Them and Us

As a Nation we still live with hangups from our feudal past. We carry over the attitude as of one subservient to his lord and master. No more so than in the workplace. We wait idle until instructed to do something, then do it to the barest limit of what was told, then wait for notice of task completed and further instructions. No initiative, no ownership just a drone working to direction. The escape excuse being, only carrying out orders, therefore not my fault, no blame can be apportioned and certainly no risk of being accused of using ones own mind. An attitude compounded and reinforced by our later day masters, our managers. As they adopt the imperious tone and attitude, brook no discussion as only they have the deities overview. Any comment from the minions can only be a ploy to sabotage and disrupt an otherwise good plan.

This was brought home to me several years ago when a German nephew was stationed here whilst a new line was brought into production. He was quite taken aback by the prevalent and hostile 'them and us' response from the English workers. So very different from the experiences he had in Germany where everyone, from manager, to Foreman, the shop steward, to tool setter, all took responsibility for sorting out a problem. All remained focused until a mutually agreed solution was found. No matter where the solution originated from, their only concern was that a solutions was found so this problem that impacted on the team was sorted. Sorted by the whole team, that included every single member of the team, none disassociating from it, until the problem was resolved. Maybe not always the fastest solution initially but paying dividends in the long run.

That is what we need now as a Nation. Finally putting aside this 'them and us'. This expectation that it is someone else's job to sort things out, arrange and put in place those expectations we have about daily life. No. This is where I think the 'Big Society' is getting it so wrong. It perpetuates this outmoded concept. The high flying intellectual is dependant on the skills of the craftsman to realise the concept as they both are on the finance man to underwrite the proposition and see it through to producing a profit. Each is interdependent on the other and it behoves neither to say this contribution is greater or more significant than an another. They all are. In my 'Small Society' we all have to shoulder the burden. Speak up and announce a need, discuss with others that need and the obstacles in obtaining it, take the initiative to suggest different tactics to achieve it, be proactive until a delivery path is found and finally to feed back appreciation for a job well done. To be actively part of the solution finding mechanisms not just a sideline identifier of a problem. Not just in the workplace but in all dealings with each other, wherever we are reliant on others to achieve our goals. So now over to you mate for your contribution.

When enough is enough

This will be a bit of a ramble but stay with me as I think we will get to somewhere interesting. Some years ago I was a committed school governor. Then Thatcher brought in People Choice or whatever it was called. Suddenly school governors had a bag load full of obligations and responsibilities and even more than that the local area would expect to hold the governors to account for any consequences. The more I looked into it the more it struck me that the actual controls were all held upstream leaving the governors to manage the dirtyend and to be the front line for complaints. I gave up being a governor. We now have 'The Big Society'. Again this seems to a have a very familiar ring to it. Pass down to the lowest possible level, the dirty coal face of making things work and answering complaints about shortcomings, whilst leaving all the real controls at a much higher level. I could go on but that would be a distraction.

Putting the rosiest picture forward, our politician are not intellectual power houses nor consumed with a passion for a particular view of life. Just regular guys and girls. It could be chance that our new Prime Minister has read the past, learnt the lessons and is reapplying what worked. Possible but implausible. What I am getting here is an over-powering whiff of success management. My definition of success would be to be solely in control of the steering, the brake and the accelerator, to not get my hands dirty doing work and to be well off the line of fire when the spray shots of blame starts. Given that our politician are not those intellectual giants it is the civil service mandarins behind the scenes that actually run and set this countries agenda. Yes they have to work within the constraints of whatever is current political flavour but, I suspect, have long ago acquired the skills to find presentations which match political aspirations but still drive towards their own determined goal.

What I think I am sensing is a civil service that has decided to devolve power to the lowest possible levels whilst ensuring they retain a tight grip on real free decision taking. Why? We are moving towards a totalitarian society. What better confirmation than the images of citizens contained behind wire fences so as to not trouble their elected representatives, this is as cynical take on demcracy working by our leaders as you could wish for. You and I might argue the pace but the direction is irrefutable. When you view the populace as fraudster, cheats, skivers, shirkers, in all a shiftless bad lot, the only possible response is yet more control, more surveillance and more punishments. It trying to tie down and manage free spirit, it is an inescapable consequence, that government gets more and more complex, intrusive and finds it so hard to keep threads together. No wonder then that the mandarins are looking to simplify what they need to exercise that absolute control. We have a long game objective playing out here. Watch out in coming years for its manifestation in several different political disguises!

It is just another example of the glass half full or the glass half empty syndrome. If your starting premise is that citizens are liars and cheats you will readily find all the evidence to confirm it many times over. So justifying yet more control, surveillance and sanction. Sit firmly down on the can of worms. On the other hand of course if your starting premise is that citizens are proudly loyal, hard working, wanting opportunities to show and share their skills you end up with a different style of government. A style that sets out to enable, utilise and harness the energy and talent of the citizens to better themselves. For this view, only the lightest of hands is necessary and to a large extent it will self-discipline itself, leaving a minimalist government that mostly has to follow the will of its peoples. As against trying to suppress the will of the people to its objectives.

Yes of course we can all identify cheats and abusers amongst us but equally we can also identify the honest and self-sacrificing. You have to take a view, are we largely honest or largely cheats, half full or half empty? There is no doubt in my mind listening to the continual justification of measure after measure that relies on scare mongering about stopping cheats and fraudsters getting away with it, how our government see the issue!

Concomitant to the path to totalitarianism is an ever burgeoning bureaucracy that will eventually overwhelm and self-destruct. There are no cost savings down that road, the tools you need to manage grow ever larger and wider. What you save today you will spend double tomorrow. The proportion of government cost against the wealth of nation just rises and rises. We have too much government focused on the wrong end. We as a society need to sit back and rethink how we want go about governing ourselves, starting out with a much simpler model. There is of course a very entrenched and powerful voice that says you will never ever get to realise it.

Power to the People

Micheal Sandels extraordinary pitch on BBC4 for his Justice and philosophy course at Harvard was an eye-opener. I have reservations about all snakeoil salesmen setting out their table with a scare story and then the promise of a world exclusive remedy if only you buy into the course, book, video or whatever. Be that as it may, the point for me was that Bentham, Kant and Aristotle's attempts to provide a philosophical framework able to answer societies toughest questions fell short of the mark. The ordinary person in the street seemed to have, bye and large, a canny understanding and a feel for where the fairness lay in those absurd hypothetical situations put to them. Absurd, but granted they did push the moral dilemma selected to the limits, polarising the options. Fine, if your accept the Sandels pre-determination of the moral conflict reflects the dilemma's our society might have to face. I suspect it showcases the point he wishes to demonstrate but might have limited value beyond that. Not reflective of life as experienced. Certainly it is not within my skills to appraise Sandels contribution. As a final point I do note that Sandels subsequent contributions all seems to revolve around the same issue, ending up at the same loose end. No sequence and build-up to a shared understanding. Just a go on and buy his book to find the answers to the universe and life? Not for me.

In counter point to that, Andrew Neil's 'Posh and Posher' BBC2 was a well assembled and orchestrated package. Ordinarily I find Andrew Neil hard to stomach, his self-opinionated smarm gets in the way. But what a good package was put together. A bit leaden as we padded self-evidently from one plank to the next but it did in the end build to a cohesive whole. So okay, I differ with him in the detail conclusions drawn, but the main thrust was unambiguous. The meritocracy that came in mid to late 1900's has been brushed aside and elitism rules day yet again.

What has caught my eye with both these programmes is firstly the common sense shown by those ordinary people in the street. In the main they have a feel for the things that concern them and they have a flair for knowing which direction they think the answers lies. Even if they are not always skilled in separating out their ideas or putting their answers into articulates phrases. The other thing that came across to me strongly is this underlying sense that we as a society are groping about for a new definition of community and how we as individuals relate and feed into it. That to me is the most rewarding and encouraging idea. Suddenly I am no longer writing this blog in isolation, a loner heading off to the next windmill. I am just part of this mass directionless searching around for a better solution.

What is crystal clear to me is that it has nothing to do with the Government. Their eyes are right off the ball looking in the totally wrong directions for what meets and will satisfy the peoples needs. Nor is it the Big Society so beloved of David Cameron. That is such a way off the mark. What we ordinary people are looking for is the Small Society, that which we can respond to, relate with and most of all contribute to without some remote organisation breathing down our necks telling us we are wrong.