Tag Archives: democracy

Quangos on the bonfire

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The government’s dismantling of 100 quangos has been the subject of some astoundingly superficial news coverage over the past couple of days. One unchallenged narrative reigns supreme, allowing of course for varying degrees of passion (the Telegraph are demanding a quango cull here  – a bit harsh, chaps?). “The bonfire of the quangos” is a widely used expression in the commentary that does exist, usually without irony (or horror).

This narrative is, as always, a story of decline and control, with quangos as culprits and the government as the agents redressing the balance. It goes a little like this: quangos squander public funds >> the government throws quangos on the bonfire >> working families save £100 each. Hands up, who doesn’t like £100?

It’s worth taking a minute to unravel the assumptions at the heart of this story and revel in its rich metaphoric load. The word “quango” is derogatory by definition (see OED here) and most likely not how the agencies being dismantled would describe themselves. It seems to go without saying that a quango is some sort of bureaucratic excrescence with little use or accountability. This may well be the case for some of the organisations in question. We just don’t know. And that is the problem.

The implication is clear that a true provider of meaningful public service would simply not be labelled a quango. Or would it? That is a key question that isn’t being addressed in political debate or in any of the media coverage and commentary. Are our needs sufficiently clearly defined as a society for us to decide which public services are superfluous? Do we possess a broadly endorsed methodology for measuring the value of public service and thus decide which organisations fall below the minimum benchmark? Should an efficiency saving be anything more than obtaining the same amount of value from a smaller investment? Does losing a useful service constitute a saving? How can any of these questions be answered in the absence of the debate that we are not having?

As for the brutal imagery of bonfires and culling, well, I find it all a little chilling. How could the National Film Council and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – for they are among the quangos being zapped – possibly inspire such savage passions? Is this a modern day bonfire of the vanities? Are quangos the Guy Fawkeses of this recession?

This sort of loaded and highly normative language is changing our world for generations to come. What we are dealing with here reaches far beyond a bunch of public bodies being dismantled. A new philosophy of public service and the role of the state is taking shape. This is not necessarily bad, nor dangerous – unless, of course, it happens a little too “organically”, without broad debate on social goals and without appropriate consent. We need to be asking the right questions.

Political reality is a social creation of our own making. It’s an extraordinary edifice of belief, language and subjective perception to which new facts and information serve little extra purpose than to reinforce views and attitudes already held. There is a significant body of psychological and sociological research that suggests human beings do not on the whole make a lot of use of the cold analytical skills that rational choice theory credits us with. Sometimes I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we did.

Democracy CPR

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Business secretary Vince Cable says the financial sector is disproportionately influential in policy circles. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. I touched on this in Amplified’s first blog post. There are important questions to be answered here about the quality of democracy and the fair representation of social and economic interests.

It is unrealistic to expect the private sector to curtail the amount of investment it makes into lobbying. What we can and should do is enrich public debate in a way that puts pressure on the policy agenda. It has not been sufficiently clear for a very long time that the financial sector or indeed any other big business stakeholder are not by default guardians of the public interest or of widely shared social goals. This has however long been an underlying assumption of political debate and policy output.

The tide seems to be turning. Nef’s Andrew Simms is pulling no punches: “This looks like full-scale mobilisation for an economic war of attrition with the finance industry on one side, and the rest of society, business and industry on the other.” This new narrative is sorely needed, belligerent though it may sound. Only a couple of years ago, Big Society guru Jesse Norman was framing social conflict in entirely different terms, personifying the state as a life-sucking force quashing all conversations: “In conversational terms, one might think of the state as the domineering bore at the table, whose loudness overwhelms the talk of others. But a better parallel might be that of the patriarch whose favourites thrive, but in whose unspeaking presence others feel robbed of air and automatically fall silent”.

When Norman was writing about this in his guide to the Big Society, anti-statism was if not the only game in town, then certainly the biggest. What the emergence of new narratives does is help ensure that the “ills” that are being addressed in policy output correspond to the values and preoccupations that best represent us a society. It may sound obvious, but variety has long been missing from the narrative palette underpinning debate, at least in its mainstream manifestations. With an obviously depleting effect on democracy. Vince Cable may have just administered some much-needed CPR.

We need to talk about everything

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Our world is in flux. This is a time of transition. A time to reflect on the systemic failure of the philosophies that have guided us for the past three decades. Certainly a time to think clearly about the sort of society we want to live in, and the values that should guide us in building it. An opportunity to question our neoliberal understanding of the state and the markets – to verify its power to bring us closer to our dreams, if nothing else. The worldwide economic crisis and the political upheaval that surrounds it are not an episodic disturbance. Impending environmental disaster is not ‘business as usual’. It’s not the end of history after all, Mr Fukuyama.

This most certainly isn’t the time to withdraw from the debate, to shut ourselves off from the buzz of conversations or to disengage from politics. Perversely, the failure of institutions – from banks that stay afloat through public bailouts to politicians that bulk up their expense claims – has precisely that effect, of demoralising and encouraging us to distance ourselves from the sorry mess. The Guardian quotes a report by Democratic Audit, which claims that “democracy in Britain is in long-term terminal decline as the power of corporations keeps growing, politicians become less representative of their constituencies and disillusioned citizens stop voting or even discussing current affairs”.

One thing I’ve learned during my time as a small cog within a big political wheel is that despite all claims to the contrary, there is nothing inevitable about the way in which politics works. Nothing about it is a given – apart from the legal framework and the traditions that frame it. All the assumptions and stereotypes that we use to justify our inaction in guiding those who represent us say more about us than they do about them. This is certainly true of the people working within the political support apparatus. Many of the bright young things I met in Brussels lived in fear of displeasing the politicians they worked with. This is a truly depressing and self-serving mindset, and one I knew was based on all sorts of outrageously wrong assumptions. I knew it because in all the support and advice work I carried out, I felt that politicians valued my input and appreciated my frankness.

So what is my point in all of this? The point is that the world is changing around us and this is not business as usual. The action we take now, and the clarity with which we express our deepest held beliefs are what will shape the world we leave behind for our children. Democracy may well be in decline, but this decline can and must be reversed. There is no other way to do that than to start talking about what actually matters to us as individuals, as social progressives and as a society. None of it is evident and none can be taken for granted. History’s not dead yet.