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.

Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

 celebrity, government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 132012
 

Earlier this year Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, told BBC 1’s Daily Politics show that David Cameron and George Osborne were “…two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.” (James Orr, 2012) It was a stunning, biting barb that left Cameron and Osborne flummoxed, with the former desperately stating that he paid just under 50p for a pint of milk.Just a few weeks earlier Dorries had gunned down Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in a Financial Times interview with a similar cutting comment: “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” (George Parker, Elizabeth Rigby & Kiran Stacey, 2012)

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons - Copyright © 2012 Press Association

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons – Copyright © 2012 Press Association

In those remarks, Dorries summed up so perfectly the frustration and anger of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have been disenfranchised by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme. For everyone who’s lost their job and/or their house (and possibly their relationship and possibly their children and their self-respect) as a result (direct or indirect) of government policy, for a few weeks at least Dorries was their champion. She expertly exposed the hypocrisy in Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “We’re all in this together”. By the ‘we’ in “we’re all in this together”, Cameron seems to mean everyone who’s not part of the 1% wealth-owning elite – who have become so prominently the targets of the ‘Occupy’ movement – and their sycophantic puppets like Cameron and Osborne. (Though there is an argument for it as a strategy, Osborne has actually made the British elite wealthier this Autumn by cutting the very top of rate of tax, for those earning more than £150,000 per annum, from 50p to 45p.)To bring out the bitter irony in this, Osborne admitted formally in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday 5 December that the Government will not make its deficit reduction target and that the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ will have to be extended from 2015 to 2018. In other words, how ever much Cameron and Osborne want to blame the 2008 global crash and the ensuing worldwide recession, the inescapable fact is that their policies are not successful in dealing with the problems. (Governments are supposed to develop policies that deal successfully with what ever problems their country faces. When they fail to deal with the problems, they effectively declare themselves to be incompetent.) So, while they make the poor poorer and the rich richer, the Government has to admit its policies aren’t working.

For their part in blithely acquiescing to both the incompetence and the greed of the Tories, the Lib Dems can expect to lose so many deposits in 2015 that they will be in danger of being wiped out of Parliament. (On the assumption that they somehow keep their seats, it will be interesting to see whether Clegg and Danny Alexander, Osborne’s number 2, abandon the what’s left of the parliamentary Lib Dems and formally join the Tories….)

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, influential elements of the Conservative Party have been driven by the ORANGE vMEME. (While there were totally-unforgiveable costs to Thatcherite policies in terms of damage done to the social fabric of our communities, especially in Wales, the Midlands and North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands – see The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain? – they nonetheless restored Britain as an economic giant. Ironically it was Labour prime minister Tony Blair who, by essentially continuing Thatcher’s policies, took Britain to the position of second richest country in the world in terms of gross national product. (World Bank, 2007) Tragically, there seems little ORANGE in the current top Tory mindset. Rather, it seems to be driven by the RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of zealotry. BLUE in that there is only one way – austerity – and it must be taken, no matter the cost to human beings. RED in that it is short-sighted and concerned only with increasing personal wealth and power and the wealth and power of its in-group, the 1%.

So, when Cameron and Osborne and their hapless lapdogs Clegg and Alexander are revealed so clearly in their incompetence and greed, where’s Nadine Dorries to put the knife in, puncture some over-inflated selfplexes and talk some much-needed home truths?

I’m a celebrity…
Unfortunately, when Dorries should have been skewering Cameron and Osborne (in the Autumn Statement) for the increased tax load they expect the middle class ‘strivers’ to shoulder, her own RED vMEME had led her away from Westminster in an all-too short-sighted pursuit of wealth and power as a contestant in I’m a Celebrity…get me out of here!

With her (partly-plastic) sculptured good looks and a genuine talent for quick-fire put-downs, it must have seemed to both the show’s producers and Dorries herself that she was a natural for I’m a Celebrity. So the antagonism her participation has produced in the Conservative Party ranks, in the media and amongst her constituents appears to have been largely unanticipated. According to a poll conducted by ex-Tory Party Deputy Chair Lord Ashcroft amongst 1500 of the Mid-Bedfordshire constituents, 58% disapproved of her being on I’m a Celebrity,  with 42% disapproving strongly. As for the programme’s viewers, they voted her to undergo the most gruesome tasks (such as eating an ostrich anus) and voted her off at the first opportunity.

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle - Copyuright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle – Copyright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

As partial justification for appearing on the show, Dorries claimed that, in conversation with other participants, she would be able to get across to 16 million viewers her controversial views proposing lowering the time limit for abortion and school sex education lessons explicitly teaching teenage girls to abstain. This proved to be hopelessly naïve. Those conversations were simply never included in the broadcasts.  The RED vMEME, of course, has no sense of future or of consequences. So it seems Dorries had little notion that her foray into the jungle would enable David Cameron’s RED to have its revenge. Inevitably she was suspended from the party by Conservative Party Chief Whip Sir George Young as soon as it was learned she was heading for Australia. On 27 November, the day after returning from Australia, Dorries met with Young to discuss the situation. A spokesman for Young was quoted after the meeting as saying: “The whip has not been restored and nor will it be until she proves she can rebuild bridges with her constituents, her association and her parliamentary colleagues.” Dorries, it was said, had a fortnight to mend fences with her constituency association. On 10 December BBC News reported that she had indeed secured the unanimous backing of local members. As legally Dorries is the sitting MP until the next election, whether as a Tory or not, the local party felt it was better the constituency had a Conservative MP representing it. However, Paul Duckett, Chair of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association, added the rider that there was no guarantee Dorries would be selected to stand in 2015. The same BBC News story also carried Cameron’s latest comments: “I believe MPs should either be in their constituencies fighting for their constituents or at Westminster standing up for their area. A lot of MPs were angry that she just waltzed off to the jungle….She has got to earn her way back into the affections of her colleagues.” On 24 November, just before setting back from Australia, Dorries repeated her earlier support for Boris Johnson replacing Cameron, telling The Sun’s Laura Armstrong: “I long for the day Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Boris is my King of the Jungle.” She also attacked the degree of control exercised by the whips: “There is a real control mechanism under Cameron in Number Ten now. MPs and how they vote are tampered with.” Since the meeting with Young, Dorries has refrained from such inflammatory comments…but no wonder Cameron says she has to win his affections!Whether Conservative Central Office would actually continue to deny Dorries the whip in face of the constituency association’s request for it to be reinstated is a moot point but Central Office does have a history of imposing its will on local party organisations. Such a course could have some justification in a report in The Times on 10 December that a petition calling for a by-election in Mid-Bedfordshire had already collected 700 signatures. (Michael Savage, 2012)

If Dorries continues to be denied the whip, there is speculation she could defect to UKIP, giving them a high profile, glamorous MP with a penchant for publicity for a honeymoon couple of years – after which she would almost certainly lose Mid-Bedfordshire and could be sidelined from frontline politics before she turned on their leadership. If she is reinstated to the Tory whip, what price would Cameron extract and what measures could the whips take to control her?

Dorries’ sheer impulsiveness is reflected in her attacking Labour MP Stephen McCabe on Twitter for reporting her to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, pointing out his own attendance rate was just 63%. McCabe responded by pointing out that he had taken time off to recover from having open heart surgery.

People’s champion…or drama queen?
Nadine Dorries would make a great people’s champion, being very much a working class Tory – unlike the public school boys currently running the Government. She was raised on a council estate on Merseyside, with her parents among the first tenants who bought their council house under Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. She worked as a nurse in the days when nurses were not considered the elite professionals they are now but changed dirty sheets and cleaned up vomit amongst their more ‘medical’ duties.

So Dorries understands the ordinary person in a way Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, with their moneyed upbringings, almost certainly don’t.

However, she is also a very astute woman who ran her own childcare business for 11 years and then sold it to BUPA, with part of the deal being that she became one of that company’s directors. It’s unlikely anyone could do that without a well-developed ORANGE vMEME governing their thinking.

As a self-made woman with working class roots, Dorries has the potential to become a centre of gravity for those on the Conservative benches who are unhappy with the make-the-rich-richer-and-the-rest-poorer policies pursued by Cameron and Osborne. An internal opposition that could exert pressure to ameliorate some of the Government’s more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, Dorries often seems to put her immediate self-interest before duty and then justifies her choices in a manner that seems almost deluded. As with the delusion that the producers of I’m a Celebrity were going to air hours of technical debate about whether the time limit for abortions should come down from 24 weeks to 20.

Dorries also has a history of altering her history to make it seem more dramatic and glamorous. For example, she reduced her age by 10 years when contesting (unsuccessfully) Greater Manchester’s Hazel Grove constituency in 2001. Her 2009 autobiographical account of her 2005 selection in Mid-Bedfordshire reads: “That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high …” However, The Times account paints the selection process as much less of an achievement: “Mrs Dorries…easily beat her 11 rivals and won the plum safe seat on the first ballot at the selection this weekend…. Senior party figures had made clear to local dignitaries that they would like the seat to go to a woman and presented the constituency with a shortlist of seven women and five men to underline the point.” (Rosemary Bennett & Helen Rumbelow, 2005)

Even the degree to which Dorries presents herself as a Christian varies significantly. She told the Salvation Army’s The War Cry: “I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use.” (Nigel Bovey, 2007) Yet a few years later, when asked if it was her Christian faith driving her campaign to lower the abortion time limit, she responded: “Not at all. Not even a shred.” When asked about her faith, she said: “I believe in other people’s Gods as well.” (Mehdi Hasan, 2012) To be fair to Dorries, people do change their minds and just a few days before that interview, she told Charles Maggs that she was struggling to keep to her Christian faith in the culture of Westminster.

Nonetheless, such inconsistencies indicate a lack of strong BLUE in her selfplex - and that may help explain why she apparently failed to anticipate such a strong antipathy to her participation in I’m a Celebrity.

What now?
There’s one sense in which Dorries clearly has the upper hand. She’s the sitting MP for Mid-Bedfordshire - and that simply cannot be taken away from her until 2015. How she plays that hand could influence politics in the UK for years to come. She could choose to become a key figure in a constructive opposition within the Conservative Party or she could defect to UKIP and play a prominent, if possibly short-lived, role in their growth strategy. Dorries’ ORANGE can certainly weigh up the strategic options but she will need to develop her BLUE much more to give her the discipline to tow the line when necessary and restrain her impulsiveness. (She’s so impulsive that, if she were a male, she would easily fit many of the criteria for the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism. Unfortunately neither Dorries nor anyone who knows her well is on record as commenting on her sex drive!)

Or she could simply exploit her celebrity. But what a waste of a potential people’s champion that would be!

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.

Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items. As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Feb 082011
 

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘”Radical Islam” and the Return of Tony Blair’)

Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation.

In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multi-culturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its own cultural practices and traditions. Anti-discrimination legislation had protected the minorities – though arguably not so much the majority - leading to a failure to integrate into ‘mainstream British culture’.  Then the very existence of multiple cultures - multiculturalism - with each one given equal due meant no one culture could dominate, leading to a diminishing of mainstream British culture - with a sense of loss of ‘Britishness’ and even confusion as to what ‘British identity’ might actually mean.

Cameron’s attack is certainly not new or isolated. The formal identification of multiculturalism as a source of racial, ethnic and cultural divisions began with Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, commenting on the reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001. He told The Times (Tom Baldwin & Gabriel Rozenberg, 2004) that multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful – not least because it encouraged ‘separateness’ between communities. He said that multiculturalism – one of the founding principles of his own organisation - “means the wrong things…. We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies.”

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in a speech last year that the concept of multiculturalism had been developed to create a more tolerant society – one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. However, multiculturalism’s message ended up becoming: “There is no need to integrate.” Further, Sacks saw multiculturalism as dissolving national identity, shared values and collective identity which “makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into”.

I’ve touched upon the undermining of national identity via multiculturalism in Blog posts such as ‘Is restricting Immigration discriminatory?’…while Jon Twigge has taken the issue fully head-on in the Blog ‘The Curious Case of Being British’. There is little doubt that Cameron is describing, not theorising or speculating. Inevitably, though, for a politician trying to play the ‘populist card’, Cameron has oversimplified the issues.

Then there is the conundrum: if we accept that multiculturalism has led us to become a Britain of ‘divided tribes’ and the majority have lost much of their unique sense of Britishness, then what do we do about it?

What is the ‘British Identity’ and what are ‘British values’?
If we want to embody or become something, it’s a good idea to spell out just what that something is. So what is ‘British identity’ and what are ‘British values’?

On Saturday Cameron said: “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism [which] believes in certain values and actively promotes them…. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality. This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe those things.”

That’s helpful. But the values the prime minister espoused are pretty much those formally held by any modern western democratic state. It hardly informs us what ‘Britishness’ is.

To expect people to adopt values unrelated to their identity is a fallacy. As Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model shows clearly, truly-held values come from the identity you hold in relation (contextually) to the environment you are in.

So, for people to cherish ‘British values’, they must have a ‘British identity’. When people wholeheartedly see themselves as ‘British’, then they are much more likely to hold British values.

Just over 18 months ago the inaugural Centre of Human Emergence - UK event featured Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck leading us through an exploration of the British character - see: ‘”Britishness” at the Regent’s College Summit’. What we came up with was:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric - often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threats
  • Humour-full -– we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

In large part our assessment was based on the past - our recent history from the days of Empire, through the Blitz to the ‘Swinging Sixites’ - though an echo of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was acknowledged in the carry-on attitude displayed by many Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of course, in identifying Britishness, we can’t simply go back to the 1960s before multiculturalism really began to take hold. That was then; this is now. As noted children’s author Rosemary Wilkie said at Regent’s College: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”  So we need a new sense of Britishness, one that does indeed draw on Britain’s illustrious past but one which also takes stock of the peoples we are right now and one which can inspire us as a nation into our future.

Britain is not the land of white anglo culture it was 40 years ago. A walk along the high street of most towns will reveal a plethora of Asian, Chinese and Thai restaurants and takeaways – with the occasional West Indian or North African nestled in between them. These establishments couldn’t stay in business without substantial patronage from amongst the white majority.

This fact alone should tell anyone with the ability to view these things objectively that you can’t just turn the clock back 40 years - just imagine: no Chinese or Indian eating houses or takeaways! So the British National Party (BNP) pipedream of shipping 2nd and 3rd generation Asians and blacks off to some place their grandfather came from is just that: a fantasy pipedream. Short of the BNP being able to impose a totalitarian state in Britain and pursuing the kind of 10-year blame and dehumanisation strategies the Nazis employed against the Jews which eventually enabled them to pursue the ‘Final Solution’, black and Asian Britons are here to stay.

Even with the will to integrate, it is inevitable that many of them will be bi-cultural: they have the culture of the land they live in and belong to now and the heritage of the land their grandparents came from. On the one hand, it is essential to developing Britishness that they do assimilate into the mainstream; on the other hand, from their heritages, many ethnic groups have much to offer beyond eating houses.

So we need a ‘British identity’ that not only draws inspiration from the past but also incorporates, to some degree at least, the amount of diversity found these days in Britain’s streets.

Another factor to take into consideration in developing a new British identity is that Britain is, in fact, composed of 3 nations in a United Kingdom with Northern Ireland. While the Welsh and especially the Scottish contributed much to the explorations and innovations that developed Empire, ‘Britain’ all too often meant England and ‘England’ meant Britain. That code was particularly prevalent in foreign portrayals of the ‘British’ or the ‘English’ - the terms being effectively interchangeable. Just look at the way Hollywood movies portrayed us in the 1930s through to the 1960s. The Welsh hardly got a look-in and Scots were only usually included if it was to caricature the ‘wild highlander’! 

That simply won’t do now. With Welsh nationalism an ever-strong presence in the Welsh Assembly and a minority Scots Nationalist Government in Hollyrood, any new sense of British identity must incorporate sufficient elements of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Scottishness’ to appeal to those more assertive and confident peoples no longer prepared to acquiesce compliantly to the Englishness.

Creating the new ‘Britishness’
Back in 2004, Trevor Phillips said: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness…. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values.”

The question then becomes: how do you create that integrated society Phillips talked about?

A strategy Tony Blair’s Government introduced in 2005 in an attempt to inculcate knowledge about Britain into immigrants applying for British citizenship (or long-term residency) was the mandatory ‘Life in the UK’ test. It covers issues such as Britain’s constitution, the originating countries of previous UK immigrants, family life in the UK and where dialects like Geordie, Scouse or Cockney come from. Knowledge of practical matters such as the minimum age to buy alcohol and tobacco and what services are provided by local authorities are also covered. Finally, the test requires a certain level of fluency in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

Last May the Home Office revealed that a third of applicants fail the test.

Out of interest, I gave my GCSE Sociology classes the following mini-version of the test:-

  • What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?
  • What is the role of the Prime Minister? Who advises them and what are the main roles in the  Cabinet?
  • What is the Opposition and what is the role of the Leader of the Opposition?
  • What are MPs? How often are elections held and who forms the government?
  • Do women have equal rights in voting, education and work - and has this always been the case?
  • How is political debate reported? Are newspapers free to publish opinions or do they have to
      remain impartial?

Close to a half failed the test. But, as several students - all of them white anglo – protested, their parents would probably have failed too and they were undoubtedly British!

As Dilts’ Neurological Levels model demonstrates only too clearly, it’s much more likely that identity leads to the values which make you want to acquire relevant knowledge than being fed knowledge shapes identity. The high level of failure in the Life in the UK test would indicate many applicants don’t value the knowledge…and the reason for that is almost certainly because they don’t really see themselves as British. Forcing knowledge at people in the hope they will ingest it does not mean they will. Ask any teacher!

By all means, from Phillips through Blair to Cameron, there needs to be pressure to integrate on the basis of the old proverb: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But that pressure alone - which comes from BLUE’s do-what’s-right thinking – will not produce integration. Indeed, in immigrant communities where the acculturation strategy - as identified by John Berry (1997) – is to marginalise (have only minimal contact with the majority culture) or, even worse, separate (avoid contact altogether) to preserve the purity of the immigrants’ cultural identity, such pressure may even lead to extreme separation,  a sense of persecution and deep-felt alienation from the mainstream culture. And that can only fuel the radicalisation of young Muslims in such immigrant communities.

What Government strategies life ‘Life in the UK’ miss is the need to target the PURPLE vMEME as well as the BLUE vMEME. What also needs to be understood by the strategists is that PUPRLE naturally differentiates between ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe’ - with race/colour, religion and ‘ethnic dress’ being the more obvious markers of difference – see: ‘Is Racism Natural?’ in the Society section of the main site.

If tribalism is natural and the markers of difference are needed to distinguish the tribes, how then can integration ever be possible?

The answer is that complete integration is likely to take generations as people grow beyond the boundaries of their tribal areas – and there are signs this is starting to happen naturally, led by one of the most powerful instincts of all: sexual love. While at the above-mentioned Regent’s College Summit in June 2009, I was impressed with how many white/black and white/Asian couples I saw in the pubs around cosmopolitan Finchley where I was staying. Around the same time last year, I attended the wedding of a white friend’s daughter to a Muslim man.

Using techniques adapted from sociopsychology, this process can be manipulated and accelerated. Muzafir Sherif et al ‘s famous Robber’s Cave Experiment (1954) demonstrated that you can create super identities with shared values if you create challenges which are so daunting, it is only by working together that they can be overcome. In 1984 G Andreeva, to all intents and purposes, repeated Sherif et al’s study but in a different culture - Russia – and this concept of uniting the tribes via common challenge (or threat) is at the heart of  Samuel Gerners’ Common In-Group Identity Model (1993). However, while Gerner expressed concern that there could be a reversion to tribal identities once the challenge was accomplished, an interesting study by Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found it effectively impossible to turn the lesser identities against each other provided there was a potential for the super identity to endure and there was a moral element to the identity. In this case, the super identity was boy scouts, the study was carried out on different scout groups brought together and the moral element was the Boy Scouts Code of Honour.

Of course, it is difficult - if not impossible (short of genocide) - to eradicate tribal identities entirely and those tribal identities will always require managing. Just think how PURPLE tribalism tore apart Yugoslavia and  the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation once the repressive BLUE controls of the Communist state were removed! But, if the memetic focus is on shared/common values, desires and needs, then the tribes can be brought together to work on achieving shared/common aims. After all, most people, whatever their tribe, want a decent income, good schooling for their children, freedom from crime and the fear of crime, value for money local services and amenities, etc, etc. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept, if presented correctly, could actually stimulate inter-tribal co-operation. After all, if government does less, then the people need to come together to do more.

Last Summer, working with Councillor Darren Reynolds of Burnley Council, he and I tentatively mapped out how gatherings of seemingly-disparate tribes might work together in that ‘race relations hotspot’ to achieve things the Council could not.

Who do you belong to: God or the State?
This, for the devout – Christian, Jew or Muslim- is always going to be an issue if the state’s laws and/or requirements conflict with religious duty. For the devout, at the end of the day, it is usually God who wins. Eg: for the Christian, Acts 5:29 says simply: “…obey God rather than men…”

Thus, national identity needs to be constructed in such a way that it is not at odds with mainstream religious teaching.

David Cameron’s linking of a failure to become ‘British’ with extremist Islam is only valid if other causes of radicalisation are acknowledged and strategies put into place to deal with them.

For Muslims, there is a duty to fight with other Muslims against oppressors – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

All too easily radical imams have been able to turn the Anglo-American blunders in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq and insensitivity to untold numbers of civilian lives lost or ruined into tales of the West oppressing Islam.

Thus, it’s difficult for a Muslim to be ‘British’ if the British are perceived to be carelessly slaughtering Muslims. The PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic of loyalty and duty tells them they should be standing alongside their brothers and sisters fighting the oppressor.

In terms of whether young Muslims can be reconciled to a British identity, the Government has been losing the propaganda war since 2002 and first talk of invading Iraq. And there’s no sign yet that the new Government has any better idea than the previous one of how to win the war of hearts and minds. No wonder MI6 is predicting ‘an unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers’!

For young Muslims appalled at Anglo-American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reconciled to being British, their BLUE need to be told by those with high authority as Islamic scholars that violence is not the way to express disquiet and disgust. Rather, that their voices can be heard through the British political systems.

I’m still baffled why so much more was not made of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa last year denouncing terrorism and stating suicide bombers could not go to Heaven - see: ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ As one of the most scholarly texts based on Islamic scriptures in recent years from one of the religion’s leading thinkers, it was literally an instruction to Muslims not to commit violence against civilians whatever the cause.

Yet it was largely ignored by western leaders.

The works of ul-Qadri –  an appropriate teacher for the BLUE of many Muslims – and similar scholars should be being promoted through the mosques as the correct interpretation of Islamic scripture. With such memes forming their schemas, it is then possible for young Muslims to be British and use our democratic systems to articulate their needs, desires and dissatisfactions.

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?

 Afghanistan, business, charity, community, crime, education, government, human rights, mental health, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  48 Responses »
Jul 152010
 

2 months ago, in ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’, I wrote about my hopes that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition might indeed be the start of the ‘new politics’ Nick Clegg says he’s always believed in. I talked about the need for 2nd Tier thinking in Government to take us beyond repeating the same old mistakes, ideological conflicts and embezzlement of the public purse.

A month on I’ve yet to see real signs of 2nd Tier thinking in anything the new Government does.

Yes, as Henry Porter wrote in last Sunday’s Observer (11 July), they’ve made a good start. “…the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing. To be sure, there have been blunders, like Michael Gove’s botched announcement on scrapping new schools, but it surely is right to suggest that doctors be put in charge of spending GPs’ £80bn budget, to remove the target culture from the health service and provide 24-hour cover. The withdrawal from Sangin and setting a deadline for ending combat in Afghanistan is welcome, as is the review of defence needs and spending. For once, our relations with the world appear to be conducted by grown-ups without displays of fawning or self-importance…..In two months, the coalition has announced the ending of the wasteful and, as it turns out, dangerously insecure children’s database, ContactPoint, as well as the ID card scheme. Immigration minister Damian Green put an end to the inhumane detention of thousands of children belonging to asylum seekers. Theresa May has agreed to examine the way the police are collecting and storing photographs and data about legitimate protesters, like 85-year-old peace campaigner John Catt who was classified as a “domestic extremist. She has also said that the automatic number plate recognition system that tracks and records 10 million vehicle journey per day will be placed under statutory regulation and scrutinised for the first time. CCTV cameras used to watch Muslims in Birmingham have been disabled. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act terror laws, used by councils to spy on members of the public, are to be reserved for counterterror operations. And in the last week the home secretary suspended section 44 of the Terrorism Act which allowed police to stop and search 250,000 innocent people last year alone, and [David] Cameron announced details of a full judicial inquiry into allegations that British intelligence officers were involved in the torture of terror suspects.”

 As Porter says, the “Coalition is popular” - and that may, in part at least, why there has been so little reaction against the massive cuts the Government is going to make – and is already making – in the public sector. (RMT leader Bob Crow’s call for a general strike is, at this stage at least, a very lone voice.) The Treasury’s demand, ‘leaked’ from the Cabinet meeting of 1 July, for most Cabinet ministers to prepare plans for cutting their budgets by 40% is, as some commentators have suggested, almost certainly scaremongering. That way, the real depth of the coming cuts – predicted to average out at 25% – will seem nothing like so bad.

While, as Henry Porter points out, the new government are already implementing a number of new policies, their ‘big idea’ undoubtedly is cutting the deficit; and it will certainly be the defining policy of the Coalition’s first few years in power.

Though I think the developing policy on Afghanistan is muddled and short-sighted – see ‘Why we must win in Afghanistan’ - much else the Coalition is doing seems headed in the right direction. Even the cuts.

We all knew there would be cuts. We’ve been told since before Christmas that there would have to be cuts; and Labour aren’t denying that they were edging towards the 20% figure for cuts in their own proposals. (Though Labour almost definitely weren’t planning to impose the cuts as hurriedly as Chancellor George Osborne intends.)

So why am I casting doubts on the quality of thinking in the new government?

Essentially, it’s because I’ve yet to see a vision being articulated.

Cameron & Clegg, in their co-written article for the Daily Telegraph (12 July) say they “…want to change our country for the better. We want to see the best schools open to the poorest children, a first-class NHS there for everyone, streets that are safe, families that are stable and communities that are strong.” That’s hardly a vision since it’s pretty much everything every politician tells the voters. Nor is a key strategy - that of slimming down and decentralising government – a vision.

When I say ‘vision’, I mean a view of how society should be.

The need for a vision
Margaret Thatcher, for example, had a clear vision based on the philosophy of meritocracy. It’s all too easy to see Thatcher as being about depriving unprofitable heavy industries of state subsidies or busting the unions or deregulating the money markets. Rather they were key strategies to free up individuals to create and enjoy wealth. ‘Thatcherism’ was such a success that Tony Blair carried many aspects of it over into the early years of his government, with the British being the second richest people on the planet (based on gross national income per head) by 2006 (World Bank, 2007).

However, it was far from being a 2nf Tier philosophy since it left substantial communities in Wales, the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland devastated, with a consequent raft of social problems – including large scale unemployment amongst the indigenous working classes, many house repossessions, spiraling divorce rates, substantial alcohol and drug abuse and an explosion in small-scale crime (drug dealing, prostitution, burglary, car theft and mugging, etc).

In the early days Blair talked from time to time of creating a ‘decent society’ but there was never any real elaboration of what he meant. So Britain drifted on, the majority reaping the rewards of Blair’s neo-Thatcherism while a substantial minority got lost in the sprawling urban sink estates typified so well in the Shameless TV programme.

Now a great many more of us are faced with ‘sinking’. The newly-created Office of Budget Responsibility anticipates 600,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next 6 years. Meanwhile leaked Treasury figures anticipate more than 700,000 private sector jobs will go in the same time period. When confronted by Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, about these figures at Prime Minister’s Questions on 30 June, Cameron stated that employment would rise during the life of the Coalition…but he didn’t say how.

The remarkable Coalition is enjoying a remarkable ‘honeymoon period’ with the voters (in spite of some venomous attempts in certain parts of the media to hurry them towards divorce). Partly that’s because people are ready for something different from the party-centric conflicts of the past. Partly it’s because Dave ‘n’ Nick actually do seem to enjoy a genuine rapport. Indeed much of the Government seems infused with bonhomie – even George Osborne and his Lib Dem Chief Secretary Danny Alexander seem capable of  singing from the proverbial ‘same hymn sheet’!

But bonhomie isn’t going to go very far when people are losing their jobs and their homes and seeing their standard of living plummet - and there seems little or no hope of things getting significantly better. The truly scary thing about Osborne’s ‘cuts budget’ is that there’s almost nothing in it to stimulate economic growth.

On 30 June Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s chief economist John Philpott told BBC News: “The government thinks that just by …tackling the deficit, there will be a vent for growth because the prospects for investments and exports will be greater. If you look at both demand in the UK economy and more globally, there is a question mark over that and if that doesn’t pay off then we’re going to have a much weaker employment outlook.”

If the economy fails to grow sufficiently in the short-to-medium term to offset the social sinking caused by the cuts in the immediate-to-short-term, we risk becoming a different kind of Britain.

Thatcher – love her or loathe her! – had a pretty clear vision of the kind of Britain she wanted us to become. So 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?

25%…25%!!!!
You simply cannot take 25% out of the public economy in anything but the very shortest term and not create massive change.

So where do we start? (After all, Clegg has promised widespread consultation over how and where to apply the cuts….)

Maybe you’re OK with having to take your own recycling to the council tip; and having your domestic rubbish collected only every other week would be acceptable…?

Getting the potholes in your road filled in only every other Spring…?

Class sizes of 35-plus and out-of-date textbooks instead of broadband-connected PCs in schools…?

How many police officers are we prepared to lose…? (Former chief constable Tim Brain estimates, for Police Review, that between 11,500 and 60,000 police officer, civilian staff and community support officer posts will be lost by 2015.)

According to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, speaking on Tuesday evening (13 July) to judges at their annual Mansion House Dinner, the fall in recorded crime during the 1990s may have been precipitated by economic growth, high employment levels and rising living standards rather than imprisoning criminals.

If Clarke is right, then will the reverse prove true when we add another 1.5 million to the unemployed tally, some of whom will be police officers?

Having still not cleaned up fully the ‘human waste’ from Thatcher’s era, are we now going to add massively to the ‘human rubbish tip’?

Just what do you do with 3 million people with no jobs and few prospects, slashed to the bare bones benefits, a still dwindling jobs market and many losing their homes…? Faced with similar crises, Margaret Thatcher, the most unpopular prime minister since the end of World War II, took us into another war – the Falklands – from which she emerged victorious and untouchable for another 8 years, the public behind her so much she was able to batter the miners almost with impunity.

What will Cameron and Clegg do to reverse their fortunes when, as is all but inevitable once people really start to suffer, their popularity dwindles? (Only yesterday a supermarket till assistant told me she wanted “that new prime minister shot because he took away my second baby’s child benefit!”)

What kind of Britain will we become?
The challenges Britain faces as the cuts bite are more than simply coping with lower standards of living, mass unemployment, schools troubled more than ever and a likely substantial rise in small-scale crime – as if they weren’t daunting enough! We actually face a major change at vMEMETIC level in societal values.

Since the late 1960s much of the political agenda in Britain (and in the rest of the Western world) has been driven by the GREEN vMEME. Anti-racism, feminism, health & safety, rights for disabled people, employment rights, anti-ageism, human rights…to some degree or other, they’re all the creation of the GREEN vMEME. In its drive for egalitarianism, GREEN will even use positive discrimination to equal the playing field for those who are disadvantaged.

The problem is that GREEN is expensive. Where now will come the money for ramps for wheelchair access in buildings that weren’t built with the disabled in mind? Community Care is more costly than institutional care – so how long before the old mental asylums are reopened and people with mental health problems requiring supervision are herded back into them? How will the Government be able to justify the Equality & Human Rights Commission when the jobless are marching through central London?

One of the things Tony Blair probably was grasping for in his inarticulation of the ‘decent society’ was that we treat each other as equals and with respect and that we care for the less fortunate.

Treating someone with respect might be hard when they got the only job available and you didn’t - especially if your PURPLE clocks that they’re not of your ethnicity and, therefore, not of your tribe. (Just watch the popularity of the BNP grow among the white working class jobless needing someone to blame! Just watch as more Muslims become more devout in the desire for God to right the wrongs white society does to them!)

Charities can be expected to take on some of the support for the disadvantaged but charities depend on donations and it’s hard to donate when your company can’t pay its suppliers (corporate donations) or you’ve not worked in a year (individual donations).

With little nurturing of ORANGE’s wealth creating tendencies, much of the culture of this country will go down the Spiral, settling in PURPLE and RED. Expect increases in racial tension, crime and religious observance (of all kinds).

To some extent, it’s unavoidable. Whether from Osborne’s head-on dive into austerity measures or Alistair Darling’s slightly more measured approach, the cuts have to happen. However, the transition to a different kind of Britain they will bring can be managed and some of the more severe effects ameliorated – especially if there is understanding and management of shifts in values from 2nd Tier perspectives.

But, for that to happen, Cameron and Clegg have got to develop and then share the vision.

It is, of course, a little unrealistic to expect 2 men who were political opponents 12 weeks ago to get into each other’s heads so much in such a short space of time that they can develop a vision they can sell both to the public at large and their 2 respective parties. But, if we are not to slide unthinkingly into the kind of Britain many of us won’t want, then Cameron and Clegg have to get to work pretty damn fast.

I wrote in ‘Liberal Conservatives’ about dissonance arising from the challenges in holding the Coalition together possibly being the factor to drive them into 2nd Tier thinking. Now, as we face the reality of the cuts, it’s clear that there’s going to be far greater dissonance from far more sources than most people realised. It’s also patently clear that the need for 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership is far more urgent than I realised 2 months ago.

I’m still intrigued and excited by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition and still think it presents potent opportunities for real change in the way we do politics…but, guys, we need real vision very quickly.

‘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!

Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, religion, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Apr 122010
 

Are Western leaders and the Western media missing a critical opportunity to exacerbate the divisions in our Muslim communities, between the minority who advocate the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of an Islamic hegemony and the majority who do not support such tactics and may even abhor them…?

For about 5 hours on 2 March it was hot news: Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, had issued a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. He said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam.

He regretted the fact that the Islamic teachings, which are based on love, peace and welfare, are being manipulated and quoted out of context to serve the designs of vested interests (such as al-Qaeda). He said that Islam spelled out a clear code of conduct during the course of war and gave complete protection to non-combatants including women, the old, children, etc – with trading centres, schools, hospitals and places of worship deemed to be ‘safe places’.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is far from being the first to condemn terrorism. As a reaction to 9/11, just days later Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar, Tariq Bishri, Muhammad Awwa and Fahmi Huwaydi, all from Egypt, Haytham Khayyat of Syria and American imam Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani issued a combined statement: “All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorise the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment. … [It is] necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and [punished] appropriately. … [It is] a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means.” Their statement was just one of many condemning fundamentalist terrorism at the time. In July 2003 Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of the Al-Azhar mosque of Cairo – considered the highest authority in Sunni Islam – said groups which carried out suicide bombings were the enemies of Islam. In January 2004 Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Shaykh ‘Abdul-’Azeez Aal ash-Shaykh told 2 million pilgrims: “Islam has forbidden violence in all its forms. It has forbidden hijacking airplanes, ships and other means of transport and has forbidden all acts that would undermine security.” Later that same year a group of prominent scholars (including ash-Shaykh and ul-Qadri) got together to issue ‘The Amman Message’ and a number of scholars, including ul-Qadri, have issued shorter, simpler denunciations since then. What makes ul-Qadri’s new fatwa different is the sheer depth and breadth of religious and legal scholarly argument it goes into to support its pronouncements. Also it declares someone who undertakes terrorist activities to be an unbeliever who cannot go to Heaven.

Ul-Qadri has effectively refuted all the fundamentalist arguments that the radical imams put forward to support terrorism. These arguments essentially cluster around 2 key ideas:-

  • It is a Muslim’s duty to use violence to relieve fellow Muslims from oppression by unbelievers (Sura 2: 191, 193). What tends to get twisted or ignored, though, is the ending of 193: “…if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.”
    ‘Oppression’ clearly is the tricky word here. Civilian Afghans being slaughtered by American helicopter gunships is unequivocally oppression…while the act is taking place. Is it still oppression when the act is stopped and the American military apologises and takes measures to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again? Living by choice as a minority under a government which allows you freedom to worship but doesn’t espouse your religious values in its social policies – the position of the Muslim communities in the UK, for example – is that oppression?
  • The belief that a warrior slain in battle for Allah will go to Heaven and be wedded to 72 beautiful virgins. This last highly-effective meme is created by putting together disconnected verses – eg: Sura 9:111 with Sura 55:46-78. This running together of different concepts to create a new idea is typical of the way religious philosophers manipulate ‘holy book’ text to create something the original writer(s) may not have intended. Radical imams certainly do it – but they’re not the only religious leaders who do it or have done it in the past. From the Crusades and before through to World War II and after, Christian leaders have manipulated Bible text in a similar same way to justify slaughter of the ‘enemy’ (including civilians).
    Sura 4: 29-30 makes it clear that suicide is wrong for a Muslim. So the imams have to twist it that a ‘suicide bomber’ blowing themselves up to destroy the ‘enemy’ (civilians) is not actually deliberately ending their own life (suicide) but is a martyr dying in battle in the service of God. Otherwise, the suicide bomber can’t expect to go to Heaven and claim his virgins.

Ul-Qadri can’t rule out jihad but he can and does hedge it about with teachings about how war is to be fought in a way that protects the innocent and preserves the integrity of both the cause and God’s will.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is the unequivocal Islamic denunciation of terrorist tactics Tony Blair called for from Britain’s Muslim leaders in the wake of 7/7. (Ul-Qadri’s choice of London to launch his fatwa was undoubtedly a deliberate part of his strategy.)

So how come the Western media has paid it so little attention? And, by largely ignoring it, are Western governments missing a key opportunity?

Helping out a different perspective on religious leadership
Unlike the Christian churches, there is no clear and rigidly defined hierarchy of leadership in either Sunni or Shi’a Islam. Rather leadership is envisaqed as a trust (Rafik Issa Beekun & Jamal Badawi, 1999). Leaders have to win and maintain the trust of their followers and their leadership is then recognised – eg: ‘Ayotollah’ is a Shi’a term of recognition for an expert in Islamic studies who will usually hold a teaching post. ‘Mullah’ and ‘immam’ are terms that roughly equate to ‘priest’; but there is no hierarchy equivalent to, for example, curate, vicar, deacon, archdeacon, bishop, archbishop in the Church of England.

Islamic scholars and teachers tend to gain influence from the numbers of their followers and the respect the followers show for the cleric’s teachings, rather than simply from the position they hold.

Thus, Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is not to Muslims like the edict of the Pope to Catholics. He is but one of hundreds, if not thousands of Islamic scholars, seeking to establish influence from their interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. So it is not a case of Ul-Qadri has pronounced; now all Muslims will oppose terrorism. Those Muslims who follow Ul-Qadri should now take his position as the definitive statement on the matter. Those who are unsure whether terrorism can be justified from scripture now have a very powerful voice giving them the soundest theological arguments as to why it can’t possibly be. Other open-minded scholars, hopefully, will test Ul-Qadri’s arguments and find they can support them and disseminate his messages through their own followers.

Since Ul-Qadri’s position is not like the Pope speaking to millions upon millions of Catholics through a hierarchical route of command expected to produce obedience, surely it is in the West’s interests to help Ul-Qadri spread his message and increase his influence?

For all we know, the intelligence agencies (CIA, MI5, etc) may be working covertly to support anti-terrorism Islamic leaders; but in public at least there is the proverbial deafening silence. There has been scant media coverage of Ul-Qadri’s fatwa and its reception in the Islamic world – which is where it really counts – beyond the day of its launch. To me, this is decidedly puzzling.

Other Muslim-sponsored events which take an anti-terrorist stance also tend to go unreported on in the West – eg: the Anti-Terrorism/All India Conference of February 2008, the National Peace Conference in Pakistan (April 2009). And attention is rarely given to Muslim anti-terrorism web sites such as the Free Muslims Coalition.

The general impression given in much of the Western media is that the majority of Muslims go along with or are indifferent to the extremists. In fact, there is real evidence that there are distinct anti-terrorism movements amongst the Muslim communities around the world and that there is an intellectual and spiritual battle on for how Islam deals with its relations with both ‘oppressors’ in particular and unbelievers in general.

So, why, oh, why are Western leaders and the Western media largely ignoring these movements when they offer ways to engage with peace-supporting Islamic leaders with the means of influencing millions of Muslims around the world and isolating the extremists?

Just think: if the news bulletins covering last month’s suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro had carried interviews with ul-Qadri quoting the Qur’an to denounce the terrorists as ‘unbelievers’ and stating that they would not go to Heaven…. How powerful a message would that have been?!?

The likes of Ul-Qadri being consulted on TV would increase their influence – especially amongst the millions of Muslims living in the West. Surely we want their views to be more influential than, say, Osama bin Laden’s?!?

If the neo-Christian West wants a peaceful relationship with Islam, both within and without its own domains, then we need to engage actively, supportively and publicly with Muslim leaders who are anti-terrorism in their views.

Seeing the likes of Ul-Qadri denouncing terrorists on TV will also help to ‘normalise’ the concept of Muslim leaders airing their views via a national medium and will present a much more positive image of Islam to the non-Muslim majorities in the Western countries.

Isolating the Extremists
At the beginning of this Blog post, I talked about exacerbating the divisions in the Muslim communities. This means isolating the extremists and shrinking their numbers while boosting the standing of Muslims who want to pursue their faith in a manner which allows for co-existence with unbelievers and at least tolerates, even if in disgust and seeking change through peaceful means, the laws of a country in which they are clearly the minority population.

This inevitably means that the extremists will attack the non-extremists as ‘traitors to the cause’ and will force the non-extremists to defend themselves.

The Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) Don Beck (2003) developed from running the vMEMES of Spiral Dynamics through Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland’s Social Judgement Theory (1961) demonstrates that the more extreme someone’s position on a policy or philosophy the more likely they are to see moderate positions on their own side as being more like positions on the other side. From the extremist perspective, this Contrasting Effect puts greater distance between extremist positions and more moderate positions on the same side, even to the point of demonising the moderates as effectively being in league with the other side. (The Assimilating Effect is seen when moderates from different sides minimise or turn a ‘blind eye’ to very real differences between them, in order to accentuate their commonalities. An example of this are the inter-faith movements.)

To some considerable extent the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have already demonstrated the Contrast Effect by carrying out ‘takfir’ on moderate Muslims opposed to them. Takfir is the act of declaring another Muslim to have committed aposotacy and become a ‘kafir’ (unbeliever); since apostacy is punished by death (Qur’an 5:32), this enables the Taliban (and al-Qaeda) to justify killing moderate Muslims. (In ACE terms, this is the ‘Zealot’ punishing those who deviate from what it decrees is ‘the one true way’.)

Since Islam is a brotherhood and Muslims are obliged to support and protect one another (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622), from a theological point of view takfir is necessary for one Muslim to kill another. However, ul-Qadri’s fatwa effectively declares takfir on terrorists and suicide bombers. Thus, moderate Muslims who subscribe to fatwas such as ul-Qadri’s, can now legitimately kill terrorists and suicide bombers because they are apostate.

To further this division between the extremists and the moderates, the neo-Christian West must increase the commonalities with the moderate Muslims – thus, increasing the Assimilation Effect between moderate Muslims and Westerners willing to engage with them as respected equals. As those commonalities are increased, so a common identity needs to be developed - as per Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993)  Common In-Group Identity Model (1993) – which separates the moderates from the extremists in conceptual terms.

Western ignorance, Western arrogance or Western scheming?
With ul-Qadri’s fatwa having the potential to change the entire relationship between Islam and terrorism, it remains a baffling mystery why so little attention seems to be being paid to it.

Could it be that potential is not recognised?

In which case, people in high places and their advisors are not paying attention. Perhaps their attention is elsewhere – Barack Obama fretting over his health care bill; Gordon Brown consumed with how to salvage the general election…? Perhaps, after nearly 9 years of the ‘War on Terror’, there still aren’t enough senior figures in the White House or Whitehall who understand Islam and how it works, to recognise the significance of ul-Qadri’s fatwa…?

As for the media, as we know all too well, bad news sells more newspapers than good news – and it’s a lot easier to drag a story about ill-equipped British troops in Helmand out for several days than it is to explore the subtleties and nuances of a scholarly and religious exposition day after day.

Perhaps it’s due to arrogance – the West can sort it out without understanding Islam?

The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) displayed the West at its most arrogant and foolhardy. Well over a million Muslim lives and the lives of several thousand Western military personnel have been lost since 2001 because so little detailed consideration was put into the follow-throughs. As military operations, both invasions could hardly have gone better; but the soldiers have paid the price since because the politicians and the strategists didn’t understand. They didn’t understand Islam and they didn’t understand tribal cultures; they simply thought they could impose Western-style Democracy and that it would work more or less smoothly from the off. Just how many lives might not have been lost had those politicians and strategists not been so arrogant and bothered to understand before they decided…?

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the first signs of acknowledging diversity and wanting to understand the local varieties of Islam and to get to grips with local tribal cultures are coming from frontline intelligence officers in the US Army. In their paper, ‘Fixing Intel: a Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’, Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger & Paul Batchelor (2010) describe pilot schemes of bottom-up engagement with local tribal elders in Southern Afghanistan which have transformed relations between the tribespeople and the military and seriously disadvantaged local Taliban. And now Colonel Fred Krawchuk – a commander in the Baghdad ‘Surge’ (2007-2008) who used Spiral Dynamics for insight into dealing with local factions – has asked Don Beck to go to Afghanistan to advise the intelligence effort.

But, as Flynn et al argue, this new, developing approach has to go right up through the chain of command to the top – to president and prime minister. We simply can’t afford for the arrogance which led to years of failure in post-invasion Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq to continue to blind us to on-the-ground realities. (No wonder both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and Abraham Maslow (1956) considered 1st Tier ways of thinking to be delusional!)

Is the West scheming – do Western leaders actually want there to be moderate Muslims?

Perhaps there is an agenda suited by the term ‘Muslim’ equaling the term ‘terrorist’? In which case, moderate Muslim leaders who have the influence to undermine the arguments of the fundamentalist clerics are not people Western leaders would wish to support and promote.

We’re clearly on the verge of conspiracy theories here – George W Bush’s use of the term ‘crusader’ in 2001 was a parapraxis (‘Freudian slip’) – there really is a crusade against Islam; the 2003 invasion really was all about getting control of Iraq’s oil; etc, etc. I’m not about to indulge in such speculation but there are numerous instances in recent history of democratically-elected governments manipulating information and  the way it is presented to sell dubious ideas to their populations.

While it’s every government’s job to put the interests of its people above all others, in today’s interconnected world, with economic meltdown triggered by overlending banks halfway around the world, plagues able to travel around the globe on passenger aircraft and nuclear obliteration of the planet still a real (if probably receded) possibility, the days of Bismarckian scheming to set one lot warring against the other for your own national advantage should be long gone.

Which leads us back to the central question: why then so little attention paid to Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s 2 March fatwa?

Is Britain really broken?

 celebrity, community, crime, government, morality, politics, prejudice & discrimination, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  6 Responses »
Jan 222010
 

 As part of his pre-election manoeuvring, Conservative leader David Cameron, according to the BBC, has today accused Labour of ‘moral failure’ and presiding over a country in both economic and social recession.

He has said the UK rewards parents who split up and is a place where professionals are told to follow rules rather than do what is best.

As an example of what he calls ‘broken Britain’, Cameron talked about the case of 2 brothers sentenced today for brutally attacking 2 other boys in South Yorkshire.

The brothers, aged 10 and 11 at the time, attacked their victims in Edlington, Doncaster, last April. They threatened to kill their victims, then aged 9 and 11, stamped on them and attacked them with broken glass, bricks and sticks. The brothers admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

While stressing that the case is not typical, Cameron cited it as a shocking example of what he calls Britain’s broken society, one of the key themes of the party’s campaign but a diagnosis rejected by the Government which said the Doncaster case was “uniquely terrible and extremely rare”.

In a book of interviews with him by GQ editor Dylan Jones, published this week, Cameron is quoted as saying: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer, and radical social reform is what this country needs right now.

“Margaret Thatcher in her time realised that the big challenge was reviving Britain’s economy, and we should recognise that the challenge for the modern Conservatives is reviving our society.

“It’s dealing with the issues of family breakdown, welfare dependency, failing schools, crime, and the problems that we see in too many of our communities.”

In fact, the ‘broken Britain’ theme is not new. Several years ago, Cameron tasked former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith with creating a ‘think tank’ to investigate and report on what was wrong with Britain, with a particular emphasis on social factors. Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has produced several very interesting reports since and has been using the term ‘broken Britain’ since at least July 2007. The concept began to capture headlines in a big way in February 2009 when Duncan Smith used the outraged headlines around 13-year-old Alfie Patten fathering a child by 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman to hold up the under-aged parenting as prime example of “what’s wrong with broken Britain”.

So is Britain broken?
Well, our kingdom has a hell of a lot of problems – just think:-

  • Struggling to make any sustainable progress out of recession when many other comparable countries are clearly on their way to recovery
  • Saddled with a national debt, the paying  back of which will take decades long-term or, short-term, cripple much of the public sector through severe cuts and/or hamstring the private sector through raised taxes
  • High rates of petty crime, drug addiction and alcoholism compared to the rest of the EU
  • The highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world
  • Unsustainably high rates of male unemployment
  • A growing problem with gun crime and knife crime
  • Rising ethnic tensions as multi-culturalism is acknowledged to have failed and the Government fails to deal with high rates of immigration – see the Blog: ‘Is restricting immigration discriminatory?’
  • The gap between rich and poor being acknowledged by the Office of National Statistics to be greater now than it was when Labour came to power in 1997
  • Politicians widely perceived as corrupt for lining their own pockets via the public purse and permitting the bankers to outrightly rape the public purse to pay their own bloated bonuses
  • The very union under attack as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish campaign for more powers for their devolved governments

But is it worse than it was? It’s interesting to note that in 1996 Tony Blair used the James Bulger case to attack the Conservative government of John Major in a similar way to Cameron attacking Labour today. Blair said: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.”

Qualitatively, I doubt that Britain is more ‘broken’ than it was when Blair cited Bulger but quantitatively maybe…. There have always been horrible, shocking crimes against children – just think of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the ‘Moors Murders’ back in the early 1960s. There have always been ruthless, brutal criminals – again, think the 1960s and the Kray Twins. Under-age pregnancy and alcoholism are millenniums-old problems and highly-addictive recreational drugs have long been available, if you knew who to ask. And racism, at root, is just a manifestation of tribalism.

2 things, though, have changed dramatically over the past 50-60 years:-

  • Firstly, the sheer scale of these problems across Britain is mind-blowingly larger than it was back in the 1950s. While Britain’s post-war, pre-Americanisation ‘Golden Age’, as depicted so charmingly in the Ealing films of the era, was a manufactured myth, the scale of crime, corruption, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy we experience today would have been unbelievable to most British citizens of the time.
  • The wide-scale spread of these problems – once largely the sinful preserves of the more wealthy classes – has permeated right through the ‘ordinary’ people – what used to be considered traditionally the working and lower middle classes. These ‘salt of the earth’ types generally held higher moral codes than many of their so-called social betters. I’m making huge mythical generalisations, of course; but, as generalisations and allowing for many exceptions, they pretty much hold true. For example, when I was a snobbish middle-class teenager in the late 1960s, my friends and I thought it was ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ to smoke cannabis. However, our working class peers thought it was disgusting and anything to do with hippies was morally depraved. Nowadays, the use of cannabis amongst working class teenagers is commonplace. Whilst the older brothers of my working class peers considered it good sport to bonk a girl in the alley outside her parents’ house late at night, they thought the middle-class hippie couples living together openly without being married was going to lead to societal meltdown!

Where’s the morality gone?
Back in 1999, when I was involved in putting together the HemsMESH project under the watchful eye of Spiral Dynamics ‘guru’ Don Beck, I remember Don talking about how the British churches didn’t do BLUE any more. In other words, they weren’t projecting strong moral codes on how people ought to live, treat each other and relate to society. In Don’s view, the British churches had become dominated by liberal GREEN thinking, with its motif of whatever fulfils the human spirit and doesn’t overtly harm others is OK.

If that sounds similar to some of the hippie mantras of the 1960s or rave lyrics of the 1980s and 1990s, then you’re hearing the same codes in action. GREEN undermines BLUE disciplines and releases RED to indulge as much as it likes without restraint, aided and abetted by ORANGE technology facilitating unlimited internet gambling and beaming uncensored violence and explicit pornography into your 10-year-old’s bedroom. It seems like an absurdly simple diagnosis of the causes of our ills – and there is, indeed, much detail to fill in – but, as an overview, it’s as simple as that.

Don Beck, from ‘Bible belt’ Texas, would, of course, be highly sensitive to the failings of the British churches; but the United States is generally acknowledged to be a much more religious country than Britain. Of course, the US has many of the same problems we have and often in more extreme versions and concentrated pockets – East Los Angeles makes Brixton look relatively idyllic! However, as percentages of national populations, the problems are on nothing like the same, overwhelming scale as here. The American churches by and large make a good fight against the ‘sin’ – though it’s clear GREEN is starting to undermine BLUE in the controversy over the ordination of gay bishops in the East Coast Anglican Church.

But, in seeking to resolve Britain’s problems, we can’t just re-engineer large-scale religious BLUE and expect it to work.

You only have to look at the opposition to the so-called ‘Islamification’ of Britain. It’s all but impossible, of course, but if you could factor out the extremists and their ideologies and discount the racist antipathy towards Islam simply because most of its practitioners have brown skins… then Islam offers much the same kind of solid BLUE values for living that Christianity traditionally has.

And a very sizeable part of the British people simply don’t want that. The proverbial RED-GREEN harmonic of it’s-good-for-you-to-do-as-you-like is now too embedded in British culture. As an example, for all that The Sun moans and whinges about Britain’s moral decay, it’s not prepared to do away with its page 3 girl or stop publishing photographs of various celebrities in indiscrete poses. Why? Because that’s what a sizeable number of people want, as verified by the paper’s sales and visits to its web site. There’s enough BLUE left in society at large to recognise the mess; but not enough to embrace the disciplines necessary to get out of the mess.

So, what Spiral Dynamics calls a 2nd Tier approach is needed – the ability to look at all the competing codes and their values and take action in the interests of the whole, meeting all needs as far as possible within that paradigm but even being prepared to sacrifice some freedoms to establish the paradigm.

David Cameron is to be praised mightily for putting his party’s emphasis on social factors. But, if he simply wants to bring back certain disciplines, it’s going to mean as little to current British culture as John Major’s (PURPLE-BLUE) ‘back to basics’ campaign did in 1997 against Tony Blair’s (RED-ORANGE) ‘let’s make money and live the good life’ ethos.

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