Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Middle East, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Jan 272012
 

Frank Wuterich arriving at court. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

This Tuesday past (24 January), Lieutenant Colonel David Jones passed judgement on Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich for ‘dereliction of duty’. Normally, the maximum penalty open to an American military judge for this conviction would be a 3-month jail sentence, 2/3 forfeiture of pay and a demotion to the rank of private. Jones did not sentence Wuterich to jail. He did dock his pay but did not cut it by the maximum permitted 2/3 as the divorced father is solely responsible for the upkeep of his 3 daughters. He did demote Wuterich to the rank of private.

Jones’ sentencing of Wuterich would appear to have finally brought the long-running ‘Haditha Massacre’ case to an end in the military legal system. However, in the way he and the American military prosecutors have done this, they may well have sentenced to death hundreds of American soldiers and many more civilians of various nationalities.

From the evidence presented by prosecutors, Wuterich is directly responsible for the deaths of 9 innocent Iraqi civilians and indirectly responsible for the deaths of 15 others killed by the men in his command.

There is no doubt Wuterich is responsible for the 24 deaths. According to Al Jazeeera TV (2012), military spokesperson Joe Koppell said: “Staff Sergeant Wuterich accepted responsibility … and agreed and admits that he gave a verbal order to shoot first, ask questions later, or don’t hesitate to shoot, and words to that effect.” The victims of Wuterich’s orders included 10 women and children killed at point-blank range. 6 people were killed in one house, most shot in the head, including women and children huddled in a bedroom. An elderly man in a wheelchair was another fatality.

The original charge against Wuterich was murder which was then reduced to 9 counts of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. The American military prosecutors this week allowed Wuterich to enter a plea of guilty to the lesser charge of dereliction of duty. As Jones found out, when passing sentence, under the terms of the plea bargain authorised by Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, he was not able to jail Wuterich.

Of the men under Wuterich’s command at Haditha, one was acquitted and the cases against the others were dropped on legal technicalities.

The relatively small amount of attention paid in the Western media to the Wuterich verdict and sentencing indicates a lack of appreciation of how it will be perceived in non-western cultures. The headline playing out across the Muslim world will be something like: ’24 Iraqi lives are not even worth 3 months in prison’.

Ali Badr, a Haditha resident and relative of one of the victims, called Wuterich’s sentence “an insult to all Iraqis” and “solid proof that the Americans don’t respect human rights” (Al Jazeera, 2012). Awis Fahmi Hussein, who survived Haditha after being shot in the back, told the Associated Press’ Julie Watson (2012): “I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair.”

According the Los Angeles Times Tony Perry (2012), Waldhauser will offer no public explanation of his decision to accept the plea bargain and stipulate that Wuterich receive no jail time.

To add insult to injury, the convicted criminal keeps his job and, at some time in the future, may again be in a position where he has innocent civilians in the sights of his automatic rifle.

For the likes of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamist groups, the farce of Wuterich’s trial is yet more proof that Muslim lives are nothing like as important as American lives. It’s more justification for the view that Muslims are oppressed by the Americans and their infidel allies – which makes it another rallying point for previously-uninvolved Muslims to come to the defence of their brothers, as indeed the Qur’an (Sura 2:191, 193) instructs them to. Those who are deeply religious and with the BLUE vMEME dominating in their selfplexes may feel compelled to do their duty if fed the appropriate provocative material from radical imams.

Lieutenant Colonel Jones and the Lieutenant General Waldhauser have given al-Qaeda a wonderful cause for a recruitment drive. Which is why Jones may well have sentenced more American soldiers and innocent civilians to death.

The ‘Fog of War’ and the ‘Animal in Man’
The prosecutors argued that, on the day of the killings in November 2005, Wuterich lost control after seeing a friend blown apart by a bomb, before leading the soldiers under his command on a murderous rampage. His defence said he did the best he could in the ‘fog of war’ and that his squad truly believed they were on a search for insurgents. However, Wuterich’s former squad members testified during the hearings that they did not receive any incoming gunfire nor find any weapons at the scene of the killings.

A marine with dead bodies at Haditha - thought to have been taken with another marine's phone.

 

Wuterich told the court: “When my marines and I cleared those houses that day, I responded to what I perceived as a threat, and my intention was to eliminate that threat in order to keep the rest of my marines alive. So when I told my team to shoot first and ask questions later, the intent wasn’t that they would shoot civilians, it was that they would not hesitate in the face of the enemy.”

His assertion that “…I never fired my weapon at any women or children that day” was contradicted by a former squad mate who said he joined Wuterich in firing in a dark back bedroom where a woman and children were killed.

It appears, essentially, that Wuterich led his men on a brutal murderous rampage against innocent civilians because one of their own had been killed in front of their eyes.

Hot-blooded revenge in a state of, fright shock and high physical arousal…?

It would be far from the first time in recent history that atrocities and massacres have been committed by soldiers in a war context. And while Iraq in 2005 was far from being a full-scale war, American troops were fighting a ruthless and brutal insurgency that was killing and wounding men from their ranks on an unpredictable but scarily frequent basis.

I’ve talked before about contexts such as war which release the ‘animal in man’ – most notably in ‘Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq’. In terms of Spiral Dynamics (Don Beck & Chris Cowan, 1996) this is the RED vMEME doing what it wants in that moment of time without constraint or thought of consequences. In his Psychoanalytic Theory Sigmund Freud (1920) would see Haditha as the Thanatos element of the Id unleashed to fulfil its death instinct. Don Beck (2002) has cautioned that countries going to war should prepare their populations back home for stories of their troops committing atrocities.

What about the aftermath?
If, then, atrocities such as Haditha are inevitable from time to time – no matter how much we try to minimise their likelihood – questions then come as to how we deal with survivors, relatives and perpetrators in the aftermath.

If we accept that atrocities will happen in contexts  such as war, when traumatised soldiers get carried away temporarily in their bloodlust, then it can be argued that reducing the charges against Wuterich from murder to involuntary manslaughter is appropriate.

After the shootings, Wuterich clearly knew he and his men had done wrong. (The BLUE vMEME – Freud’s Superego – kicking back in.) The sergeant lied to his commanding officers by stating that 15 of the dead Iraqi civilians were killed in the same explosion that led to the incident. Few outside of the immediate scene knew about the killings and the American military first attempted to downplay the killings until a local human rights activist went public with video footage of the aftermath. A subsequent investigation by Time suggested that most of the dead were shot by Marines – and in March 2006 a criminal investigation was begun.

With regards to the survivors and the relatives, should the American military pay compensation? As yet, there is no indication that this will happen. The American military does not routinely pay compensation for foreign nationals innocently killed or injured in its operations in their country. However, it is possible for survivors and relatives to pursue compensation claims through the American courts – assuming, of course, that they could muster the considerable financial resources required to do this!

This,and the fact that Wuterich will not serve even a day in prison following his sentencing, really does appear to show that the Americans do attribute lesser value to Iraqi lives than American lives. (No one who has been convicted of killing Americans walks free from an American court.

Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (197 ) Social Identity Theory – see Prejudice & Discrimination – offers a powerful explanation for this discrimination (which is racism in all but name). Simply by categorising ourselves into ‘us’ (American liberators) and ‘them’ (Iraqi Muslims) – we end up absorbing the norms and values of our in-group and stereotyping and demeaning their out-group in the worst possible way. Thus, out-group Iraqi lives are worth nothing like as much as American lives.

It is, of course, the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalism which is behind this not-of-our-tribe discrimination. It’s also how, in part at least, the Nazis were able to manipulate the German people (‘us’) into nationwide complicity in the persecution of the Jews (‘them’).

If the Americans want to avoid being seen as hypocritical, partial, tribalist and racist, then they need to rethink substantially the way they deal with the aftermath of atrocities like Haditha.

The difference between war and counter-insurgency
Before we leave this brief study of the tragedy of Haditha, it’s worth considering the kind of situation those American troops found themselves in.

They were combat troops trained for straight forward battle but tasked to take on insurgents using guerrilla and terrorist tactics in a crowded, residential areas. From the British Army in Malaya in the 1950s, through American troops in the South Vietnamese cities in the 1970s and Russian troops in Afghan villages in the 1980s, the use of regular battle troops in such neo-policing operations has a bad history. Atrocity, murder, torture, rape and the widescale alienation of civilian populations have tended to characterise such operations. Again, it’s the PURPLE vMEME’s tribalist discrimination at work; but the more different ethnically and racially the civilian population have been from the soldiers, the more the soldiers have tended to abuse them.

From an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, I would argue that a different time of man is needed for urban counter-terrorist operations than for an outright battle. If we use Hans Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament construct, then someone high in Psychoticism is more likely to make the kind of soldier needed for a battle. So compulsive and impulsive they are effectively fearless is very much what’s desirable. Ruthless brutality towards the enemy is also quite welcome.

Hunting out insurgents hiding amongst a civilian population is a very different game to slaughtering your enemy on the battlefield and requires a different sort of mindset. Yes, the soldier still needs to be lightning quick in their reflexes but the ability to slow yourself for that vital second or two under extreme provocation, such as the bomb blast at Haditha, is essential for successful interactions with the often equally-terrified civilians. Self-restraint is not a trait of Psychoticism; so men high on that temperamental dimension are not the right kind of people for neo-policing operations. When RED wants revenge, as it did in Wuterich, then it’s much more difficult, if not impossible, for BLUE to restrain it if the person is high in Psychoticism.

Of course, there are other factors which predicate the inhibiting or disinhibiting of behaviour. But, if we can at least get the right kind of soldier temperamentally suited to the task at hand, then we are more likely to minimise the risk of massacring of civilians in counter-terrorism operations.

While, unfortunately, there will still undoubtedly be outright battles in wars between countries in the decades and centuries to come, the guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist element of warfare has increased substantially since the end of World War II. Military planners, in who they recruit and how they train those recruits, need to have more diverse resources to deploy to different situations.

The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

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Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

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Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

‘Liberal Conservatives’: new politics?

 Afghanistan, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
May 142010
 

The first day of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition we had Nick & Dave: the Love-In in the Rose Garden which more than a few commentators likened to a wedding, such was the bonhomie and adoring gazes between the principals. Yesterday we had Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ voice of sensible moderation, and William Hague, the conservative of the Conservatives, sharing the walk along Downing Street to David Cameron’s first cabinet meeting. Not to mention the bizarre spectacle of Lib Dem anti-nuclear spokesperson Chris Huhne taking charge of implementing the Tories’ plans to build more nuclear power stations! Today, of course, Cameron’s at war with a number of his own backbenchers over the intention to fix the level at which Parliament can be dissolved prematurely at a vote of 55% of the House of Commons (up from a simple majority of 51% and making it that much more to get rid of them). At least the Lib Dems are only being berated for this ‘stitch up’ by members of another party (Labour)!

Undoubtedly the week since the general election results were declared has been one of the most interesting in modern British politics!

The 55% no-confidence level stitch-up is, in fact, a key plank in the Tory/Lib-Dem agreement which, theoretically, ties the 2 parties to each other for the to-be-fixed 5-year life of this Parliament. This straightjacket, it is claimed, will give us the stable government we clearly need to steady the markets and to start to tackle the huge problems Britain faces.

But the story of this historic coalition – the first since the Second World War and the first time Liberals have had seats in a non-wartime cabinet since 1922 – may be in trouble even before it has begun. Not only are there very noisy grumblings about the ‘unconstitutional’ 55% but grassroots Lib-Dem activists are mounting a campaign to force Nick Clegg to put the coalition agreement to a full vote of the party membership. Meanwhile a number of Tory MPs have said they will campaign outrightly against the Lib-Dem-driven proposal for electoral reform once the legislation for the referendum is pushed through.

A number of seasoned political commentators are also far from convinced. Eg: the venerable Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail (12 May), says: “Nick Clegg has climbed into bed with the Tories, whom most of his supporters hate, for a political price that is more than a pittance, but scarcely worth the price of their souls. More than a few Tories, in their turn, are dismayed that David Cameron has made a deal with a party of hookers.” He goes on to describe the coalition as: “…a pantomime horse doomed to fail”.

Of course, putting together a government from parties, which have been staunch rivals since the Victorian times when William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli used to square up to each other across the dispatch box, is going to be problematic. Not least because these 2 historical political giants still infect their respective parties with their memes.

While economically Cameron might be Margaret Thatcher’s grandchild, his emphasis on social responsibility and talk of society’s obligations to the underprivileged and disadvantaged show clear strands of Disraeli’s political DNA surviving and replicating through generations of Tories to infect his thinking. As for the Lib-Dems, while they might in title be Liberal Democrats and have a touch of the centre-left about them, at heart the likes of Simon Hughes embody old Gladstonian Liberalism.

But some would declare us now to be in a post-ideological age where stolid pragmatism is more important than unthinking devotion to principle. Perhaps it was that kind of thinking that led the Lib Dems to leak that Monday’s (doomed) flirtation with Gordon Brown and Labour (far more, it was previously thought, their natural allies) was just going through the motions, to appease the party activists, and that the object of desire all along had really been the Tories?!?!? Maybe it was similar values that led David in the Rose Garden to declare that a minority Tory government, negotiating policy by policy support with the Lib Dems, just wasn’t inspiring; he just had to have a full-on relationship with the man he had only a couple of weeks before, as one reporter reminisced, referred to as a ‘joke’?!?!?

If pragmatism does have the upper hand over principle, then maybe…just maybe…the coalition does have a chance of succeeding. In which case, Clegg’s fine words about a “new kind of politics” might not turn out to be just so much hot air.

As for Cameron, he is reputedly talking about the ‘Liberal Conservatives’?!?!?

Some overlap of values?
On the face of it David Cameron appears to be dominated in his thinking by the ORANGE vMEME. He is concerned with progress, achievement and wealth. In these respects, he is very much Thatcher’s grandchild. Beneath this is a solid BLUE desire for order, stability, duty and conservatism (small ‘c’). Thus, his natural approach to the fiscal deficit is to cut, cut and cut public spending while looking for opportunities to liberate wealth-generating entrepreneurism.

Yet there is also a touch of GREEN liberalism in Cameron’s thinking. (Goodness, he’s even on record as supporting civil partnerships for gay and lesbian couples!) And it’s the work of the GREEN in his selfplex which enables Cameron to at least understand where the Liberals are coming from.

As for Nick Clegg, his near-naked ambition shows strong ORANGE at work beneath the publicly-voiced GREEN-derived mantras of the Lib Dems. Ostensibly, Clegg’s ORANGE ambition pulls him down from GREEN ideals to do the ‘dirty deal’ with Cameron which has so unnerved many Lib-Dem activists.

It’s interesting, looking at the footage of him and Cameron on the steps of 10 Downing Street and in the Rose Garden, how alike they seem. The same age, similar youthful good looks, slim, modern haircuts, sharp suits…they could almost be peas from the same proverbial pod.

If they can get on on a personal level and they can use each other for mutual progress, there is every possibility the core of the coalition will work – and the ruthlessness and cunning of ORANGE will enable Cameron to outwit the rigid BLUE of the Tory naysayers while Clegg undermines the lofty principles of GREEN-led Lib Dems simply by being in government, having a highly-visible profile and gaining credibility with the electorate.

Of course, there is a real risk of divisions in the ranks being driven and/or manipulated into real splits, with one or both parties splintering in the stress of being in a coalition with those they had previously despised – and that’s probably a higher risk for the Lib Dems. However, a real partnership between Cameron and Clegg, even if one of mutual use, should, theoretically, work. And, if the partnership works, without the parties splintering under the pressures of coalition, then maybe we really are into “a new kind of politics”.

2nd Tier thinking
After the Regent’s College summit last June, when we started putting together the Centre for Human Emergence UK, there was some considerable debate amongst the core team, as to how we might engage with politicians in developing ideas for the regeneration of British identity and culture. By and large the consensus was that the Lib Dems – at least, as a party – were most likely to be receptive to the kinds of ideas we were beginning to formulate.

The reason for this perception, partly drawn from portrayal in the media and partly from the direct experience of some of us in meetings with Lib Dem politicians, was that GREEN was so strongly dominant in much of the party’s collective selfplex, compared to the BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES driving the Tories and BLUE and GREEN motivating Labour. (These vMEMETIC ascriptions are, of course, huge generalisations about the 3 parties.)

If we were to find 2nd Tier thinking – or at least a readiness to move to 2nd Tier thinking – we thought we would be much more likely to find it amongst the Lib Dems.

So, a year later, with the Lib Dems forming a minority element in the new government, how does that perception stand?

Well, there was little in the Lib Dem election manifesto to indicate that the primary vMEME driving their thinking was anything other than GREEN. (Which doesn’t mean other vMEMES didn’t exert their influence – just that the overriding impression is one of it being a GREEN-led agenda.)

Since GREEN, in its desire to bring about fairness and equality, can actually become unrealistic in its expecations, the Tories’ BLUE and ORANGE demands on their policies being adopted by the coalition in areas such as immigration, defence and fiscal management is probably no bad thing. The Tories’ insistence on no joining the euro for the life of this Parliament is also no bad thing, given the mess the Eurozone is in – but longer term that may need to be reviewed, both from a pragmatic as well as an ideological angle.

The coalition programme, from what we know of it so far, can almost certainly be described as coming primarily from BLUE and ORANGE, with some GREEN initiatives. So it’s not the strong GREEN-derived  programme a pure Lib Dem government might have attempted to implement – but then it’s also without the worst excesses a strongly GREEN agenda might have contained.

So far, at least, there seems little on offer for people whose values come primarily from the PURPLE and RED vMEMES lower down the Spiral. As all too often in modern British politics, their needs get ignored by the political cognoscenti, making them easy prey for the likes of the British National Party. Hopefully, the Tories proposed cap on non-EU immigration might help those people feel they are not totally ignored by the political mainstream.

This disconnection with communities dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking – particularly the traditional white working class – is just one reason why programmes produced by BLUE and ORANGE and even GREEN are not enough in themselves. It requires full 2nd Tier thinking to perceive the full range of needs and desires on the Spiral.

So we’re back to the question: where is the 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership?

The effects of dissonance
Between 9/11 and the build-up to Iraq, I thought I detected an amount of 2nd Tier thinking in Tony Blair. The way he courted Muslim leaders in the wake of 9/11, using Qur’anic text and Islamic concepts to persuade them to at least not oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan seemed to me to display the remarkable ability to work with people in terms of their own values. Then came the blind alliance with George W Bush and the blunders people are still paying for with their lives in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After that, Blair was always ‘damaged goods’.

Yet no other 21st Century Western leader has impressed me with that quality of thinking. Even Barrack Obama, for all his initial promise, now seems bogged down and uninspired.

David Cameron certainly doesn’t impress me he’s got that kind of vision. At least not yet. Nor does Nick Clegg. Vince Cable maybe. Certainly the man is a treasure for his erudite wisdom and seemingly-unflappable composure – but he’s yet to master projecting himself as a charismatic figure in the mass media. William Hague is even worse at handling the media; though, years after fluffing his go at leading the Tories, he is at last starting to be recognised for his incisive judgements.

So what hope of 2nd Tier thinking in our new government?

Ironically it may actually be the stresses and strains of coalition – the very same pressures that lead commentators like Max Hastings to declare the coalition doomed – that make the difference.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) identified dissonance as being a critical component in any process of change. And dissonance there will certainly be as the 2 coalition partners try to come to terms with people and policies they have publicly despised until now. So this key to change will certainly be in abundance.

The actual triggers for neural change, which would enable Cameron, Clegg and their colleagues to self-actualise into 2nd Tier thinking may actually come about via the incredible surfeit of ideas – memes – involved in the huge internal and external dissonance which will beset the coalition. Susan Blackmore (1999) hypothesised that it is was memes – the sheer scale of ideas – early hominoids were dealing with which led to the development of the human ‘big brain’. So could it be that it is the sheer scale of the problems they face which will force the thinking of Cameron, Clegg, etc, up the Spiral…?

If so, are there any signs of the potential Beck & Cowan state is also necessary for progress up the Spiral?

Well, consider this from Clegg: “I hope this is the start of the new politics I have always believed in – diverse, plural, where politicians of different persuasions come together, overcome their differences in order to deliver good government for the sake of the whole country.”

It’s a good talk, isn’t? Let’s now hope they walk the walk!

just how many homosexuals are there really?

 community, cross-cultural, mental health, morality, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Oct 082009
 

This week, in discussing Sigmund Freud’s views (1923) on homosexuality with a class of A-Level Psychology students at Guiseley School in Leeds, the question was raised as to just how ‘normal’ gay and lesbian relationships are. When I stated that most recent surveys – ie: in the past 10 years or so – have tended to average around 2-4% of the adult population in the Western-ish world clearly identifying as gay men or lesbian – ie: verging on the statistically abnormal – I was quite taken aback by the sheer vociferousness of the class that the true number was at least 10% and, therefore, normal.

2 things struck me about this response:-

  • How accepting the class were that homosexuality was ‘normal’ – quite a contrast with a Psychology class in Goole 3 years previous, in which the class had insisted that Evolutionary Psychology proved that homosexuality was abnormal and a perversion
  • Where this mythical number of 10% of the population had come from and how strongly it was entrenched amongst the Guiseley students

In and amongst the praise heaped on my book, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, by Integral Review in 2007, I was castigated for ignoring homosexual relationships; I had 3 chapters on male-female relationships and none on same-sex relationships.

To be honest, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to include homosexual relationships. I have only come across a couple of handfuls of openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in my 55 years. Compared to the hundreds of heterosexual relationships I have encountered, same-sex relationships seemed so few in number they just didn’t register as a social fact I needed to write about.

Nonetheless, my RED vMEME’s pride stung by Integral Review’s criticism, I set out to discover if it was possible to find out just how many gay and lesbian relationships there might be.

What the surveys tell us
I found the following surveys carried out from 2003:-

  • 2003: The largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59 in 2001/2002. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. However, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. 50% of the men and 66.66% of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual or bisexual.
  • 2003: In the United States Tom W Smith’s analysis of National Opinion Research Center data states that 4.9% of sexually active American males have had a male sexual partner since age 18, but that “since age 18 less than 1% are [exclusively] gay and 4+% bisexual”. In the top twelve urban areas however, the rates are double the national average. Smith adds that: “It is generally believed that including adolescent behaviour would further increase these rates.”
  •  2003: According to the Durex Global Sex Survey for 2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex (Line Kaspersen, 2004)
  •  2003: The Canadian Community Health Survey (Satistics Canada, 2004) of 135,000 Canadians found that 1.0% of the respondents identified themselves as homosexual and 0.7% identified themselves as bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, almost twice the proportion of 0.7% among women. However, 0.9% of women reported being bisexual, slightly higher than the proportion of 0.6% among men. 2.0% of those in the 18-35 age bracket considered themselves to be either homosexual or bisexual, but the number decreased to 1.9% among 35-44 year olds, and further still to 1.2% in the population aged 45-59. Quebec and British Columbia had higher percentages than the national average at 2.3% and 1.9%, respectively.
  •  2005: HM Treasury and the Department for Trade & Industry completed a survey to help the Government analyse the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (such as pensions, inheritance and tax benefits). They concluded that there were 3.6 m gay people in the United Kingdom – around 6% of the total population or 1 in 16.66 people (Donald Campbell, 2005)
  •  2005: The American Community Survey from the US Census estimated 776,943 same-sex couples in the country as a whole, representing about 0.5% of the population (Gary J Gates, 2005)
  •  2006: A study by Nathaniel McConaghy et al found 2-3% Australians identified as homosexual while 20% of Australians reported having same-sex attractions

More recently Joseph Fried’s 2008 analysis of General Social Survey data looked at the percentage of American males, categorised as either Democrat or Republican, reporting homosexual activity for 3 time periods. Democrats admitting homosexual activity rose from 2.8% in 1988-1992 to 5.8% in 1993-1998 and then 6.6% in 2000-2006. Republicans admitting to homosexual activity peaked at 2.2% in 1988-1992.

A CNN exit polling showed self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters at 4% of the voting population in the 2008 US presidential election.

While the surveys present quite a mixed picture, by and large the percentages of openly gay people are well below the 10% figure the Guiseley students threw at me. An average would be around the 2-3-4% mark, depending just how it was calculated (as the surveys do not all measure like for like) – and that is verging on statistically abnormal.  In a normal distribution of population – such as that shown in the graphic for IQ (copyright © 2001 Psychology Press Ltd) – the vast bulk of the population (95%) falls within 2 standard deviations of the mean. Therefore, what is beyond 2 standard deviations is considered statistically abnormal.

 Normal Distribution

There are, of course, huge problems in collecting this kind of data, due to the large amount of prejudice & discrimination against gay men and lesbians still in many parts of the Western world. Many people who are gay undoubtedly try to conceal it to avoid being discriminated against. Thus, for reasons of social desirability bias (wanting to appear in the best light), political and social prudence, and perhaps just sheer fear, people responding to these surveys may not always have told the truth. The real number of gay men and lesbians in the samples used in these surveys is almost certainly higher than the official figures produced. The problem is we have absolutely no idea how much higher. Slightly higher or a lot higher…? We simply don’t know and we have no way of finding out. The best guestimates are just that: guesses. As most researchers into heterosexual relationships will admit, it’s incredibly difficult to get at what really goes on behind closed doors. Enter the murky underworld of homosexuality and it’s that much harder. We have Gay Pride Festivals in New York City and London; but in places like Goole it’s still very much a secretive, barely-admitted underground scene.

The best we can say is that the official responses to surveys tend to average out somewhere in the 2-4% region – verging on the statistically abnormal – but the real figure is almost certainly higher. Just how much higher we don’t know.

The meme of the 10% figure
The myth that 10% of the population are gay appears to have developed from the work of Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy & Clyde Martin whose notorious bestseller ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ (1948) – see The Sex Reports – was the first widely read neo-scientific attempt to study sexual relationships, orientation and practices. (In 1932, 11 years before the Hierarchy of Needs construct made his name, Abraham Maslow had published an investigation into female sexuality and dominance but it was not widely read at the time.)

What Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin al actually wrote was that, of the American males surveyed, 10% were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55″. Whether this meant the men surveyed were homosexual as a permanent sexual orientation or had merely gone through a homosexual phase is unclear. In any case, there are serious validity problems with Kinsey et al’s sample groups. Firstly, they included an unrepresentatively-large number of prisoners and male prostitutes when set against the ratio of such persons in the general population. Secondly, his responses may have been coloured by personality bias – as they were self-selected and it can be argued it takes a certain type of personality to volunteer to talk about ’taboo’ subjects.

Whatever Kinsey, Poleroy & Martin actually intended and whatever the flaws in their studies, the 10% figure has stuck – and this demonstrates the power of memes – ideas that can spread from mind to mind like infectious viruses. No wonder a whole new psychological sub-science of Memetics has developed over the past 30 years, concerned with understanding the what and how of memetic infection. Just what kind of ideas propagate best and in what kind of circumstances. Susan Blackmore (1999) has investigated those qualities of memes which make them most likely to propagate; but Don Beck & Chris Cowan’s 1996 concept of Spiral Dynamics is even more pertinent as it links the successful propagation of different memes to which motivational systems (vMEMES) are dominant in the minds of the receptor – collective grouping or individual.

Thus, we can link the decline in influence of the BLUE vMEME in North American and Europe – particularly in terms of strict Christian teaching – over the past 40 years or so and the emergence of GREEN with its libertarian and egalitarian values. Thus, the rise of GREEN has facilitated the spread of the ‘homosexuality is OK’ meme.

Of course, with growing Muslim populations in many parts of Europe, we may well be in for a new wave of BLUE thinking that could challenge GREEN’s ‘anything-that-liberates-the-human-spirit-is-OK’ ethos. I deal with this in my concurrent post, ‘What will Islam do for homosexuals?’

So is homosexuality normal?
Statistically it might be verging on the abnormal; but is it abnormal in any other way?

Certainly it’s not an illness, as the American Psychiatric Association finally recognised in 1973 when they withdrew its entry in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There is no credible evidence it is injurious to psychological well-being, provided the gay man or lesbian can accept they are what they are and they have effective strategies for dealing with the discrimination they are subjected to. There are some concerns about the sheer level of promiscuity among gay men – not only in terms of sexually transmitted infections but also potential emotional instability brought on by such behaviour. However, according to Celia Kitzinger & Adrian Coyle (1995) promiscuous gay men tend to protect themselves by being more distant with their partners.

If the evidence indicates that, by and large, it’s not psychologically harmful, why then do so many people find the mere concept of homosexuality so offensive?

The ‘it’s not natural’ argument falls down on 2 points:-

  • Firstly, it’s natural for most homosexuals – yes, it doesn’t fit with Evolutionary Psychology’s motif that sex is all about procreation and passing on your genes but then neither does contraception or some heterosexual couples choosing not to have children. Besides which, we have so many men with so much sperm, it’s hardly a survival-of-the-species issue if a small minority choose to waste it on other men!
  • Dean Hamer’s (1993) attributing of the genetic marker Xq28 on the X chromosome to homosexual preferences may mean some men really don’t have a choice in sexual orientation. Hamer’s work has yet to be validated to the point of complete acceptance but it’s certainly setting the lead on investigating causes of homosexuality – see: Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?. (Of course, no one’s yet come up with a potential biological determinant for lesbianism!)

What is much more likely to be behind such a dislike for homosexuality is the PURPLE vMEME’s distinction between those it identifies with/belongs to and those who ‘are not of our tribe’.

PURPLE uses all kinds of markers for discriminating between those who are in its in-group and others who are in the out-groups. It can be race, nationality, religion, gender, etc, etc…and, of course, sexual orientation.

To go back to our example of Goole which is a largely traditional white working class inland port, with lots of social and economic deprivation. In such communities, PURPLE tends to dominate much of the culture, propagating and enforcing its memetic taboos and rituals. Undoubtedly there is something of a BLUE vMEME harmonic left over from the days when Christianity really was the religion of the land. Christianity paints homosexuality as sinful – eg: Leviticus 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 – and this lends legitimacy to PURPLE’s categorising of homosexuals into the out-group.

Small wonder the homophobic Goole students found support in Evolutionary Psychology’s stance of sex-is-for-procreation. It’s a BEIGE level argument, about as basic as you can get…but higher up the Spiral the arguments are much more complex. Eg: the homosexuality-accepting Guiseley students are from one of the more affluent parts of Leeds, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the UK, with substantial ethnic minorities. In that mix of money, commerce and diversity, they will be exposed to just about every vMEME – every way of thinking – there is. So it is no surprise that they may have absorbed some of GREEN’s values around sexual orientation.

In reflection, then, the argument about whether homosexuality is ‘normal’ or not is more a question of differing values held by different vMEMES. As to just what proportion of the population is homosexual, we don’t really know; but it’s probably more than 2-4%. What we shouldn’t do is unthinkingly accept memetic ‘urban myths’ like 10%.

Yesterday I met Zulfi Hussain MBE

 business, charity, community, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Apr 082009
 

Well, no, I didn’t actually get to meet Zulfi Hussain to say ‘Hello’ – but we were in the same room and we made eye contact and he will know who I am because I was the guy going on about the importance of values in understanding diversity. (“Hey, Zulfi, that was me…Keith Rice!”)

 

If I sound unusually humble and maybe even a little subservient – fawning, even! – not at all my usual pompous and arrogant self…well, I spent some time yesterday with one of those rare people who just make a difference in the world. Almost just by who they are. You just know, being with them, that you are in the presence of someone special – very special indeed!

 

I can probably number on one hand the people who have made me feel that way previously: Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan, Meta-States developer L Michael Hall, ‘Inner Child’ specialist Penny Parks, maybe former Hidden  Resources head honcho John Lavan….

 

The occasion was a get-together yesterday morning of some of the speakers and committed participants in the ruins of the 6th annual Yorkshire Leadership Conference. The Conference, so successful in previous years, had already been rescheduled once. On the day a vibrant, forward-looking conference of 100-plus  participants and a over a dozen speakers and facilitators should have been plotting the evolutionary development of the Yorkshire & Humber region and beyond; instead a rump of less than 25 of us met to discuss the viability and progress of  the key issues. Yorkshire Leadership Programme leader David Taylor – whom I have known since the heyday of the 21st Century Group – seemed both genuinely upset and perplexed by the collapse – hopefully, just temporarily – of the conference.

 

But, as was acknowledged by several participants, once I put values and needs into the discussion using Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943, 1971), the concepts of corporate social responsibility, the environment and sustainability are too far up the Hierarchy to be relevant to many small businesses focussed on survival in what is increasingly being talked up as the worst recession since the 1930s.

 

Although the meeting was so far from what had been intended, it did produce some useful discussions. Though they were largely inconclusive, you never know what little seeds of ideas might germinate from them in time.

 

Zulfi was the highlight

At least for me, he was. His story, as he told it, was truly inspirational and a fascinating example of vMEMES at work.

 

A self-made multi-millionaire who came to this country as a young boy with no experience of formal education, he suffered severe racial abuse at a Bradford secondary school on an estate which was a National Front stronghold. Yet Zulfi appears to harbour no grudges – no bitternesses – from what were clearly traumatic experiences. (At one point he and other Pakistani students were forced to take cover in a part of the school which “we could defend” because it had only two access points.) You might have expected Zulfi’s PURPLE vMEME to polarise him into a position of tribal isolation and opposition to the white tribe whose own PURPLE demonised him and his fellow Asians while his RED would want revenge, taking the law into its own hands in a clear vacuum of dependable BLUE order….

 

How Zulfi mutated from the harassed, beaten and abused teenager into the suave and confident businessman before us was not part of his story on this occasion. However, he did credit his father’s guidance during these years. There may, however, be an interesting mix of vicarious learning and genes in Zulfi’s development as his father obviously was also a remarkable man, being one of the few Indian soldiers to escape and survive from the Japanese prisoner of war camps during World War II.

 

The Zulfi of today seems slightly extraverted, a persuasive speaker who was not shy either of reading us a poem composed, he said, for the occasion or of showing us his impressive list of credentials, concluding with his MBE award. However, none of this came across as the kind of bragging RED  – or even ORANGE – might engage in. Rather it was part of a strategy to show us what could be done if there was sufficient will.

 

I have no doubt that this man is capable of 2nd Tier thinking.

 

Connections and bullying

It was Zulfi’s story of how he set up his Global Promise Foundation which most illustrated what can be done and which demonstrated his 2nd Tier mastery of 1stTier thinking.

 

His GREEN horrified by the devastation wrought by the ‘Asian Tsunami’ of 26 December 2004, his TURQUOISE realised some of what needed to be done to prevent more of the survivors dying. His ORANGE entrained by 2nd Tier thinking made the best use of his huge network of business contacts, to acquire both much-needed supplies and the means of getting those supplies out to the survivors. With people dying first from injuries and then from disease, speed was literally of the essence and Zulfi’s 2nd Tier-entrained RED was put to use in what sounded at best like brutal badgering and at worst like outright bullying.

 

Zulfi told us gleefully how he telephoned one senior BT executive early in the morning of 26 December and said: “The sooner you say Yes, the sooner I’ll let you go back to bed.” Another company, who offered some clothes over the phone, soon found themselves with Zulfi in their offices; 4 hours later their offer had expanded to 3 full containers. Zulfi then told them he wanted one more thing: transport. Thus, the company was bullied into bullying their haulage contractor into transporting the clothes for free.

 

Zulfi’s TURQUOISE could see that cash was needed as well as supplies and he set up a number of fund-raising events, even exploiting members of his own family! Money was taken from younger members of his family if Zulfi could get an aged uncle onto the dancefloor; when the ruse was explained to the uncle, he was badgered into promising £5,000 a head if Zulfi could perform a similar trick on the youngsters. Which he did. RED using PURPLE for 2nd Tier purposes!

 

Through his fund-raising, Zulfi raised over £2M – a relative drop in the ocean in terms of what was needed in the aftermath of the tsunami – but undoubtedly it saved lives. And, if lots more £2Ms were raised….

 

It also was the start of Global Promise, with its vision of making “a real difference to the quality of life of local communities around the world, helping them achieve their potential.” Interesting that Zulfi uses ‘Promise’ – such an optimistic term – rather than the usual ‘Concern’ or ‘Relief’ or ‘Aid’.

 

It was an inspiring privilege to hear his stories and realise some of just what can be done if there’s the will.

The Critical Link between Failed States and Values

 Africa, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  6 Responses »
Jul 042008
 

Written by ALAN TONKINI

 

I am honoured once again to publish AlanTonkin’s work as a ‘guest blog’. Alan wrote this piece for the Global Values Network web site he runs but also thought it would be appropriate to publish it here. GVN is one of the most advanced projects in the world at using Spiral Dynamics to monitor shifts in societies and assess impacts at national, international and even global levels.

As the world seems to become an ever-more dangerous place, Alan offers this consideration as to why so many ‘Third World’ states fail to develop in positive and healthy ways for the benefit of their own peoples and the international community.

 

The latest edition of Foreign Policy magazine for July/August 2008, in conjunction with The Fund for Peace, has just published their latest rankings of Failed States with Africa occupying seven of the top ten positions. These include Somalia (1), Sudan (2), Zimbabwe (3), Chad (4), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6), the Ivory Coast – no 8 - and the Central African Republic (10).

 

The non–African countries are Iraq (5), Afghanistan (7) and Pakistan (9) which are in the Middle Eastern region (see map below – copyright © 2008 The Fund for Peace).  A further eleven African countries are included in the critical Alert list of 32 countries.  This is a total of 18 or 56% of the total and raises the question of why is this the case? The balance of 34 fall into Warning and only South Africa currently falls into Moderate.

 

Failed States Index 2008

In order to more fully understand this situation it is necessary to fully appreciate the direct link between  Failed States and Values and why the two issues are so closely intertwined. 

 

Dr Don Beck, in his ground breaking work on ‘values’ in ‘Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change’ (co-authored with Christopher Cowan and first published in 1996) explains this link.  The book is based on the original work by Professor Clare Graves at Union College in New York in the 1950s and shows how different values require different levels and approaches to leadership. 

 

Beck also visited South Africa over 60 times in a fifteen year period extending from the early 80’s to the mid – 90’s during a period of rapid political change and transition. These visits generally were on average a minimum of 15 days in length giving him an in depth exposure to South Africa covering a total period of over two and a half years.  

 

During his visits Beck interacted with a wide variety of organisations and individual leaders including top politicians from both the leading ANC and National parties as well as other political parties and groupings. He also had wide exposure to leaders in both business organisations and NGO’s.

 

How Different Values Influence Democracy and Leadership.

Beck has produced an interesting graphic to illustrate his approach and we will use this to show how different values produce different leadership.  It is also important to note that different ‘values mixes’ exist in both developing and developed countries.  This helps explain why bodies such as the United Nations are often unable to agree on how to facilitate and resolve global problems due to widely differing worldviews.

Stratified Democracy

South Africa has a dual profile with both a developing and developed component.  This scenario is often described by commentators as the 1st and 3rd World components of the South African economy.   However, even South Africa as the largest and most developed economy on the African continent still has a majority of its citizens who exhibit the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values. 

 

In looking at Sub-Saharan Africa it becomes clear that the reason why many African states behave as they do is due to the values systems present.  In considering the African countries represented in the top ten Failed States they all without exception exhibit high levels of tribalism and the influence of ‘warlords’.  Until this changes with increased stability democratic values are simply not possible. 

 

The Zimbabwe Issue

The current problem of Zimbabwe lies in the values struggle between ZANU–PF and Robert Mugabe filling the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power space with the MDC being more centred on BLUE Stability and ORANGE Growth.  The shift from Tribal Order and Warlords took place in Europe over two centuries ago.  However, until a larger number of Africa’s leaders and people make the shift into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise the continent will continue to remain a serious global concern. 

 

This is best illustrated in the graphic shown below illustrating the influence of values in The Competitive Impact of Values updated in 2002 from the World Competitiveness Report of 1992.  This shows how countries move from collective

individual values over extended periods of time going back centuries.

 

.  

It is important to note that Africa is still moving into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise and helps to explain the reasons for the dictatorships and corruption still prevalent on the continent.  At this stage much of Africa broadly compares to Europe during the 18th and early 19th Century.

 

Some Conclusions

The countries of the developed world need to more fully understand the reasons why African countries and leaders behave as they do.  They need to encourage positive change by demanding positive action on democracy and its institutions in return.  The days of not setting achievable outcomes on both aid and project financing should change to positive outcomes being rewarded by the developed economies. 

 

At the same time, the new younger generation of emerging African leadership who were not part of the transition from colonial to nationalist politics must take responsibility for the required values shifts in Africa.  This includes providing the correct messages for the population of their countries and encouraging hard work and responsibility, as has occurred in countries such as Singapore and China. 

 

At this stage many African politicians avoid criticising irresponsible RED Power language within their own countries in order to avoid confrontation with rogue elements.  Until there is a significant change in the values of the leadership in these countries this essential challenge is unlikely to happen.  In addition, there is a real risk that existing democratic institutions such as the courts may be threatened if there is no support for a set of more ‘developed values’.  This equally applies to African leaders who support advanced values criticising those who are in denial of these.

 

The new South African Constitution is an example of an ideal being ahead of the values of the broad population.  It is generally accepted that the Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world.  However, the thrust of the South African Constitution is on the BLUE Order, ORANGE Enterprise and GREEN values set.  At the same time the bulk of the population are in the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power range and this is why it is critical that the emerging ‘black middle class’ continues to grow and move into the values range as set out in the Constitution.  

 

What is also required in South Africa is a visionary leader who can integrate the wide spread of values present and move the values spread of the whole country forward.  This will involve an understanding of the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values while at the same time moving the majority of the population into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise.  A young version of Nelson Mandela is urgently required who can mobilise all the differing levels and build a shared vision of the future.  This type of leader is the one who operates at the Integral YELLOW level.    

 

If Africa is to move forward as a continent its leaders have to take more responsibility for their actions. They also need to avoid falling back into the habits of the past by accusing the developed world of not understanding its positions. We all operate in a global economy and common standards are being applied on an equal basis.  However, equally there needs to be a better understanding of the developing world by those holding economic power in order to move the development process forward.  

 

It should also be realised that this is a journey, not an event and that values change over time due to the existing life conditions.  This includes the fact that we often  only change as individuals and countries only when it is too uncomfortable to stay where we  are. This is where positive pressure and encouragement from the developed world can move developing countries forward on the values continuum.  This is also a key step in the ongoing movement against global terrorism and other threats.  

 

This process can significantly accelerate change in developing countries which can results in the shifts that have taken centuries in some regions being compressed into a shorter time frame. This is the key opportunity in the 21st Century for both the developed world as well as in those countries and their citizens currently occupying the areas of most concern on the ‘Failed States’ league table. See also Failed States Index on www.foreignpolicy.com

 

First Kosovo, then Northern Ireland?

 international conflict, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 232004
 

So Kosovo’s back in the news. 31 people dead. The return of tribal bloodletting and ethnic cleansing. Only this time it appears to be the Serbs that have been getting the worst of it.

Seemingly triggered by the stupidity of Serb youths hounding (literally, with a dog!) a couple of young Albanian children to their deaths in a river, what increasingly looks to be a well-coordinated campaign by Albanians to drive Serbs out of their homes suddenly materialised from nowhere. And now the dream of an Albanian Muslim Kosovo, independent of Serbia, is equally suddenly back openly at the top of certain extremist groups’ agendas.

The speed with which the situation in Kosovo deteriorated clearly caught the NATO troops and the United Nations mandated administration off guard. As I write, several thousand addtional NATO troops have entered Kosovo and a relative calm seems to be returning to the Serbian province.

Yet the sheer ferocity of this sudden outbreak of ethnic violence raises questions about the viability of the UN strategy for it not only exposed the fragility of the NATO-imposed peace but also its shallowness.

On the face of it things had been going reasonably well in Kosovo for the UN. There had been no signifcant ethnic violence since NATO entered the province in 1999. Kosovo’s Albanian-dominated devolved government and the Serbian government in Belgrade had been making progress in discussions on issues such as energy. Kosovo’s top Serb and Albanian politicians had reached agreement on how the ethnically-divided city of Mitrovica should be run. Gracious, Serbs and Albanians had even begun talking to each other in the streets again!

Now, nobody other than the extremists seems to know what to do next. On Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme late last week, I heard one fellow from the UN say the multi-ethnicity of pre-1991 Kosovo had to be restored. (1991 saw the start of the breakup of Yugoslavia with the secession of Slovenia.) Did this guy think Kosovo had once been some model of ethnic cohabitation? Didn’t he know that the visit of Slobodan Milosevic to Kosovo in April 1987 was one of his key stepping stones to power? When Milosevic heard the complaints of the downtrodden minority Serbs and made a rousing speech promising action against their Albanian ‘oppressors’, it was a call to Serb nationalism.

Two tribes go to war!
Kosovo had been a running sore on the body of the Yugoslav Federation for years. There were many reasons for this; but a key factor was quite simply that the Albanian Kosovars were not Slavs. ‘Yugoslavia’ was a bold attempt in the aftermath of the First World War to create an overarching identity for the Slavic states and thus bring stability to the Balkans.

The Balkan tribes cohabiting peacefully under an umbrella identity was a fragile condition, as demonstrated only too horrifically by the Croats’ murderous persecution (under German auspices) of the Serbs during the Second World War. To knit Yugoslavia together again after that needed something way beyond tribalism – and that ‘something’ came in the form of the Communist state and its overlord, Marshall Tito.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, tribalism is a manifestation of the PURPLE vMEME. Since PURPLE seeks safety in belonging, by default it delineates between those who are of-our-tribe and those who are not-of-our-tribe. However, it is possible to build super-tribal identities.

For example, in England Liverpool and Manchester might be rival centres of trade, industry and power – and fans from the two cities’ football teams might clash violently. However, they are all Lancashire people and the historical prejudice against Yorkshire, which still surfaces from time to time, is something many from both cities will subscribe to. Lancashire and Yorkshire people both tend to see themselves as ‘Northerners’ and will all too often disparage ‘Southerners’. Englishmen from across the country will – and have in the past! – united against the Scots. Both Scots and English will fight together under the umbrella of ‘Britons’ – as they have done in the 300 years since the Act of Union.

The taller the hierarchy of tribal identities, the more BLUE structure it needs to hold it together and to suppress tribal rivalries lower down the hierarchy.

In the Communist state Tito established a BLUE system which did exactly that while promoting the concept of Yugoslavia – ‘All the Slavs’. It also helped that Tito had high RED which made him both charasmatic and ruthlessly controlling.

Thus, Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrans could all be ‘Slavs’ equally in Tito’s land. The Albanian Kosovars, of course, weren’t Slavs but claimed descent from the Illyrians, supposedly the original settlers of the Kosovan lands. It is perhaps a credit to Tito’s genius that he more or less managed the ethnic tension in Kosovo – moving from suppression of the Albanians to partial liberalisation – but Kosovo remained a problem throughout his time as leader of Yugoslavia.

After Tito’s death in 1980 and coinciding with the slow but sure collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia equally slowly but surely began to unravel until the early 1990s saw Slav slaughtering Slav in the Serb-Croat wars. With the BLUE structure of Communism gone and RED demagogic leaders like Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman unleashing the PURPLE-BLUE beasts of nationalism, the identity of ‘Slav’ was replaced by the lower tribal identities – Croat, Serb, Bosnian, etc – and in PURPLE it’s okay to kill those who are not-of-our-tribe if they are seen to threaten our tribe.

Of course, the rigid BLUE Procedures of organised religion can add mightily to tribal tensions. Thus, Othodox Serb Christians can kill Catholic Croatian Christians (and vice versa) for not worshipping in the same way and following the same rituals. There are relatively few differences between Catholic and Orthodox Christians in the grand scheme of things. Create a super identity of ‘Christians’ – subscribed to by both Catholic and Orthodox – and BLUE will legitimise the wholesale slaughter of Muslims who don’t just not worship correctly but actually worship the ‘wrong’ manifestation of God and a ‘false prophet’. (Equally BLUE Islam will legitimise the slaughter of Christians – just ask al-Qaeda!)

It’s notable that, after all the turbulence of the 1990s, the two remaining real hotspots in the Balkans are Bosnia and Kosovo. In both instances PURPLE tribalism and BLUE religious hatreds are at the centre of the divides. In both instances a BLUE structure of order is imposed by a Western military force.

GREEN thinking predominating in much of Western thought on resolving the Balkan conflicts talks of restoring multi-ethnic harmony as though the people there will be naturally tolerant and respectful of their neighbours’ different tribal origins and religious beliefs. Its assumption that all should think similarly is flawed…fatally flawed! What is not needed, when dealing with PURPLE tribalism and BLUE dogma, is GREEN liberalism. What is needed is the kind of BLUE structure, capable of repression, that Tito built. For sure, GREEN informing that BLUE structure so that all can function to some degree under it is helpful; but control, not freedom, needs to be the main priority.

However, GREEN wouldn’t tolerate the human rights abuses that tend to go with such regimes and the capitalist thinking of the ORANGE vMEME in the West couldn’t stomach actually facilitating state control on that level. So a Tito-type solution is unlikely to come from the West.

Writing in this weekend’s ‘Observer’, Tim Judah, author of ‘Kosovo: War & Revenge’, recognises the strength of the ethnic divide and, somewhat tentatively, proposes partition as perhaps the only way out. That, as he ruefully acknowledges, more or less legitimises the ethnic cleansing necessary to create partitionable geography.

Partition seems to be working after a fashion in Cyprus. It’s highly debatable if it can be said to have worked in Ireland.

Lacking a Super Identity
Mulling over the explosion of violence in Kosovo, tangentally I began to think of Northern Ireland. It suddenly came home to me just how fragile that peace is.  

As with the Muslim Albanians and the Christian Serbs in Kosovo, there is no Super Identity the Republican Catholics and the Unionist Protestants can buy into. The Republicans see themselves as Irish; the Unionists see themselves as British. On the religious front, Rome and Canterbury might be carrying on periodic flirtations but there are still huge barriers (not least the ordination of women and then the whole issue of homosexuality) to be overcome before there can be any meaningful reconciliation. In any case the Church of England is virtually papist to the likes of Ian Paiseley – and there are a lot like him in the more Protestant Protestant churches in Northern Ireland.

Like Kosovo, quiet for over four years, the PURPLE tribalism and the BLUE divides of national allegiance and religious bigotry are there just below the surface in Northern Ireland.

There are some key differences, though between, Ireland and Kosovo. For one thing, after 25 years of ‘The Troubles’ failing to achieve anything, a lot of people in the province were worn out with it all. For all their efforts, the terrorists (or, freedom fighters, according to preference) couldn’t beat either the BLUE machine of the British Army or the BLUE resolve of the British political establishement.

But perhaps more importantly, a lot of people in the South lost interest.

Following the 1922 partition, Eire enshrined (BLUE) in its constitution its (PURPLE) claim to the 6 counties it had failed to recover from the British. PURPLE’s affiliation to the physical geography cannot be understated – though it is frequently ignored! Thus, as so often has been said, it became the duty of every Irishman to get the 6 counties back – and thus the ambivalence of many Irish governments towards IRA-type operations in the North.

However, the remarkable transformation of the Irish economy in the mid-1990s (helped by bucketfuls of European Union money) changed the perspectives of a lot of people. Whether the success of the economy led to the emergence of the ORANGE vMEME at a major cultural level or whether it was ORANGE which made such a success from the EU handouts is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. What we do know is that, for many people in the South, bettering themselves became more important than championing historical causes. When the Good Friday Agreement was voted on in 1998 – with its requirement that Eire drop its constitutional claim to the 6 counties – it breezed through in the South. In the economically-depressed North, where BLUE polarisation dominated, the Agreement barely got through.

A number of the key decision-makers in both governments and both communities recognise that economic prosperity is one of the keys to Northern Ireland not slipping back into violence. If ORANGE, in its wealth-making mode, can undermine the polarisation of BLUE but use BLUE order to suppress those, for whom BLUE dogma and PURPLE tribalism is what it’s about, then Northern Ireland might have a good chance.

Moving back to Kosovo, even though around 90% of the population are Albanian, the Serbian national psyche has a deep emotional root in the province – ‘Old Serbia’ as it is known to Serbs, being the heart of mediaeval Serbia – a mediaeval Serbia which was broken in defence of Western Christianity at the Battle of Kosovo Polje, trying to hold back the Muslim hordes from the Ottoman Empire of the Turks.

ORANGE-ification
Letting go of Kosovo is for the Serbs the equivalent of Eire abandoning the 6 counties. However, for the Serbian economy, still recovering from wars and sanctions but tempted by the carrot of EU membership, an Eire-type ORANGE-ification is not beyond the realms of possiblilty.

It is exactly this kind of strategy for the Palestinians that Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan discussed with the US State Department during Bill Clinton’s first term. Using Eire as the blueprint, the idea was to pump money into the Palestinian economy in the hope of stimulating a cultural emergence of ORANGE. The hope was that Palestinians would become more interested in bettering themselves than killing Israelis – and that would then remove the Israeli justification for continued occupation of the Palestinian areas. (For various reasons the talks with the State Department stalled but Beck has since discussed variations on that theme with foreign policy interest groups at the European Parliament and the European Commission.)

Perhaps some kind of partition of Kosovo along the lines suggested by Tim Judah will provide a partial and at least temporary solution. But, as the Irish Catholics proved, partition borders don’t tend to hold people back for very long when there are few jobs one side of the border and a shortage of labour on the other. And then the pre-partition probems are re-engaged.

As most MeshWORKERS know, there are rarely final fixed solutions when managing vMEMES. A constant vigilance for changing scenarios and the capability to respond to those changes are necessary to anticipate and resolve problems.

In Kosovo – just as in Ireland – the PURPLE tribalism will never go away but it can be superceded by a ‘greater PURPLE’ identity – eg: ‘Yugoslavia’ – and held in check by powerful and efficient BLUE. The propagation of GREEN humanism to undermine some of the BLUE religious dogma will also help. In the right conditions, contained tribalism can even be rendered irrelevant by the emergence of ORANGE at a cultural level.

The key then to managing conflict is understanding and manipulating vMEMES. PURPLE tribalism can be managed and controlled but its power to re-emerge as a powerful and potentially destructive force should never be underestimated.

Hull OFSTED hits the mark – but misses the point!

 education, Neurological Levels, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jan 192003
 

After months of speculation in the media and undoubtedly trepidation at the Guildhall (seat of Kingston Upon Hull City Council) and in Essex House (the headquarters of Hull’s Local Education Authority), the results of the inspection last September by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) have been made public.

2002 was a bad year for Hull Education. The city returned to the bottom of Britain’s GCSE league tables after managing one place above bottom the previous year and slumped 11 places down the primary league tables.

Director of Learning Peter Fletcher, in post only a year or so, held Hull’s headteachers accountable for the GCSE league table performances last Summer while the Hull Daily Mail screamed out its headline, ‘Do you care?’  at parents who allowed and even facilitated truanting by their children.

The OFSTED report has largely upheld these two positions. Fletcher and Essex House get off pretty lightly while headteachers are criticised for not being focussed enough. However, it is parents and the truancy issue which seems to have most vexed the inspectors. Since the LEA is considered to be pursuing a robust anti-truancy policy – truancy sweeps in conjunction with Humberside Police have made local headlines several times – the inescapable conclusion is that it is parents who are the problem.

Since, in most children’s lives. the parents are the single biggest influence until well into the teenage years, OFSTED have undoubtedly got the right people in their sights. If you can’t get the kids into school, then you can’t teach them. they can’t take exams and the Government targets can’t be met. So doing something about the parents who can’t or won’t ensure regular attendance by their children is clearly a major issue.

Unfortunately, while OFSTED have hit the mark, the inspectors appear to have missed the point.

Truancy, like attendance, is a Behaviour. As the Neurological Levels model clearly shows, Behaviours are driven by Values & Beliefs – and Values in turn are underpinned by a sense of Identity.

If the formal school education of the child is not a foremost Value for the parent, then other priorities – taking the day off to buy the child a new pair of trainers, going on an out-of-season holday, keeping the child at home to do chores and errands while the parent is ill, etc, etc – can easily take precedence. And, since people are driven by Values, the parent who condones and even facilitates truancy in such circumstances, sees nothing wrong with what he or she has done.

Of course, having police officers bringing truanting children home or having an Education Welfare Officer knocking on the door to enquire about unacceptable absences can change the priorities of the parent somewhat.

When such a parent, under such pressure, changes behaviour and now insists the child goes to school, is it because the parent now recognises that conforming to expectations and sending the child to school is the right thing to do – in Spiral Dynamics terms, BLUE – in which case the parent may now be on the way to recognising the Value of formal school education? Or is it a fear-driven RED response to a greater power (‘The Law’) he or she cannot fight? – in which case, there will be little or no Value in the child receiving a formal education – the Value lies instead in avoiding a real threat (fines, possibly even a custodial sentence)?

If the motivation comes from RED fear of a greater power, rather than BLUE conformity to expectation, then, since RED thinking has little sense of consequences, once the threat has been removed, the parent will be vulnerable to other priorities overtaking sending the child to school.

What the OFSTED inspectors missed – as do many in the management of Education – is that, to bring about real sustainable changes in behaviour, there have to be changes in Values.

And in the Classroom…?
Here’s an unpalatable truth for many education strategists: many, many teachers breathe a sigh of relief when a problem child truants – some even rejoice! It means they have more chance of teaching the class than wasting large amounts of the lesson in ineffective behaviour management.

Of course, it’s ‘politically incorrect’ for teachers to think this way – they should be obsessed with (GREEN-derived) ‘inclusion’ the same way as the strategists and the ‘gurus’ are! But, if the strategists and gurus could be flys-on-the-wall in school staffrooms, they would pick up conversation after conversation about how relieved teachers are when a problem child is absent or how they wish such a child when present could be somehow spirited away!

Most classroom teachers recognise when a child has Value in his or her school education – and, since most children reflect their parents’ Values, they can soon discern whether the parents have Value in their child’s school education.

The child who doesn’t have enough Value in his or her formal education to actually bother to come to school is unlikely to become a model student once forced into class. Since he sees little or no relevance in what is being taught, winding up other students or even the teacher becomes an entertaining way of passing what is effectively a jail sentence – and RED, which is where the thinking of most of the seriously-disruptive children is at, bores very easily indeed. (I once asked an abusive Year 11 what such behaviour accomplished. Her reply was: “It’s got me thorugh five years of this hell hole. Now, fuck off!”)

Getting the truants into school is only a part of the solution – as Malet Lambert School found out when they improved attendance in 2001-2002 but actually expereinced slippage down the GCSE league tables.

So truancy and bad behaviour are symptoms of the formal school system having a lack of relevance to the Values of those children and their parents.

And it is a complete misapprehension to suggest that truanting children are not learning. They are learning to improve their skills at Playstation games and improvised sports, they are learning gang leadership and relationship skills, they are learning to shoplift, steal cars and break into houses, to take drugs and drink alchohol, etc, etc – often to live on their wits independently, without proper support from adults. What they are not doing by absenting themselves from school is learning what the system says they should and which they consider irrelevant.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching History in a secondary school in a deprived area of a port which had largely lost its fishing industry. The area was largely populated by the former fisherfolk. (Hull gets all the brickbats because its demographics give it such a strong concentration of ‘problem schools’, but there are schools throughout the rest of Humberside – for that matter, thoughtout Britain! – equally as problematic as any in Hull.)

As part of the curriculum, I was obliged to teach the Protestant Reformation of the Middle Ages to a class of low ability Year 8s. About half of them had never been out of the town, nearly 90% had never been in a church and only one had ever opened a Bible. What relevance did the Reformation have in the eyes of such children?

If we were going to interest such children in History, I suggested we develop a local history module around the port’s fishing fleet, thus enabling those children to explore their PURPLE heritage in a positive way, through talking to grandparents and other relatives, etc, to find out what part they had played in the port’s glory days of the fishing boats. I was told that the pressures to conform to the National Curriculum would not give us time or scope to do this.

Has Education lost its Way?
Numerous Key Stage 2 teachers have told me that Year 6 is not about Education; it is about getting high Standard Assessment Test (SAT) scores. Anything that will not actively contribute towards the children doing well in the SATs is likely to get jettisoned.

The desire to measure progress towards goals and targets comes from ORANGE thinking and is laudible in itself. The problem comes when BLUE thinking institutionalises the targets as standards and the targets then become ends in themselves.

That not all of Hull’s headteachers share the same obsession with targets as the Department of Education & Skills and OFSTED may be a recognition that Education is about a lot more than just meeting the targets – and that is no bad thing!

While the school systems perpetuate BLUE values of conformity, discipline and linear thinking and ORANGE goals of  future achievement, our society has changed dramatically in the last half-century in ways which the systems are not addressing adequately. The advent of large-scale GREEN permissiveness (in everything from dress and language to sexual mores), channelled through ORANGE consumerism, has fed RED self-indulgence and destabilised PURPLE family units. (The early 1990s campaigns of John Major around ‘family values’ and ‘back to basics’ were hopelessly naive but at least he recognised some of the damage done.)

It is a basic principle established by Abraham Maslow and reinforced by the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck & Chris Cowan, etc, that, when the lower levels of thinking are compromised, people leave the higher levels to sort out their problems at the lower levels. (Indeed the higher levels may collapse completely – ie: the individual ceases to think at the higher levels until the problems at the lower levels are solved.)

Thus, if a child’s PURPLE safety-in-belonging is compromised because the parents split up or the young person is unable to find him/herself as a unique human being – RED self-expression – then the higher disciplines of BLUE and the strategic forward-thinking of ORANGE mean little or nothing.

The school system, in demanding that everyone should conform to its BLUE-ORANGE ethos, is not serving the needs of many parents and children whose thinking is in PURPLE or RED. No wonder they don’t find it relevant!

The school system needs to become part of a broader system that addresses all the needs of all people in all their ways of thinking. This will require a seismic shift in thinking amongst politicians and education and social strategists. However, there are some encouraging signs that some forward thinkers are starting to move in that kind of direction.

Last year’s Parliamentary green paper on 14-19 Education, helmed by then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris, was a brave admission that vocational education – usually (though not always) more suited to people whose thinking is in PURPLE, RED or BLUE – needs to be developed on a par with academic education – usually (though not always) suited to BLUE., ORANGE and beyond.

More locally, in this past week Simone Butterworth, Leader of Hull City Council, stated in a letter to the Hull Daily Mail that the thinking of the Cabinet in deciding on a management restructure, which would appoint new Directors with a cross-Council remit, was a recognition that issues such as Education performance were beyond the Directorate of Learning as a stand-alone department. Social Services, Housing, Regeneration and whole raft of other services would need to link up to provide a broad based approach to developing the young people of the city – with Education performance as a key consideration.

This is radical stuff – and exciting! It would appear that Ms Butterworth is inching her way towards developing the breadth axis necessary for a large-scale MeshWORK. What must follow, though, is the developing of the understanding to provide the depth axis. so that all ways of thinking can be taken into consideration. Without the depth axis and the common understanding it provides, the breadth axis will fail to gel as conflicting personalities and departmental agendas fight for domination.

Making Education relevant to the needs of the people it is meant to serve is the key to educational performance. If that can be accomplished, then truancy – while it is unlikely ever to be entirely eliminated – will become largely a thing of the past.

The more the needs of the people are different from the ‘solutions’ Education offers,the more truancy there will be. Close that gap and truancy will diminish accordingly.

OFSTED may have identified the behaviours inhibiting progress in Hull Education, but it will require much more sophisticated thinking to understand and deal with the causes of such behaviours.

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.