

Integrated SocioPsychcology Perspectives
In Spiral Dynamics terms, Clarke’s policy of everyone playing their part in giving equal/ mainstream opportunity to the highly-disruptive element is rooted in GREEN thinking – both in the desire to benefit the disadvantaged element and in the concept that everyone should take a share of the pain of doing that.

What Humphrys was identifying effectively was that this egalitarian dream would not sit well with the blue/ORANGE thinking of the aspirational meritocrats trying to get the best education money could buy for their offspring.

It was a classic major vMEMETIC clash Clarke ducked out of via his diversion.

The Conservative Party’s ‘new’  education policy launched the following week and largely lost in the Charles vs Charles furore was much closer to the values of Middle England.

According to Michael Howard and Shadow Education Secretary Tim Collins, a Tory Government would enhance a school’s ability to pluck unruly pupils out of classrooms and exclude them permanently, if necessary – with the independent appeals panels often blamed for overturning permanent exclusions being abolished.

Howard said: “How can the majority of pupils, who want to learn and get on, do so if they are disrupted by one or two unruly yobs their teachers are powerless to discipline or expel? School discipline is not some optional extra. It is the starting point. If our children are to get the decent education they deserve – and our country is to have the skilled workforce it so desperately needs – proper discipline in our schools is essential. Children learn best in a safe, secure and structured environment. They cannot learn in classes where loutish behaviour and disrespect for others are the norm.”

For once the Tories have a policy that addresses the needs of several vMEMES at once. Not only would it protect the achievement-oriented classroom environment  BLUE and ORANGE relish but, in its emphasis on removing the threatening and potentially dangerous, it would meet PURPLE safety needs and thus have an appeal to many in the traditional working classes.

Moreover, the Conservatives wouldn’t just abandon the delinquents. They say they would fund the 24,000 most disruptive students going into ’Turnaround Schools’ where discipline would be strict and they would face a curriculum based on reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as instruction in social behaviour and civic values. These students would be allowed back into mainstream education when they were certificated as having reached a minimum level of both skills and behaviour.

So it would appear their strategy would also facilitate GREEN’S need to help the disadvantaged.

(This element of the Tories’ education policy is not really ‘new’ but dates back to at least William Hague’s time when the Turnaround Schools were to be dubbed ‘Progress Centres’.)

Some people might consider the sheer scope of the Conservatives’ policy to be 2nd Tier. However, to be truly a 2nd Tier policy, it would need to link in with addressing the environmental factors which engender the development of such problematic youngsters – eg: parenting, neighbourhoods, employment prospects, etc. The Neurological Levels model shows us that Identity and Values & Beliefs – and, by implication, the vMEMES that shape them will adapt in relation to the Environment (Life Conditions).

There is also the question of financing the Turnaround Schools. They will be expensive. Indeed, it may well take some real 2nd Tier thinking to persuade BLUE and ORANGE to fund the re-socialisation of delinquents!

When I first entered the workplace in the early 1970s, a middle class boy from a fairly-protected environment, with my late-hippie-era GREEN values of equality and tolerance, what used to pass as the manual working class was a real shock to me. I found it hard to equate the racism and sexism I found to be pretty much the norm with the values preached by the Labour Party that claimed to represent them.

Years later, through my training in Spiral Dynamics, I came to see that traditionally there were two distinct strands running through Labour’s politics.

One was the GREEN of the intellectuals – students, lawyers, teachers, etc – who colonised much of the Labour leadership. The other was the PURPLE of the tribes – working class communities and shopfloor unions – and their leaders. These were often working class people whose self-expressive RED had driven them to become union stewards and local ward councillors.

These two strands wove together into an uneasy alliance, bound together by their mutual hatred of the class capitalism produced by BLUE and ORANGE thinking – and the Conservative Party which represented them.

However, as ORANGE technology and the spread of its globalist meme virus has changed the economic realities of the world we live in, including an 18-year reign of Tory governments and the end of the Communist fantasy, so the manufacturing base of this country has declined significantly, reducing the influence of the working class and their largely PURPLE values.

To end its isolation in the political wilderness, Labour had to acknowledge the new realities and, in the person of Tony Blair at least, adopt BLUE/ORANGE values. Thus, the vMEMETIC roots of the ‘Old vs New’ conflict which is yet a further twist in Labour’s multiple dichotomies.

That twist, however, stole much of the Tories’ natural constituency from them and left them to drift into an ever more narrow-minded extreme right direction.

Judging from the multiple vMEME education policy now on display, however,some Conservatives have been doing some pretty ‘big big-picture thinking’.

Meanwhile Charles Clarke’s education policy – at least on school discipline issues – looks decidedly Old Labour. Will that mistrustful alliance of GREEN with PURPLE and RED yet vanquish the BLUE-ORANGE interloper memes? (Many do suspect that the New Labour Project – at least as we know it – will indeed evaporate with Tony Blair’s eventual departure.)

If Labour does succumb to more Old Labour memes and the Tories can come up with more policies that are as multi-vMEMEd as the education one, then Labour may yet be denied its unprecedented third term in office.

But the Biggest Big Picture Issue is…
Prince Charles may indeed be where he is through birth and heritage. He may indeed, as many have suggested, not be the ‘brightest button’ on the planet. He is undoubtedly abysmal at managing his public image!

But for years this King-in-seemingly-endless-waiting has studied some of the world’s greatest thinkers and used his influence to ask questions that the standard-issue politicians, with their 5-year Parliamentary seat life and their buy-me-and-get-these-certainties soundbites, often don’t ask.

So, if the Tories have managed a Big Picture multi-vMEME education policy – and let’s hope there is more where that came from! – then Charles is asking the really Big Picture questions.

The questions he asks are often concerned with the paradoxes we face in trying to determine what kind of society we want to be and how we accommodate our ever-growing diversities.

There is nothing in what I have read of Charles’ speeches and/or writings that hints at any desire to inhibit opportunity in this country – and, as his defenders have pointed out, his Prince’s Trust operations represent some of the most potent work amongst the disadvantaged in this country.

Of course, we can’t pretend that Charles is an egalitarian – so real GREEN thinking will always have a problem with who he is – but he does seem to have a genuine passion for our country being a society which better serves the needs of its diverse citizenry.

So he doesn’t seek to inhibit ambition but rails against a one-size-fits-all education system and suggests we need a sytem – or systems? – which will equip as many as possible to make their way through life as best they can with what they have in terms of natural abilities.

Certainly not egalitarian. But hardly classist either.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to declare Charles a 2nd Tier thinker but I can understand why people like Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck are so keen to talk to him.

A Tale of 2 Councils…and the real challenge facing Simone Butterworth and Jim Brooks

 education, regeneration, Spiral Dynamics  4 Responses »
Oct 212002
 

The county of North Lincolnshire and my home town of Hull are virtually neighbours. Just 5 miles of the A63 through the East Riding of Yorkshire and a mile or so of the Humber Bridge separate them.

North Lincolnshire Council has been awarded Beacon Council status. Following a damning Audit Commission report, Kingston Upon Hull City Council is under serious threat of some form of central government intervention unless, by December 2002, it can show demonstrable progress against its remedial Action Plan.

Why such different scenarios for two local authorities geographically so close?

Systemic Thinking?
Nothing symbolises the differences between the two councils more than the critical field of Education.

For it is its strategies in Education that have seen North Lincolnshire achieving Beacon status in two consecutive years. (Although the Beacon award was specifically for Education, to achieve the award, the Council per se has to be perceived as a high-performing local authority.) By comparison Hull has been bottom of the GCSE league tables for 4 years out of the past 5; the year it wasn’t bottom, it ws next to bottom.

There are those in Hull who look enviously at the semi-affluent farming communities around Scunthorpe. They proclaim that, if only Hull could take in those semi-affluent, middle-class dominated villages of the East Riding on the city borders – Cottingham, Willerby, Anlaby – then the increased weight of more gifted pupils with more supportive parents would put Hull on more of an equal footing. Gleefully, they point out that Thomas Sumpter in urban Scunthorpe is just as troubled a school as Andrew Marvell, David Lister or Sir Henry Cooper in Hull. However, Fredrick Gough in urban Scunthorpe is a fairly-successful school in spite of its difficulties – just as Malet Lambert in Hull is. Demographics obviously do play a part; but they don’t provide a complete explanation.

Let me throw a slightly-different light on this. North Lincolnshire has more varied groupings of population types than Hull, requiring a wider range of strategies. Perhaps the Leadership and the Senior Management at North Lincolnshire are better at understanding the varying needs of their constitutents?

I recently conducted a Spiral Dynamics Organisation Culture Survey within the Community Investment Team at North Lincolnshire. (Click here to view the case study resulting from that project.) The BLUE procedural thinking one usually expects to find in councils was, of course, there in abundance. However, I was totally taken aback by the sheer amount of YELLOW (systemic, integral, flexible) thinking ascribed by members of the CIT to the Leadership of the Council.

As strong as YELLOW was, RED demagogusih/power-god thinking was perceived as very low. RED is often rampant in local authorities, particularly among elected representatives – and the bullying culture and financial short-sightedness Hull is accused of are symptomatic of excessive RED.

Of course, the Spiral Dynamics survey in North Lincolnshire was carried out on a very small sample and may not be truly representative. Nevertheless, middle management of a key department considering their local authority to be led by a high degree of systemic, integral thinking at a time that authority is awarded Beacon status does invite a cause & effect analysis.

And what of Hull…?
Hull, of course, has a new council. After decades of Labour rule, the people of Hull threw them out in May 2002 and a new Liberal Democrat-led Council somewhat nervously took its place in the Guildhall’s corridors of power.

New Council Leader Simone Butterworth has told me that she appreciates the criticality of having a values-based approach (such as that required for a MeshWORK). And there does seem to be something going on at the Council in terms of a values shift, reflected in the appointment of Jim Brooks – with the private sector-sounding title of ‘Managing Director’.  Previously his position carried the more traditional title of ‘Chief Executive’.

In the media – and especially over Education – Councillor Butterworth has made a number of statements to the effect that parts of the Council need to take a more private sector goal-oriented approach. Is Simone attempting to move the Council away from RED power games and beyond BLUE bureaucracy to a more ORANGE achievement-oriented culture?

Elsewhere some of the signs are not so good. The media reports of enraged parents and pupils protesting at the gates against the proposed closure of Kinloss Primary School in the Bransholme estate look like a replay of the debacle last year at nearby Coleford Primary. (This time let’s hope the Deputy Director of Learning doesn’t run a protesting teenager’s foot over while trying to escape the mob!)

Have they learned nothing?

Of course, Hull Council has to reduce the number of surplus school desks – just as it has to do something about surplus housing stock. These are pre-conditions to avoiding central government intervention in 2003. It may be that closing Kinloss really is the least harmful option.

But how the Council goes about persuading its disgruntled constituents of the need for action is a different matter. It would appear that little or nothing has been learned from Coleford or, for that matter, the protests over the closure of the Orchard Park estate’s Shaw Park Primary last Summer.

The ‘so far-so good’ merger of the Danepark and Court Park primaries on Orchard Park – where Spiral Dynamics was used to look at how to meet all the stakeholder needs and expectations – shows that rationalisation processes need not always be that painful. (Click here to view a case study of the merger.)

So, while the change in administration at the Guildhall seems to hold out the promise of some new ideas, in at least one key area little seems to have changed.

The Real Challenge…
Of course, just how much YELLOW-level leadership there really is at North Lincolnshire is highly debatable. That there is perceived to be any, though is quite remarkable.

Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck and Chris Cowan have each expressed concern at the serious lack of YELLOW/2nd Tier leadership amongst our politicians. (And it was this concern that led Don to stage the October 2002 Integral Leadership Conference in London.)

If Simone Butterworth and Jim Brooks really want the Council to take the lead in breaking Hull out of its descent into deprivation, under-attainment, under-performance and general disillusionment, then they have to recognise that developing an ORANGE achievement culture in the Council itself is only part of the picture.

They have to develop the capacity to understand all levels and their needs and to create strategies which take into account the needs at all levels yet serve the good of the whole. Only a MeshWORK approach – whether that particular appellation is used or not – can do that.

The effective disgracing of the previous administration and the pressure from central government for reform gives Butterworth and Brooks a unique opportunity to tear away those Council strategies and units which don’t work – on the basis that they are so bad they can’t be salvaged – and to bring in new ideas and new constructs. The opportunity is there to break the mould and become a truly radical, transforming, whole system local authority.

Let’s hope they use this opportunity this way. Otherwise Hull is likely to spend many more years bumping along the bottom.

Of Cogs & Spirals…

 NLP, regeneration, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Aug 152001
 

Written by DAVID BURNBY

I first met David Burnby of Common Purpose when he came on the second of my Introduction to Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of NLP courses June-July 2001. David was so enamoured of the material that I asked him to contribute something for my embryonic Blog. The provocative piece that follows is what he wrote for me.

 

Hull is a great place! The quality of life is high, the folk are friendly, the pace is easy. It’s an attractive city with much to offer. Yet ask someone outside of Hull what they think of the City, what image they have of the place, and you’ll probably get a resounding ‘don’t know’ or something about fish (actually, a very small part of the local economy). Unless of course they’ve stayed here a while, in which case you’ll probably get a very different story – a very large number of Hull students for example, fall in love with the place and stay here.

Does it matter if we have a bad image – or no image at all? Yes it does. Because like any other City, Hull needs to attract inward investment, skilled and talented people, tourists: and the people of Hull need to feel good about their own city and spread the word. Yet Hull was not good at marketing itself. The branding was confused based on a variety of different logos, strap lines, even names (the City appears on some maps as ‘Kingston upon Hull’ and others as just plain ‘Hull’).

About four years ago, spurred on by the then Bishop of Hull, the Right Reverend James Jones (now Bishop of Liverpool), a group of business people bought into the future of the City by becoming ‘Bond Holders’. They invested money in buying the services of one of the country’s leading image-makers – Wolff Olins. Their consultants devised an image enhancement strategy for the City and a new branding. Based on the theme of ‘Pioneering’ (for which Hull can lay claim to much), a new logo for the City was launched which became known locally as ‘the cog’. Each ‘tooth’ on the ‘cog’ represents five ways in which Hull pioneers: Discovering, Innovating, Leading, Challenging, Creating.

As a logo, it works well. It is clean, reproduces well, lends itself to use in a variety of formats and, outside of Hull, was well received. But internally – it was a disaster. By and large, Hull people hated it. Quite why so many people felt quite so strongly about it defied logic. They criticised the using the name of the City in lower case saying it was a bad example of poor grammar! They said the ‘cog’ was old fashioned, meaningless, even insulting! They felt Hull’ s traditional coat of arms, the three coronets, was being undermined. Even flower beds depicting the new logo in the city centre were trampled down, feelings ran so high. The Letters pages of the Hull Daily Mail were saturated with abuse and derision.

As a supporter of the image enhancement strategy, I was asked to chair a group of people trying to achieve a greater buy-in to the image enhancement process. Before I could do that effectively, I needed to try and understand just why people were so dead against such a seemingly innocuous branding. Which coincided very nicely with discovering Spiral Dynamics. On Keith Rice’s second series of workshops, I used the issue as my case study.

There were already some explanations about why the cog was received so badly. “People don’t understand branding” was a favourite. “Once it’s explained what it’s all about, they’ll come around.” Maybe; but the Spiral Dynamics model helped me realise there was more to it than that. Not least because for many Hull people, the basic elements of the Spiral are not met. People will not feel positive about their city when they live in sub-standard housing, when they feel unsafe in their own homes, when they are constantly reminded about how their children are failing in school and when traditional jobs and livelihoods have vanished. All of that, I can’t change.

Yet I know that despite the many challenges Hull faces, we are far ahead of much of the country. Our schools are full of brilliant examples of achievement against the odds (even though it is not reflected in the league tables). We have a well developed and active community sector. The City’s regeneration strategy is starting to take effect. The City is steeped in examples of good practice, of community entrepreneurs succeeding against the odds. So there’s much to celebrate.

Many people in Hull operate in PURPLE – a strong sense of belonging which, in a changing world, is being threatened. People crave for the security of the tribe – their local community, often bound by history and culture. This is represented by icons in the City – notably the Lord Line building on St Andrews Quay. It was the head office of one the biggest trawler owners in the city and, in many ways, local people could be justified in seeing it as a representation of how trawler crews were mistreated by the owners, denied employment rights, a symbol of tragedy when a ship was lost.

But no, the weight of the campaign to save that decrepit and crumbling building by the old fishing communities has frustrated developers for ten years. It still remains an eye sore on Hull’s major approach road. Because it’s almost the last icon people have left. Telling people locked into PURPLE that their heritage is dead and gone, “you have to wake up to the NEW Hull” is a doomed strategy. You simply cannot trample over people’s heritage in that way. People will not hear that fish is smelly, unappealing, the past. Because that’s too scary. So, the new logo becomes a symbol of exclusion – a new Hull that has scant regard for the past, that people do not relate to and feel deeply suspicious of.

So the strategy has to start in PURPLE, not ORANGE. We have to help people celebrate their role in their communities, focus on the positive, highlight how successful people are in their new tribes. (The local authority perhaps did not expect the strength of opposition from tenants they would encounter when proposing demolition of the hated high rise flats on Orchard Park Estate). How? By bringing together people in an environment in which they feel safe, by helping them feel part of the ‘New’ Hull. By demonstrating how an image enhancement campaign can improve the quality of life, by acknowledging the present whilst still respecting the past. Then we can start to get the emotional buy-in to the process.

And the logo will become what it is. A marketing tool and, in the scheme of things, an almost irrelevance.