fisharepeopletoo

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.

Who Would Play Gordon Brown in the Film?

If you read it as a story, which for most of us it might as well be, then the big character in the middle still feels like Brown.

He's the one who has got the most to loose. Not so much his job as of himself.

Look at his face. That has got to be a man who is lying there awake in the middle of the night, and he cant even turn the bedside lamp on because he doesn't want to wake his wife up, and he couldn't concentrate to read even if he did.

And what he is thinking about in the dark is that everything that he thought he'd done for the best might be judged a failure because of his own decisions, and in 100 years time there will still be people writing books arguing about how much he was to blame for a culture that brought the world to its knees.

A few weeks ago, he made a speech feebly blaming "lobbying" and "pressure from the Conservatives" for deregulation of the banks, which suggests he is already beginning to try and find a way to tell himself about his choices, but it will be all the harder to bear the answers because he will tell himself he made the choices in good faith, with good intentions, in order to use the tax revenues to do good.

And now everything that he may or may not have achieved before it will seem uninteresting to history compared to the crash. That's what he is now, as a public figure. The Bankers' Crash, guilty or not?

And that is quite a shift in what he can tell himself about himself in the last 24 months or so.

There is only one job in the whole world in which he can do anything about that, in which he can take action to change the ending of the story written about him, and of the story he can tell himself with any honesty. And that job is Prime Minister.

That is what will be torturing him. That perhaps as soon as tomorrow he's not going to be able to do anything else about changing the end of the story. If he looses the job then all he can do, from his new job at Oxford or Havard or wherever, is wage an undignified campaign for his own reputation, not change the future on which that reputation will rest.

Compared to that, Clegg and Cameron don't have much of themselves at stake. Cameron will probably get the knife if he can't deliver a coalition, but wanting to be the next Tony Blair isn't a failed ambition that anyone would find it too hard to recover from.

And as for Clegg, if he makes a tactical mistake he'll suffer only according to the strength of his principles, which ought to be what guides him anyway. If he follows them, he can't blame himself too much if it doesn't work out, and he's the only one of the three who is certain to be around for the next election with chance to try again.

That's why the big scene is, or has already been, when Brown understands, or is made to understand, that he has to let go, and when he knows that this time there isn't any more fight to be had. To work as a scene you'd have to write it such that he had real self knowledge and honesty, which he may or may not have.

But if the character of Gordon Brown has that self knowledge and honesty, then that is the scene when we'd watch a human being suffer at the hands of the only thing that can't ever be changed, our own choices in the past.

The problem isn't the excluded. It's the included.

If there are pockets of generation-to-generation "exclusion" and wasted human potential in the UK - and that means low birthweight babies, doing badly at school, tragically narrowed life chances, unemployment, ill health and early death - then it is because for a child born in those places the odds are stacked so heavily against them that only the most exceptional and determined could ever have any hope of overturning them.

And it's a lot to ask of a newborn baby to make up its mind to be so exceptional and determined by the time it is 3 years old.

The reason those odds are so stacked is because through a mixture of history, bad government and malice aforethought we've ended up with a political rule set designed so that the included, for example this retailer of bankers' culture, can shamelessly game the system to their own advantage through old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, slack corporate regulation, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on.

Welfare for the rich, taxes for the poor.

If you haven't noticed that over the last 18 months, you really haven't been paying attention.

And if you give any sort of a shit about human beings having the freedom to waste their lives on their own terms and not on anyone else's then you've really got to be asking about system-wide structural changes to the rule sets.

Because if you think that the inclusion problem is going to be solved by the included being nicer, then you'll very soon find yourself taking the piss .

[square brackets]
a report on the freedom to waste your life on your own terms

MacDonaldsville and Starbucksia (and Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle)

It really really really does depend who is talking and who is listening.

Poor but 'Appy (and Rich but 'Appy)

Lots of research tells us that more equal societies are better places to live: their citizens are fitter, live longer and are happier.

It doesn't matter if everyone is rich or everyone is poor, equality is good for people.

England is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and I don't think it is going to become more equal ever again.

If it hasn't happened after 10 years of New Labour, it isn't going to happen in the next 10 years of David Cameron.

We are governed by the rich (wielding analogue power), for the rich and that isn't going to change.

So we are stuck with misery.

But we only live in such an unequal country because that's what we choose to draw our borders round.

If we draw our borders round city-states and regions, straight away they are much more equal places to live.

The gap between the richest few percent, the middle and the poorest will be far narrower in Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Newcastle than it is in England.

Without redistributing a single penny, everyone is suddenly happier.

And the best thing about this revolution?

You can start it in your head.

Whether you live in Mayfair or Maryport, just say "I don't live in England any more, I live in..." and whistle a happy tune.

The Reboot Britain Che Scale Challenge Results Are In!

The Che Scale is a handy ready reckoner for working out if policies are radical or just talking the talk.

Whatever the policy is, just ask yourself "If I were a rich and/or powerful person, how worried would I be by this?"

The Che Scale goes from 0 to 5, with 0 being "Ten more years of New Labour? Yes please!" and 5 being "Stuffing a suitcase full of used tenners and clawing their way onto the last Learjet to Monaco."

Anything over 0 has at least something worth listening to.

So, these are the sessions I went to at Reboot Britain, scored on the Che Scale.

Introduction and Welcome from Chairman Nesta 0/5

I wasn't happy with any of this, so much so that it gave me pause to wonder about how, why and in whose interests Nesta are spending a "national endowment".

I might come back to Chairman Nesta and his Vanguard of Innovation another time so I'll leave it there.

Except to say that this would have got minus Che Points except that Che never gets negative. When Che faces a negative situation in his life, such as girlfriend trouble or running out of milk, he gathers a band of armed men around him and sets off into the forest to start a revolution.

Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport 0.5/5

Only 0.5 Che Points but a very enjoyable talk.

It was interesting to hear a working politician talking about what he thought the internet meant for the centre left and centre right in the same way it's always interesting to hear people talk about jobs that mean something to them.

I'm not sure if the phrase "collaborative individualism" can make any sense, but if it does it'll depend on who says it and who hears it.

Fools Gold, Gillian Tait, Assistant Editor, Finacial Times 3.5/5

This was the most radical session of the whole day, presented by a financial journalist who used to be an anthropologist, and had analysed the credit crunch by studying the culture within banks.

The reason the world went bust was because:

- nobody responsible for financial innovation really had a clue what they were messing with
- they were all making too much pretend money for anyone to care
- regulators didn't regulate
- banks were structured like tribes with everyone in the tribe looking upwards not across,
- but, the tribes had no one at the top who knew what all the bits were doing let alone how it all worked
- whichever part of a bank was earning the most ("Who's got the most goats?") did what they wanted.

If I was a rich and powerful banker I'd be threatened by this, because it left nowhere to hide.

To stop it happening again we need to challenge this financial "innovation", and challenge the tiny priesthood doing it.

Then she wished us "good luck" and marched out, which at first I took as fond best wishes but afterwards I thought was actually "fat chance".

Mining the Archives, Tony Ageh 1.5/5

Archives are the raw material of a new industrial revolution, but they have to be opened up.

Let's hope so because I'm not sure the UK has got many other untapped sources of new wealth.

1.5 for the openness and the challenge to existing media.

How Co-design Can Help Reboot Britain, Deborah Szebeko 1.5/5

We should listen to the people who use public services when we try to make the services better.

This will make better and more efficient public services at a time when there is no money left to spend on better public services.

Can't argue with that.

I wasn't so keen on the idea that we should look at national questions through an X Factor style "Britain's Got Problems" type event, but 1.5/5 anyway, because that bit was probably a joke.

Consumer Democracy or a Politics of Citizenship Matthew Taylor 2.75/5

This was quite useful because he said that consumerism is ok in our relationship with services as we use them - we should all expect to get decent treatment - but it's not a good way of thinking about government.

In our other role as the owners of public services we have to recognise that governing is about working out compromises between groups of people who maybe can't all have what they want.

If our opinions are surveyed as consumers of government we are quite grumpy, but when people do take a role in "government" structures, e.g. citizen juries, they prove themselves to be good at listening and compromising.

I've read a lot of evidence of the same kind in a report called "Empowering communities to influence local decision making: a systematic review of the evidence" and I think it's all very hopeful, so long as it's done on scales that people can get their heads round - very local - and it means something, so there has to be a risk of failure.

Hyperlocality and Active Citizenship 3/5

"Hyper local is bringing geographical scale down." - Kevin Harris, who really does know about this stuff.

The smaller the units are the more chance there is of self-organising, self-sustaining, bottom up problem solving and self government in which people do listen and compromise.

I hope.

But there has to be a risk.

Nothing meaningful ever happens if there can't be a failure.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre is full of the risk of failure: if not enough people in your neighbourhood can be bothered to take part, you get less money to spend. Tough.

Straight Line Thinking Stops Here, Alan Moore 0.25/5

This was about as much use as crystal aura cleansing. Lot's of natural metaphors and folksy stuff about communities and sharing.

0.25 just for not being Chairman Nesta.

How we learn to stop worrying and love local government 3/5

Local government as a convenor ( I quite like that word just because it reminds me of 1970s trade union shop stewards on the 6 O'clock News).

If you think of local government as the convenor of a process of citizenship at a very local scale (I can't quite bring myself to say "hyperlocal"), that is again quite powerful and hopeful I think.

The more sense people have of themselves as part of a local citizenry, the more of a challenge it is to the centralised state.

How People Power Can Reboot Britain, Lee Bryant 3/5

Three points for saying that government contracts should be parcelled up into small seed funding awards for small businesses, social enterprises and so on. These businesses would try and work out solutions, with the best ones making themselves obvious, and the same money would be working twice, with even the cost of the failed ideas being repayed as support for businesses that were trying to be innovative, some of which might well use the knowledge gained from their failed innovations to come up with successful, and unexpected, new ones.

And the same three points again for talking about failure at all, and pointing out that even if 60% of the ideas failed that wouldn't be any worse than the big contracts the government gives out now to consultancies.

And again for suggesting getting rid of "process based" improvement based on setting targets from the centre and enforcing them.

Howard Rheingold 2/5

Media literacy as an ongoing personal state of mind that questions sources of authority, and that convenes collective action (my use of "convenes" to paraphrase I think, rather than him saying it in so many words.)

And that was it. Home in time for tea.

I went to Reboot Britain with very mixed expectations, and all-in-all got plenty out of it, though I might have been even happier in a plain old conference about technology and local government.

Why MPs Were Right to Fiddle their Expenses

Because we let them.

Corruption is the UK is structural not personal.

What are those structures?

Is it because we are the second most centralised country in the world after North Korea?

Which means we are all victims of invisible analogue corruption that is far worse than the cost of a few tins of cat food*.

And, if you want my opinion, the way to end that structural corruption is to

• break up the English nation state* completely - it shouldn't even have a darts team, let alone a "parliament"
• replace it with a constellation of self governing city-states and regions
• give them power to make their own laws, raise taxes, conduct foreign policy and have their own darts teams

that way, the people to whom you grant authority to act on your behalf won't need a "second home allowance" because they will live on your street and work in your town hall, and if they abuse your trust, you can go round and wring their necks.

Of course, my opinion isn't worth sh**e (but nor is anyone else's from outside the centre of real, analogue, power).

And it's not very likely to happen anyway (but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make it happen.)

But if we are up in arms about the cat food, we have a responsibility to ask how it happened, be honest about who else has benefited from letting it happen*, and take responsibility for doing what is needed to stop it happening any more.

Asterisks:
*What do you think Peter Mandelson was doing on that Russian oligarch's yacht last summer? Talking about the football? A Lord and a gangster were carving up your life. How do you think the world's financial institutions got so "de regulated"? Anyone ask you if you thought it was a good idea to put your job and your mortgage at risk so that over-networked smug idiots could pay for their single estate first press olive oil importing businesses?

*nation states are sooo 19th century.

* And among those who benefit are the very same people stirring up the outrage in order to sell a few more copies of the Pyongyang Daily Worker.

Everything That Is Wrong With Our Shitarse Country Made Flesh In One Frail Human Being

A couple of weeks ago I was banging on as usual about what everyone could already see for themselves - that the reason we are in such a fine mess was because Margaret Thatcher deliberately wiped out any counterbalances to the City of London (financial services industry).

This meant there was no one left with any political authority to say

 "letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, [and] retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients"

isn't the only possible way to run a country.

The pixels weren't dry on the page before the Independent had a double page feature (I can't be bothered to find a link to it - why would I make this up?) on Harry Blain, the owner of the Haunch of Venison art retail outlet.

Harry was brought up in Surrey, went to Eton, and was a stockbroker before he retired to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil, sorry, art gallery in Mayfair.

You see what I mean?

It's No Good Blaming the Bankers Now

We all ate in the restaurants that their lunches kept busy.

We all went to the art galleries that fed their art market.

We all re-mortgaged our houses in the property boom that their bonuses fueled.

Didn't we?

"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

It is what Margaret Thatcher said at the height of the recession of the early 1980s to justify her economic policy.

But that recession wasn't an unforeseeable and unstoppable tsunami any more than this one is.

That recession, if not politically generated, was used, with malice aforethought, by Margaret Thatcher's government to remove any counterbalancing political, economic, social and cultural centres of power that might offer an alternative to the dominance of the City of London [global financial services] in the UK - those counterweights being the industrial and manufacturing city-regions, mostly centre-left politically.

And that is exactly how we've got ourselves into the fine mess we are in now.

Because since then there has been no world view, and no point of view from which to have it, that carried enough weight to say

"Umm. Err. Umm. Err. Maybe letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients, and leave everybody else to face the consequences when the bets not only don't win but turn out never to have had any way of winning except by using them to make more bets and pay more bonuses, might not be the only possible way to run a country."