Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austerity and the Euro – an Appalling Lack of Quality Leadership

 business, civil unrest, cross-cultural, Europe, government, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 202012
 

Well, the Eurozone crisis has certainly dominated the news this past week or so – and the Greeks are once again at the centre of it. But this time it’s different. This time it’s not so much the ORANGE vMEME of the ultra-rich financial speculators effortlessly wrongfooting the BLUE-dominated fiscal technocrats in Brussels and Berlin which is causing the problem - though the speculators are still making plenty of money! Rather, it’s the people - the newly-poor, crushed and deprived by the austerity measures wreaking havoc with lives right across Europe - who are democratically electing populist politicians and extremist politicians promising them relief from the austerity. (21 of the Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi candidates made it into the Greek parliament in the 6 May election.)

New Greek elections in mid-June are tipped to give an outright victory to the leftist Syriza bloc which, if Syriza’s leaders stick to their guns, means forcing the European Union to renegotiate the second bailout deal agreed in March, so the austerity measures the Greek are forced to endure are that much less severe. That or Greece tears up the agreement and effectively leaves the euro.

Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP
Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP

In trying to predict what will happen – or what should happen – the pundits are all over the place. And so are the politicians! German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hinted as far back as early March – before the second bailout deal was finally agreed – that Germany might be prepared to see Greece leave the euro. In their first somewhat-underwhelming summit on Tuesday (15 May), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President François Hollande made it unequivocal that they wanted Greece to stay in the Eurozone…yet only days before Merkel had been backing Schäuble’s position. The 2 positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive: it’s quite possible to want Greece in the euro ideally but be prepared to see the country leave if it doesn’t fulfil the criteria to continue to be a member.

The Foolishness of the Austerity-Alone Agenda
Hollande is being portrayed in some quarters of the media as a naïve simpleton who thinks, in Ed Balls fashion, that you can spend your way out of the kind of massive debt crises befuddling much of Europe. If Hollande does think that way, it’s not clear from his public policies that is what he believes. In public at least Hollande isn’t saying No to austerity; he’s saying let’s have less austerity on one hand and develop growth strategies on the other. We’ve yet to have any evidence Hollande knows how to grow an economy…but at least he understands the importance of growth. For all my initial enthusiasm for the Coalition in the UK – see: ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’ (May 2010) - it quickly became apparent that the new British government had little vision beyond its dogma of introducing swingeing public sector cuts - see: ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?’ (July 2010).

In retrospect it’s astonishing - and can only be attributed to BLUE’s myopic determination to do ‘the right thing’ - that the likes of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron really believed their national populations would passively accept having their living standards decimated.

People have lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes their marriages and families as an indirect – and sometimes direct - consequence of the austerity programmes introduced by these leaders. Imagine: your BLUE has done ‘the right thing’ your country expects of you (obeyed the laws, done your job to the best of your ability, paid your taxes, got married and produced children, bought a house with the biggest mortgage your salary can justify and consistently maxed out your credit cards in the name of consumerism and supporting the retail economy)…and then you lose everything because the government or a government-funded agency has taken your job away. Meanwhile, you see that ‘1%’ allowing servile politicians - hey, George Osborne! - onto their yachts and into their mansions and those same servile politicians then increasing tax allowances for the mega-rich – hey, George Osborne! - so they get even richer! No wonder BLUE subsides, betrayed, and RED takes to the streets and the barricades. Syriza saying No to the second bailout deal - and all the trauma that will produce – may yet be a preferable alternative to a people’s revolution and/or an Army takeover. (Greece is no stranger to either!)

Sarkozy is, of course, now consigned to the dustbin of history by an electorate not prepared to accept more and more years of austerity. (If he is remembered at all, beyond having a wife distinctly more glamorous than him, it will be for leading the West into the dubious but nominally noble role of being the Libyan rebels’ airforce in their 2011 struggle to oust Mouammar Gadhafi.) As for Cameron, the violence of last Summer’s riots - see: ‘The Riots – who’s right: Cameron or Blair?’ - may just have given him the ‘reason’ to turn the police loose Gadhafi-style on the next lot of anti-Government protestors rampaging through the streets of London, judging from the astounding amounts of rubber bullets the Metropolitan Police are reported to be stockpiling. Even Merkel is no longer looking so invincible, with her Christian Democrats suffering heavy defeats to anti-austerity parties a week ago in the their once-safe region of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It’s a 2-dimensional view, worthy of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to think that a single strategy can solve what, in reality, are multi-faceted problems. Thatcher thought that freeing up the financial services to generate wealth while doing away with the old ‘heavy industries’ and the trades unions that went with them would solve the UK’s lack of competitiveness. What those policies resulted in was a fabulously wealthy south-east of England - so rich it pulled Britain into the Top 4 richest nations on earth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). Yet much of the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the lowlands of Scotland were turned into industrial wastelands characterised by high unemployment, broken communities and broken marriages, failing schools and sky-high truancy rates, widespread alcoholism and substance abuse, and rocketing crime rates.

As Britain is now statistically in a ‘double dip recession’, I can’t help having some sympathy with Ed Milliband’s repetitive chanting that this is a recession “made in Downing Street”. While just about everyone on the Labour front benches, from Alistair Darling, Labour’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, through to Milliband - with the exception of Balls - recognised the need to take radical action to cut the deficit, they also warned continually against cutting too fast and too deep. They recognised the dangers both to the economy and to the social fabric of the UK. Cameron and Osborne took no notice of such warnings - even when this February 2 credit rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, warned that the UK’s austerity programmes were so severe that they risked strangling any putative growth. Even this Friday, in a speech to business leaders in Manchester, Cameron was defending the government’s economic and fiscal policies, without accepting any criticism of them. In the same speech he paid only a fleeting, cursory recognition that a second policy of stimulating growth might also be necessary.

So, for the time being at least, Britain is stuck in austerity, thanks to Cameron; while Greece and other parts of Europe are stuck in austerity, thanks to Merkel and Sarkozy. If growth policies do emerge to balance out the austerity programmes, they are unlikely to come from such leaders - their BLUE thinking is too limited to the single strategy of public sector cuts: the ‘one true way’. Osborne epitmoises this BLUE-derived cut-and-do-nothing-else railroad thinking. From his first financial statement in 2010, he has done almost nothing to encourage business growth.

It seems it may need new leaders to bring in new multiple strategies which can combine reducing public sector profligacy with fostering private sector growth. So far at least, the Greek Syrizans are vehemently anti-austerity but have not voiced any viable alternative. Hollande was elected on an anti-austerity/pro-growth manifesto. The realities of being in power and having to negotiate with Merkel (who openly championed Sarkozy’s re-election bid) seem to have tempered Hollande’s rhetoric in the short time since his victory. While he wants a new focus on growth - but doesn’t say how he will stimulate French private sector growth - he is now giving more credence to the idea of some degree of austerity in Europe as a whole, at least.

With the BLUE conformity to society’s expectations failing to maintain stability and security, people’s PURPLE gets frustrated and bewildered, leading to a partial breakdown in social norms - what Émile Durkheim (1895) termed ‘anomie’ – which allows RED to self-express in what can often be a quite dangerous way. Beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour start to morph and change. As Susan Blackmore (1999) has shown, when old memes start to become dysfunctional, new ones rapidly take their place.

The riots and looting in Britain in August 2011 illustrate only too well the dangers of austerity programmes leading to widespread anomie in the specific sense that Robert K Merton (1938) used the term. When ORANGE-driven consumerism continues to promote high-value goods as socially desirable and indicative of status but there are fewer and fewer legitimate BLUE/PURPLE routes to obtaining those goods due to austerity measures, then it is predictable that RED self-expressive and self-indulgent thinking will dominate in the minds of some and they will then ‘acquire’ those goods by whatever means available to them.

By its very nature Capitalism cannot stop producing/providing and selling what it produces/provides. Otherwise there is no revenue from which to pay wages and overheads and derive profit. Austerity is, in a sense, anti-capitalist because it limits the legitimate ability of the market to buy what the Capitalists produce/provide. The only way to then get what the Capitalists tell you should have is through anomic means. Just one small example of what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) were getting at when they talked about Capitalism having sown within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Beneath the Surface of the European Union
On the surface, the Eurozone crisis and the controversies about austerity are about European countries racking up unsustainable amounts of debt - hence the austerity programmes to reduce the debt. Additionally, certain countries - most notably Greece but Eire, Portugal, Italy and Spain are also in similar messes - allowed their debts to build up to the point where they no longer could generate the revenues to service those debts as the markets lost confidence in those countries and interest rates rose. (Friday’s downgrading of Spanish banks by Moodys illustrates this perfectly.) Hence, the need for bailouts from the EU and the International Monetary Fund for these countries just to keep going.

But why are there such discrepancies amongst the countries in the EU? How come Germany is the only nation in the EU with really solid growth (in terms of GDP), the Italian economy hasn’t grown in 10 years and Greece is effectively bankrupt?

It’s about far more than differences in geographical location and natural resources, as some commentators would have it. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s about values. Alan Tonkin (2010), in his Global piece, The EU: an Organisation divided by Values, presents a basic overview of the values mix in the different member states and shows that there are clear values faultlines in the composition of the EU. Germany, Britain and, arguably to a lesser extent, France are driven by what Alan terms ‘BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise’. In contrast, he sees the Mediterranean nations of Italy, Spain and Greece as rather more relaxed, with PURPLE and RED more to the fore.

Of course, such ‘broad brush’ analyses are vulnerable to criticisms of playing to stereotypes. Yet there may well be some accuracies in such national stereotyping - how ever ‘politically incorrect’ the GREEN vMEME may make that seem.

A personal anecdote…Krissy is a young German woman working as a nanny in the Harrogate area of the UK and currently a participant in my latest ‘Introduction to Psychology’ adult education class at Rossett School. One ‘homeplay’ I set the class was to observe over the following week instances of each of the vMEMES as they went about their daily business. When they fed back at the next session, Krissy spoke at length about how much BLUE she saw in herself and in her friends and relations back home - indeed, in German culture as a whole. In effect, Krissy was confirming the stereoptypes of Germans as being:-

  • Ordered, disciplined and hard working
  • Highly procedural and efficient
  • Intolerant and punitive of people who are not like them or their values

- all characteristics produced in the selfplex by the BLUE vMEME.

Of course, one case study proves nothing. Nevertheless, Krissy’s thoughts do appear to support the basic stereotype of Germans. In which case, there may be some degree of accuracy in stereoptying of national groups. However, as Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrated in South Africa in the early 1990s - see: Don Beck & South Africa - it’s not being in a certain racial or ethnic group per se which produces attitudes but it is the vMEMES which dominate in the culture of a group.

Accept the broad brush stereotypes Alan Tonkin points to and accept that these come from vMEMETIC cultural domination as a ‘working hypothesis’…and it becomes possible to use 4Q/8L as an instrument to identify key factors contributing to the malaise afflicting the EU.

The rules and structures of the EU are located in the lower right quadrant and are largely derived from over-mature BLUE with some strong mixes of ORANGE and some fewer but nonetheless influential splashes of GREEN. The overall culture of Germany is in the BLUE-ORANGE zone - lower left quadrant – and, thus, is well-equipped to take maximum benefit from the EU structure. Greece, on the other hand, if dominated in its culture by the less-complex vMEMES of PURPLE and RED, is very ill-equipped to cope with the structures, procedures and demands of the EU.

Evidence of the weakness of BLUE and the strength of RED comes from the problems the Greek government has with tax collection. Greek culture is not heavily imbued with memes about ‘doing the right thing’. Evidence that ORANGE in Greece is in short supply comes from the fact there are such low levels of enterprise and business growth activity.

As Alan Tonkin hints, a key threat to the EU is that fact that more member countries are centred lower down the Spiral than are centred in the BLUE-ORANGE zone. In part, this explains why so much responsibility for the success and sustainability of the EU falls upon those countries centred higher up the Spiral – especially Germany.

Memetic and vMEMETIC changes can also be seen in attitudes amongst German electors. Once the staunchest advocates of European integration, resentment is growing at German wealth being risked to bail out a country with little or no short-to-medium term prospects of economic growth. At a cultural level, there is a longer-term danger of Germany becoming exhausted with supporting the European project and sliding into BLUE/PURPLE protectionism.

Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press
Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

Whither Europe?
Yesterday the leaders of the G8 met at Barrack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland.

Briefing the press afterwards, Obama said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on jobs and growth. That isn’t quite the tone of the official communique which stated  that the G8 leaders had committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility. The communique also added that, with regard to what strategies might put be put in place, “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

In other words, despite Obama’s disengenous optimism, there is no real concensus among the leaders. Cameron appears to have come around a little bit to the view of Obama and Hollande that there must be  a new focus in the Eurozone on growth. However, reducing the deficit remains his overrriding concern at home. Merkel is still wedded to austerity and is said to be concerned that the German viewpoint wasn’t given adequate consideration at the summit.

When the world is said to be on the brink of financial meltdown, this is a demonstration of an appalling lack of qaulity leadership. And it shows all too clearly that most of them don’t ‘get it’.

The botched manner in which the EU has allowed the Eurozone crisis to rumble on for over 2 years, with austerity put forward for most of that time as the only possible solution is an appalling indictment of the lack of higher level thinking of the leaders.

Even more telling is that they treat the Eurozone crisis as the issue: if they could only stabilise the euro, things would be OK! Unfortunately, that is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to a gaping wound which the crisis has exposed. It is a failure to recognise that the problems with the euro and the ‘debt mountains’ accrued by many member states are symptomatic of more fundamental problems. As we considered earlier, it is the values differences created by different vMEMES in the 4Q/8L lower left quadrant which is the real source of many of the EU’s problems - as Alan Tonkin identified 2 years ago.

Acknowledging this, of course, means facing up to the stark reality that not all member states are equal and, therefore, cannot all be treated the same. This is anathema to the GREEN vMEME which has influenced certain elements of the German political intelligentsia for many years - a factor which may help explain why Germany has allowed itself to get sucked into some very unnatural and unequal partnerships.

In understanding how this mess has come about, it is necessary to keep in mind the original aim of the EU: to contain West Germany (as it then was), increasingly resurgent economically (after the country was devastated at the end of World War II) and to minimise the likelihood of Germany and France ever going to war again. On the basis that countries which are economically interdependent rarely end up going to war with each other, the original European Coal & Steel Community was launched in 1951. The economic aim was to serve the political aim.

Again, when many of the former Soviet bloc countries joined the EU in 2004, it was politics driving the agenda - with economics having to meet the political needs. The political aim was to safeguard these countries from either disintegration and social chaos and/or to minimise lingering Russian or Communist influence. But, of those countries, only Poland so far has shown the potential to be a significant European economic power on the same level as Germany, France and the UK.

Yet, although the EU is driven by political agendas, the politicians, if indeed, they have the will, are unable to persuade their electorates that direct political controls - ie: some form of federalism - are necessary to manage some level of EU-wide fiscal and economic policies. Without that, we get exactly what we’ve got: Greece ‘cooking its books’ and running up vast quantities of debt, dependent on German hard-won wealth to bail it out.

Once you consider it from a 4Q/8L perspective. a straightforward union of nations containing Germany at one extreme, dominated culturally by BLUE and ORANGE with some GREEN, and Greece at the other, dominated by PURPLE and RED with some BLUE, was never going to be an easy match-up. Even with federal controls!

It may indeed be that some form of federal Europe is not acceptable to the peoples of Europe - but that has yet to be tested electorally, so  we don’t know for sure it isn’t. However, if centralised control isn’t acceptable, then Europe has to find another means of managing the divergent cultural values of its member states.  On Friday David Cameron said: “Decisive action is needed by the Eurozone. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road.” While Cameron’s superficial analysis appeared to go no deeper than the woes of the euro, his criticism of the inertia of the EU leaders was spot on. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road – but the can is more than the problems of debt and the common currency: the can is the fundamentally-flawed structure of the EU which gives equal status to countries with wildly-divergent values and, therefore, wildly-divergent aims.

It may be that the EU, instead of treating its members as if they are all the same, has to apply differentiated strategies to them. It may even be that there needs to be differentiated tiers of membership whereby Germany, France, the Benelux countries, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland form one tier; and perhaps the others are split between 2 other tiers, based on a banding of GDP:debt ratio? Each tier would have a different set of obligations and a different set of benefits? EU members which don’t use the euro would form a totally different category of membership?

What ever steps are taken- undoubtedly, tentatively! - to do something about the present crisis – and it’s hoped it is at least a sticking plaster job! - the EU needs fundamental reform. Cameron has talked about ‘bold initiatives’ being required with regard to the Eurozone. In that respect at least, he is right. But any intiative – no matter how ‘bold’ – will only work to a degree unless the EU tackles the values divergences within its membership.

Is the Big Society in BIG trouble?

 celebrity, community, government, heroes and inspirational figures, morality, society, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 252011
 

So the day after David Cameron effectively relaunches the ‘Big Society’, with a new ‘white paper’, his key figure in charge of implementing the Big Society, Lord Wei of Shoreditch, resigns….

That could hardly be worse timing! Surely Cameron knew Wei was going?!? In which case it would have been much more politically astute to have rescheduled the launch of the white paper. As it is, Wei’s departure is a gift to Labour, with Shadow Cabinet Office minister Theresa Jowell saying, “….yet again”  the Big Society is “descending into farce. Only a day after Cameron told us all to take more responsibility, it appears that there will now be nobody in his government responsible for bringing the Big Society into reality.”

If Cameron didn’t know Wei was going, then it says something about Wei that he could time his resignation to such negative effect or about either Cameron’s judgement in recruiting such a fickle ally or  Cameron’s treatment of Wei that he could undermine his boss in such a damaging way.

Whatever the circumstances of Wei’s depearture, the effect is damaging both to Cameron personally and to the development of the Big Society concept.

Whether you think Cameron is being honest when he says the Big Society is the thing “I’m most passionate about in public life. This is what is in my heart. It’s what fires me up in the morning” - or it really is just an attempt to distract from the damage the cuts are doing to the social fabric of our kingdom, he certainly seems to be sticking with the theme. Even in face of withering criticism such as that of Jowell who said of the latest Big Society relaunch: “Under the indiscriminate impact of accelerated cuts, the essential elements of community life are slowly being starved of sustenance. What we lose in the next two years may become impossible to rebuild in ten.”

The Big Society and the cuts
Part of Cameron’s problem, of course, is that the cuts are doing very real damage - and the damage is going to get a lot worse before it eases off. Plus, that easing off may be some distance in the future if Vince Cable’s weekend statements about the abysmal state of Britain’s economic prospects are anything to go by. Thus, it may be that Cameron’s cuts and the general economic malaise of the country see damage to our social fabric on a par with the devastation of the traditional working classes in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher.

It is, of course, the Coalition Government’s mantra that there really is no way out of Britain’s financial mess other than the 25% cuts programme Chancellor George Osborne decreed last October. For all that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls is said to really still believe Britain should invest and grow its way out of the deficit, Labour leader Ed Milliband is insisting Balls sticks – in public, at least! – with predecessor Alistair Darling’s view that the cuts should be at a slightly lower rate of 20% and over a longer periodof time. So even though Osborne now acknowledges some need for investment and growth, the major players are pretty much agreed on the cuts – it’s only quite how deep and quite how fast on which they disagree.

The conundrum then is this: when people are losing their jobs…and then their houses…and then their relationships crack under the pressure, will they want to donate to charitable and community ventures from what little money they have? It could be argued that all the newly-unemployed will have the time to get engaged in charitable and community ventures…but will they be motivated to? When you’ve done everything right - done your job to the best of your ability, looked after your family and been a good, tax-paying citizen – only to lose much of what’s really important to you through no obvious fault of your own, do you really want to be told to take on unpaid work to help others by the man who ordered the cuts which have cost you so much?

It’s a slap in the face for the BLUE vMEME. Do what’s right…and you lose almost everything. It’s not supposed to be like this! Since the theory is that vMEMES ebb and flow according to the Life Conditions, if the Life Conditions are no longer appropriate to BLUE, then expect something very different. In the students fees protests last November, we saw a lot of angry RED damaging the property of those the demonstrators saw as being unaffected by the cuts - banks, high-end retailers, Conservative Party headquarters…even Charles & Camilla’s car!

My hunch is that we’re going to see an awful lot more of that kind of thing in the next couple of years. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, we’re going to see more and more people no longer able to participate in - be ‘seduced’ into – the consumerist society. Instead, they join the ranks of the ‘Repressed’. What we saw in the student fees protest could also be seen as those who feared they were going to be barred from the ranks of the Seduced - not being able to go to university being perceived as a severe restriction on career prospects.

Of course, the real story is not as simple as that. Students can still go to university and enhance their career prospects - it’s just that the debt incurred works in a different way and may prove more burdensome for many. Unfortunately, the Government is failing it get its message across - even with as formidable a figure as Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes spearheading the campaign to give students the real facts about the new fees structure.

Getting the message across
When it comes to the economy, it seems the Government is not entirely sure just what the message it is failing to get across actually is.

According to Vince Cable at the weekend, Britain’s economic malaise is more than just a return of the old boom-and-bust cycle Gordon Brown supposedly put an end to; it’s also a consequence of an ongoing restructure of the global economy. Eg: “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. We take our prices from international commodity markets driven by China and India.”

This is bad news for Cable’s party boss. Nick Clegg has staked the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes on the Coalition Government being able to turn the economy around sufficiently by 2015 for there to be a ‘feel good’ factor working for the Coalition partners in that year’s general election. Considering the drubbing the Lib Dems received in this April’s elections, the last thing Clegg wants to hear is Cable saying that Britain will have to get used to being poorer on at least a semi-permanent basis..

In a poorer Britain, of course, people doing it for themselves, rather than relying on a cash-strapped government - the essence of the Big Society meme – might be a highly practical approach. In fact, it may turn out to be the only way some things get done!

The question then comes back to: how do you get people - many of whom will have suffered severely because of the cuts – motivated to give to time and some of the little money they have to charity and community programmes?

That Cameron is not a particularly good communicator - and struggles to get his message beyond his core electorate - is indicated by the failure of the Tories to achieve a majority in the Commons when up against a jaded Labour Government and a prime minister (Brown) perceived by many to be petty and ineffectual. Many Tory campaigners reported they found it difficult to get the Big Society message across to voters on the doorstep – and a number simply dropped it from their list of issues to discuss.

Even now Cameron struggles to define just what the Big Society is, The best he could manage at Monday’s relaunch was: “The Big Society is not some fluffy add-on to more gritty and more important subjects. This is about as gritty and important as it gets – giving everyone the chance to get on in life and making our country a better place to live.”

To underline the Government’s commitment to the Big Society concept, Cameron wants his ministers to undertake a day of voluntary service over the course of the year with a charity or community group.

Yet, how much Cameron fails to understand how messages are received - the heart of Memetics - is demonstrated by his appointing Tory party donor and former ‘non-dom’ tax avoider Lord Ashcroft to head a review of British Army bases in Cyrus. When people are losing jobs and homes and being told by Cameron to give to charity and community projects,  Ashcroft’s appointment (though nominally unpaid) looks like more ‘jobs for the boys’ amongst the wealthy and the elite. No wonder Nick Clegg is said to be furious about the appointment!

A similar insensitivity with regard to how messages are perceived can be found in Cameron’s comments to the Daily Telegraph in April about it being OK to appoint political interns on the basis of personal contacts, rather than the more formal but equal opportunities-oriented basis Clegg was championing. The cynics might point to this and argue from that Cameron is really an old-fashioned Tory who just does as he wishes and only bothers with the ‘little people’ when he needs to exploit them. Certainly at times he seems to run off a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of pure arrogance!

Successful communication is about values
Or, more specifically, understanding and appreciating diversity in values.

While RED and BLUE might seem to dominate in his thinking on political appointees, when it comes to the Big Society, David Cameron’s language seems to indicate more that it’s GREEN (look after people on a community basis) and BLUE (because it’s our duty). GREEN thinking is way too complex for most people  – in 1976 James P Shaver & William Strong raised doubts as to whether most people develop beyond what is now termed BLUE..

As for that vMEME, if many people are downscaling from BLUE to RED because of adverse Life Circumstances, then a BLUE call to duty – when they’d done their ‘duty’ and got made redundant as a reward - is not likely to have much influence.

Rather than pitch the Big Society at BLUE and GREEN levels, Cameron would do better to make it ‘cool’ for RED so that helping out in a community project becomes a means of gaining status and respect. A short cut to achieving this would be to get celebrities to volunteer.

The ‘cult of celebrity’ has grown exponentially in tandem with the growth of mass media.  One psychologist interested in our fascination with celebrity is Kate Douglas. Douglas (2003) has suggested that it is evolutionarily adaptive to model successful individuals because, by learning from them, it may shorten our own route to success. So, who better to be seen demonstrating Big Society attitudes, values and activities at a time when many people are struggling to be successful (due to the cuts).

It the people need to learn to do for themselves what the Government can no longer afford to do, then, to maintain our society, the ability of the people to do has to grow at least that little bit faster than the Government’s ability to do decreases. Which means people have to be persuaded to volunteer ahead of the sheer necessity to take it up on themselves.

Which, in turn, means David Cameron has to persuade more than cajole. And persuading means working with what is important to people – their values – more than what’s important to you (your values).

More people in this kingdom think in PURPLE and RED than BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN. Which is why The Sun sells more copies than The Independent and why more people watch Coronation Street than Panorama. Thus, Big Society advocates have got to learn to talk the language of the people they want to communicate to.

So, Dave, maybe give Take That a call…get as many celebs doing Big Society stuff as you can. Make it cool. Make it fun!

…oh, and Dave, if you want to get re-elected in 2015, you’ve got to be seen as more trustworthy than the other lot. No more Ashcroft deals, huh?!

Could Bernard Jenkin and Iain Duncan Smith be 2nd Tier thinkers?

 Afghanistan, charity, community, government, international conflict, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Oct 192010
 

Maybe there is some hope of 2nd Tier thinking emerging amongst UK politicians….?

 I was greatly heartened yesterday to hear Bernard Jenkin, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme call for strategic thinking to create a “deep and sustained analysis of what kind of country we want to be in 10 or  20 years time.”

Jenkin, Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), was being interviewed about the Committee’s report, ‘Who does UK National Strategy?’, published mere hours before the first part of the Government’s Strategic & Security Defence Review.

The Committee’s report suggested there was a tendency for Whitehall to “muddle through”. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were cited as examples where there had been a lack of over-arching strategy.

The report also warned that the UK’s capacity to think strategically had been undermined by assumptions that its national interests are best served by its relationship with the US and economic links within the European Union – “Uncritical acceptance of these assumptions has led to a waning of our interests in, and ability to make, national strategy,”

Unfortunately Foreign Secretary William Hague attempted to make political capital from the report, saying it showed a “chronic lack of strategic thinking in Britain’s foreign and security policy” in recent years. In other words, it’s all Labour’s fault! Perhaps Hague’s response was inevitable, given the fractious relations between the Coalition Government and Ed Milliband’s increasingly left-leaning Opposition; but I could have hoped for better from a politician who has often displayed a high complexity of thinking alongside rough and ready practicality.

In spite of Hague’s rhetoric that: “Under this government there is a proper mechanism for the bringing together of strategic decisions about our security, defence, diplomacy and development, after years of ad-hoc thinking and poor decision- making.” – he was given only guarded approval by Jenkin in his Today interview. Jenkin acknowledged Hague’s vision in foreign policy but lamented that very little was being done in Whitehall to make it effective.

The need for strategic thinking
Bernard Jenkin is a rather controversial character. A seemingly-tireless self-promoter who got hurt in last year’s parliamentary expenses scandal, he wears his convictions on his sleeve (limited integration with the EU, anti-proportional representation) and appears to expect everyone else to treat them as the only sane option. Nonetheless, he is absolutely right about the need for strategic thinking and the tactical way in which he has exposed the lack of it without overtly undermining the Coalition Government smacks of a certain brilliance.

While the remit of its report is defence, the PASC yesterday caught the whole of Whitehall in its sights: “We welcome the new Government’s aspiration to think more strategically, but when we tried to find out who actually does UK National Strategy, virtually all the evidence we took suggests the answer is ‘no one’. Ministers are in danger of announcing a Strategic & Security Defence Review that is anything but ‘strategic’. Whitehall has fallen out of the habit of strategic thinking.  Different departments think about strategy in different ways, often at cross-purposes.”

In his Today interview, Jenkin expanded on this: “…we’ve lost the art of strategic thinking…. There needs to be much better cross-departmental working. For example, the Treasury, their strategy is clearly deficit reduction but it’s not the only strategic imperative facing us….”

A key element in Jenkin’s brilliance has been to say all the traditional assumptions should go under the microscope and to call for truly radical thinking which takes into account the resources available. For example, he told Today: “If we’re going to have to live in a much smaller envelope, how do we completely reorganise the way we do defence? Instead it’s been about Okay what do we have to cut?”

This very much reflects my ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the Vision?’ Blog when I wrote: “…what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?”

The Big Society sounds like it might actually result in effective taking up of some of the slack as the public sector is shredded in the coming years…but what will the Big Society look like? What kind of people are expected to inhabit it?

When Jenkin asks, “…what kind of country we want to be in 10 or  20 years time?” – he’s going along very similar lines.

Having the capacity for strategic thinking
That David Cameron and Nick Clegg, together or separately, have yet to articulate a vision of transformed Britain beyond the most woolly philosophy, may not just represent the difficulty in bringing together 2 very different political traditions. It may also reflect a lowered capacity within government to develop strategic thinking.

As Jenkin told Today: “You need the research and assessment staff who are going to do the analysis and assessments…. There used to be… a six-month course at the Civil Service College for strategic thinking. Now there is a one-week module. It’s that kind of reduction in the importance of  strategic thinking that’s being denied.”

It’s perhaps telling that the minister who most completely has a vision for his area of responsibility and who had the arguments so well prepared he managed to get the key points through the Treasury’s slashing was Iain Duncan Smith. His Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank, outside of the Whitehall malaise, has been researching and proposing options on social policy reform for years. Duncan Smith has had the benefit of substantial strategic thinking resources.

While the CSJ undoubtedly has a PURPLE/BLUE ‘family values’ bias in its fundamental assumptions about how society should work, there are clearly GREEN empathies both in the unrelenting distaste for poverty that underpins everything it does and in the way it connects up with so many charities. That it could guide Duncan Smith into preparing for a totally different way of thinking about welfare demonstrates the radical, daring thinking Jenkin calls for right across Whitehall. Again, one might well attribute 2nd Tier thinking to Duncan Smith and his team who have included the likes of psychologists Rod Morgan and Lawrence Sherman and maverick Labour MP Frank Field.

The Cuts…from the BLUE vMEME or 2nd Tier thinking?
As the country braces itself for the most savage spending cuts since the early days of the Great Depression, there is no doubting the need to cut the defecit. Labour will say they’re much too soon, much too broad and much too deep – but Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were starting to head in a similar direction before their election defeat (if not at the same frantic pace!).

The question, to me, is: are we just cutting, cutting and cutting – driven by the BLUE vMEME’s drive to do ‘what’s right’, regardless of the human cost – or is there a vision for the shaping and reshaping – social construction – of a different kind of, hopefully better society. If it’s the latter, then it needs to come from 2nd Tier thinking – the kind of dazzling, daring thinking that’s comng from the CSJ.

Unfortunately, as Jenkin, indicates, it seems highly unlikely that kind of thinking is widespread in Whitehall. It needs to be.

In his interview, Jenkin at one point was savaged by Today regular James McNaughtie for seeming to suggest that he was advocating the training and development of strategic thinkers at a time when Whitehall was meant to be cut back. Jenkin denied that he wanted to create a new department as such  but, as with the report, advocated an investment in the development of training and resources in strategic thinking.

Jenkin, again, is right. If we cannot develop – re-develop? – longer-term strategic thinking, then we risk being limited and trapped by myopic short-termism.