Paradigms, paradigms

Have you ever had a gnawing feeling that – recession and austerity aside – all is not right with the way we live today? And have you ever tried to describe why you feel that way, or what could be done about it, but drawn a blank? If you have, it seems you’re not alone, and recent thoughts from two Tonys – Travers and Judt – could explain why and offer some solutions. The trouble is, while the explanations for the gnawing they provide are similar, the solutions they suggest pull in opposite directions, begging the question: where, if anywhere, do we go from here?

In a recent post on the LSE politics blog, Tony Travers reported on the growing feeling in the UK that our relationship with politics and with institutions both public and private is not what it should be. Politics has become too distant for us to care about, and institutions too big for us to interact with; and we suspect that neither politicians nor institutions really care about us, either. This disenchantment is mirrored at a local level by declines in social capital and increases in community breakdown, leaving us caught in the middle, without the support of the state or our peers. (Actually, I’ve extrapolated his comments a bit here, but reading between the lines this seems a reasonable claim to make.)

This trend is being recognised in policy circles, where we can see an increasing interest in ‘localism’ and ‘community’ – the most prominent example being the continuing emphasis on the Big Society, but others include the recent Localism Bill and Giving White Paper. And beyond Whitehall, calls for devolution of government and private sector power to a more local level have come from across the political divide – viz. Compassionate Conservatives, Red Tories and, most recently, Blue Labour.

Travers notes the growing intellectual weight behind and focus on localism, but he also highlights a towering problem that its advocates will need to overcome. He argues that on the one hand ‘England has become used to hyper-centralisation, to demand-led dependency on the State and to government-imposed service guarantees’, and on the other most politicians and policy-makers see nothing wrong with centralisation per se and have little faith in local decision-making, as demonstrated by their reluctance to increase local powers over taxation.

Travers does not explicitly connect these two claims in his post, but his analysis echoes that of Judt in his compelling treatise on the state of social democracy in the US and the UK, Ill Fares the Land. Judt tackles the gnawing on a more general level. He believes that we have for so long lived in an age of self-serving materialism, obsession with growth, glaring inequality and the primacy of the market and the private sector that we have forgotten how to question the validity of all this. Even if we sense that things could be better, he argues, we no longer have the vocabulary or the imagination needed to make a strong case for an alternative.

Judt identifies a paradigm shift that explains why change is so difficult, and the same is surely true of centralism: we have got so used to a dominant, paternalistic state over the past few decades that we have forgotten how to think locally and argue for local power. And it is not just politicians and policy makers who have developed this collective amnesia, it is all of us. Quite apart from cynicism about spending cuts, one reason why it has been so hard to explain and establish the Big Society is that the people who need to be engaged to deliver it – you and me – cannot get beyond the idea that the state ought to be doing it all for them. The fact that many people are quicker to dismiss the Big Society concept for harking back to a 1950s idyll that never existed than they are to consider whether it might actually have some value shows how distorted our view has become; and Blue Labour is criticised for harking back to the end of the 19^th century!

In both instances, then, we sense a need for change but are unable to articulate or argue for it effectively, with the probable result that nothing will happen and we all remain dissatisfied. But that’s where the similarity ends, because if one of these changes is achieved, it could well be at the expense of the other.

Judt’s hope is that the banking crisis and other recent events will lead to a resurgence in support for social democracy and social conscience. Travers’, by extension, might be that growing public disdain for central government, coupled with increasingly well-made arguments for localism, will force or persuade those in control at the centre to relinquish some real power. The trouble is, Judt’s vision necessarily involves the emergence of a stronger and more interventionist state, whereas greater localism would necessarily reduce the state’s authority. We can’t have both, so it will be interesting to see which paradigm we shift to next. Or, more likely, whether we simply stay as we are and carry on being gnawed.

Sending nudges down the Tube

The Nudge blog is always worth reading for its quirky and thought-provoking content, and a recent post about the influence of the London Tube map on travel decisions caught my eye.  This schematic ‘Beck’ map simplifies the complex web of Tube lines by distorting the distance between, and location of, the stations.  It makes the system easy on the eye, but, as the Nudge blog post points out, can lead to some perverse decisions.  For example, nearly a third of passengers choose to go from Bond Street to Paddington via Notting Hill Gate rather than via Baker Street: the former route looks shorter and quicker on the Beck map, but it actually takes longer and, as a geographical map would quickly show, involves a greater distance and a considerable dog leg.  There are maps on the Nudge blog post if you’re not a Londoner and can’t picture this!

It occurred to me that the Beck map is a pretty good analogy for nudging and choice architecture, and that it flags up an issue that doesn’t get much coverage: the possibility of unintended consequences.  The idea behind choice architecture is that decisions are always influenced by the environment in which they are taken, so it makes sense to ‘design’ that environment so that people make the ‘right’ decisions. And nudging is underpinned by behavioural economics, which argues that for all sorts of reasons putting complex information in front of people does not help them to make rational decisions in their best interests.  Both aspects are captured by the Beck map: it simplifies information about the Tube lines so that people are not confused or unable to find their way; and because of its ubiquity and the fact that users are often underground when using it, it rather than geographical reality is the ‘environment’ in which decisions are taken.

If I’m not stretching the point here, this suggests that, like the Beck map, nudges could have unintended consequences despite their effectiveness in helping people to do what is ultimately the ‘right’ thing. Take for example pensions reform, one of the first and most concrete pieces of nudge policy, and one which will undoubtedly have a significant and widespread impact.  There’s no doubt that in the long term saving for one’s retirement while still earning an income is the ‘right’ thing to do, but that there are all sorts of reasons why we don’t save.  It’s also clear that by playing on the effect of inertia, automatic enrolment in a workplace scheme would help people to make that ‘right’ decision to save while still working. But, as with the journey to Paddington, isn’t there a chance that the choice architecture and simplification involved will lead some people to choose the wrong route to their destination?

As the BBC’s recent Poor Kids programme highlighted, there are millions of people in the UK who are struggling to manage on the money they have.  In this time of austerity, the real incomes of the hardest up are likely to fall further as wages stagnate, benefits are reduced and inflation rises.  Regardless of the future benefits of saving, is ‘losing’ another 4% of salary in pension contributions really in their best interests right now?  Of course they have the option to ‘opt out’ of their workplace pension, and avoid the contributions, but the system is designed precisely on the basis that they are unlikely to do that.

There must be other, and perhaps even better, examples of nudges which are destined to have beneficial effects for most, but turn out to have unintended consequences for some.  But in the rush to embrace them as cheap, light-touch interventions, the fact that there may also be downsides seems to have been ignored. Indeed, the main current of opposition seems to be to the concept of nudging (the idea that it’s another form of nanny state or even that it involves ‘playing with people’s brains’), rather than to specific nudges themselves.

I wrote in an earlier post that nudges are more paracetamol than radiotherapy as far as social ills are concerned.  But even paracetamol can be harmful if you don’t read the packet.

Size isn’t everything

This post was prompted by a very interesting article by Jonah Lehrer in which he brings together two recent papers on how a city’s population size affects the lives of its inhabitants. In the first, theoretical physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt demonstrate that the inhabitants of a city will, on average, produce and enjoy around 15% more of almost everything – from the trademarks and patents they register, to the local restaurants they can visit, to the income they earn – than the inhabitants of another city that is half its size. They also show that it isn’t just the nice things in life that scale in this way: negative variables from murder to bedbugs also increase exponentially with population size. This isn’t a surprise in itself: as Lehrer says, city dwellers understand and accept this trade-off between the good and the bad aspects of urban life. What we didn’t necessarily appreciate is the high level of consistency between and predictability of these variations.

The second paper is by Samuel Arbesman and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School. These researchers looked at the incidence of prosocial behaviour, such as organ donation, voting and helping strangers, and how this varies with city size. In contrast to West and Bettencourt’s strikingly consistent results, they found no one statistical rule to describe variation in all types of prosocial behaviour; instead, different activities increased or decreased at different rates as city size changed.

This contrast is interesting. If people’s behaviour and experience in cities is predictable in so many ways – registering more patents and doing more shoplifting; having access to more restaurants and encountering more bedbugs – why should the same not apply to helping strangers on the street and giving money to political campaigns? What makes prosocial behaviour different and less predictable than other forms of behaviour?

One answer might be that in general the predictable factors of urban life both support and suppress a city dweller’s propensity to behave prosocially, and that more specifically an individual’s inclination to carry out a particular type of prosocial behaviour is influenced by his or her reaction to the combination of the factors he or she encounters.

Engaging in prosocial behaviour requires the opportunity and desire to cooperate with and consider the needs of others. West and Bettencourt’s research shows that larger cities certainly provide us with a greater desire and more opportunities to cooperate – for our own ends, at least. But it also shows that living in a city strengthens forces that prevent us from engaging with and caring about others, especially strangers.

Different people will react to these competing forces in different ways. A higher reported murder rate will induce varying levels of fear of crime in a local population, which in turn will deter some from going out of their way to help strangers more than others. A more cooperative environment will encourage varying levels of political discussion and debate, which will make some more interested and involved in politics than others. And that more cooperative environment may trump a fear of crime and encourage engagement with strangers, or a fear of crime may increase cynicism and disengagement from politics – or the opposite may be true.

All this would mean that, for a city as a whole, while the strength of productive and disruptive forces might be closely and broadly related to the size of the population, the combined influence of these forces on different types of prosocial behaviour will be much less consistent and predictable. Perhaps that’s why measuring and encouraging prosocial behaviour is so difficult, and why it needs more attention. It is important, after all, even if there is no convenient magic rule to describe it.

To AV or not to AV – what is the question?

There is a tremendous irony at the heart of the current debate on AV.  Politicians of all persuasions are looking the electorate in the eye and telling us, as sincerely as they can, that we are the audience with the greatest stake in the issue of voting reform.  But their internal debates suggest something rather different.  Where does that leave us?

Those in favour of AV tell us how unrepresentative the current system is, how only about a third of MPs secure a majority of the votes in their constituency, how many MPs can effectively ignore the needs and votes of many of their constituents, how the existence of safe seats means some don’t even need to work hard to engage their core support, and how most voters are effectively disenfranchised by this situation.

Those in favour of FPTP invoke the ghoul of perpetual coalition government and compromise, the fact that second, third and fourth choices should not have the same weight as first choices, the relative complexity of AV, and even the fact that AV is too small a step and should be rejected in favour of something closer to PR.  Oh, and the fact that the only countries in the world to use AV for national elections are Australia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji (which is apparently considering a change anyway).

These are all reasonable arguments, and positive reasons to engage with the question of electoral reform.  They should in themselves persuade people that it matters to them and encourage them to think about it and vote on it.

And yet, when those same politicians look each other in the eye, the debate takes a rather different course.  Those in favour of AV claim that FPTP is mainly being defended by politicians with a stake in it (mostly the Conservatives).  Those in favour of FPTP claim AV is really being advanced as a mechanism for increasing the power of the Lib Dems.

In other words, the debate turns negative, and is about power for politicians, not power for the people.  And politicians, let’s not forget, have the loudest voices on this issue, so people are well aware of their internal wranglings.  The debate on Newsnight a couple of nights ago, in which four politicians spoke a lot and two non-politicians said less, was a case in point.

Isn’t this exactly what we don’t need?  Our voting system is at the heart of the relationship between Parliament and the electorate, and all politicians acknowledge that something needs to be done to engage with us again (even if they can’t agree on how).  Surely an extended debate on the future of that system should be taken as an opportunity to re-engage people, and to persuade them of the importance of their part in the electoral relationship? It would be a shame if it actually reinforces the disconnect between us.

It comes down to the question of what are we voting for in May – something that matters to us, or something that really concerns the fortunes of 650 (for now) MPs?

The mean streets of [insert your town here]

So, the government continues on its march towards complete openness and transparency with the aim of maximising public accountability and choice. The latest step on the way has been, of course, the launch of police.uk, which maps individual crimes for all to see. Now, I’m all in favour of transparency and public accountability, and in principle I value information that allows me to make choices about public services, or at least alerts me to the fact that I can make a choice. But I have to wonder whether the impact that this new website could have on communities has been fully considered.

I’m not talking about the depressive or inflationary effect the data could have on house prices in some areas – although this has inevitably been raised and widely reported, here for example. No, it’s the potentially depressive effect it could have on social capital and strength of community in areas with the (reportedly) ‘meanest streets’.

Community strength relies on social interaction: people going out, using local amenities and seeing and talking to each other. There are all sorts of things that promote such interaction, from well designed social spaces to low levels of population churn, and there are many things that inhibit it. One of these negative factors is fear of crime.

Fear of crime in the UK has for years been out of sync with actual crime figures, with perceived levels increasing while real overall levels have been falling. But it’s not as irrational as it might at first seem. As my own (alas unpublished) research in this area has shown, fear of crime is driven by influences on a number of levels which come together to produce misguided but fairly unshakable beliefs about what goes on across the UK as a whole and in the local area. These influences include general cynicism about the ‘state of the nation’, powerful reporting of high-profile incidents in the national and regional media, hearsay and word of mouth, the condition of the local environment (street lights, litter, graffiti, vacant shops etc) and, yes, personal experience.

Feelings on all these levels reinforce themselves, and lead to perceptions that are often out of step with local reality. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s the perception that discourages people from going out, from lingering to talk to others, from ‘risking’ starting a conversation with someone they don’t know, or from trying something new. And this inhibition leads to increased atomisation, the degrading of community feeling, greater isolation and everything that goes along with that trend.

Crime maps, however accurate or useful in the sense of public accountability, could drive these perceptions in either direction. In some areas, people will find that local crime is not as bad as they had believed. That’s good – although the other influences on their perceptions will remain, and they’ll have to look at the website to find the encouraging data. But in areas with ‘bad’ or even ‘worse than expected’ results, the maps will be yet another influence that reinforces people’s fear – and since local media is more likely to report ‘bad’ results than ‘good’, these people probably won’t even have to look at the website to be affected this way.

In these areas, new and apparently hard evidence of crime taking place nearby seems likely to harden existing beliefs and concerns by making what may have been just a vague feeling that ‘the nation is in trouble and my patch is no different’, or perhaps a slightly more crystalised and considered view that ‘crime must be bad around here because the environment feels intimidating, other people talk about it and anyway look at all the bad things that go on in this country’, that much more convincing. To paraphrase David Cronenberg, even if it sounds a little melodramatic, if people were afraid before, they’ll be very afraid now. And while that line was a good way to promote a film, the same can’t be said for its effect on social capital and the community.

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.

Excluded habits – round 1

Are there any aspects of social policy that cannot be addressed by a behaviour change approach?

The recently established Behavioural Insight Unit – or ‘Nudge Unit’ – is making wide-ranging recommendations about how to improve people’s lives, and its creation seems to represent a shift away from the New Labour approach of addressing the structural causes of social problems. So far, though, none of the issues it has tackled seem as complex or deep-rooted as the problems that were the focus of New Labour’s fairly self-explanatory Social Exclusion Unit, Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, and others. And yet the current governing parties (the Conservatives in particular, with their depiction of ‘Broken Britain’) were not shy about highlighting social problems such as these when in opposition.

The government may have changed during the last year, but the social landscape in the UK has not. So if there has been a shift in approach, it begs the question: can a behavioural strategy which focuses on individuals address the types of social issue highlighted by New Labour’s policy units and the Conservatives’ pre-election rhetoric? Is there anything that can be achieved by behaviour change models in the face of something as complex and deep-seated as social exclusion?

This is a question I’ve begun to consider for the RSA, which through its Social Brain and Connected Communities projects has great interest in the issues of behaviour change and social capital. I’d be really interested to get some comments on this, but my early thoughts are that, yes, there is potential for a behavioural approach to be effective – but it’s not as simple as Nudge.

There are perhaps two fundamental sets of factors behind social exclusion. One is structural: low levels of social capital, high local unemployment, poor transport infrastructure, high turnover and diversity of the local population, fear of crime etc. We obviously can’t ignore or deny the significance of these challenges. But there is also a second set of factors: the behaviour patterns or (for want of more sensitive terms) habits and inertia that are established by exclusion, and make it difficult to escape from that situation. It is this second aspect of exclusion that I think suggests an opportunity for a behaviour change approach.

First, let’s be clear about terminology. By ‘habit’ I mean a pattern of behaviours and attitudes that has become so well established as to be carried out without conscious thought. By ‘inertia’, I mean an inability or unwillingness to change in the face of external pressures or a lack of incentives. It is habits that I want to focus on here, because once they are established they are essentially self-perpetuating and isolated from external pressures, and can therefore be addressed in themselves.

As the Steer report from the RSA’s Social Brain project describes, habits direct most of our decisions and much of our behaviour, for good or for ill. They are driven by the automatic brain system, which works intuitively, instinctively and extremely quickly. Habits can be guided by our controlled brain system, which is where we make conscious, deliberated choices (this is akin to the rational, economic model of behaviour change, or the ‘think’ model). But the controlled brain is slower and weaker than the automatic brain when it comes to decision making, and since the latter has an innate preference for what it already knows, the odds are stacked heavily in favour of automatic continuation of things as usual.

Moreover, trying something different is rewarding at first (specifically, it triggers a pleasant dose of dopamine in the brain), but the novelty and reward quickly wear off after a few iterations, as anyone who has a lapsed gym membership can testify, and the incentive to keep to the new routine is reduced. Habits can also be influenced by the environment in which the automatic decisions are taken (as in the ‘nudge’ model), but again the ingrained nature of the behaviour means the odds are stacked in favour of the existing routine.

Changing habits, then, is very difficult. As the Steer report argues, it requires first a recognition that habit can be guided deliberately, that the environment can have an influence, and that change is initially attractive, but also that each of these is weak and short-lived compared to the brain’s long-term preference for the status quo. Then it requires an approach that takes all this into account.

So what does this mean for social exclusion? Exclusion may be caused by structural factors, and those factors may contribute to its persistence, but while it persists an ‘excluded’ pattern of behaviour and attitudes becomes established and normal – and it is this habitual rut, as much as the external challenges, that prevents people from improving their situation. Whatever the challenges they face, individuals may consciously try to become more socially included, but unless they recognise and understand how their habits work, and in particular appreciate the relative weakness of their controlled brain, their ‘willpower’ will either fail to make a difference or they will give up on it before a difference can be made. And if this happens often enough, they will stop trying.

Likewise a change in the environment, such as an improvement in local transport services or an invitation from a friend to do something different, may not be enough to break the habit if there is no corresponding deliberate effort. Neither ‘nudge’ nor ‘think’ will work on its own; but a combination of the two, and recognition of the need for persistence once the initial reward for novelty has worn off, has a chance of success.

While it is of course important to deal with the structural challenges people face, I think this offers an opening for a behaviour change approach as well. If people are caught in a habitual cycle, and this, alongside unemployment, poor transport and other factors, is what perpetuates their exclusion, they stand a better chance of improving their situation if they recognise their habits for what they are, and understand how these work and can be changed. And if they do succeed in breaking their excluded habits, some may even be able to overcome the structural challenges that caused their exclusion in the first place.

Thoughts on how this might work in practice are for another post, but I think the principle has potential. It may sound naïve or unrealistic, or even callous, to argue for something other than dealing with structural challenges, but I think enabling people who are socially excluded to address and overcome one of the main sets of factors perpetuating their situation is both possible and worthwhile. What do you think?

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.

Shhh – don’t mention the nudges

Nudging, as Jonathan Rowson points out in a recent post on The RSA Projects blog, is already the flavour of the month and looks like being at the top of the menu for the rest of 2011. The government has recently announced that in the coming year we will be ‘nudged’ towards paying our taxes, quitting smoking, insulating our houses and signing up to be an organ donor. The media is lavishing attention on the idea. And the term is gaining such traction that it’s being misapplied to behaviour change measures which are rather more ‘shove’ than ‘nudge’, such as the decision to increase tax on high-strength beer and reduce it on low-alcohol brews.

At the moment, all this publicity and attention seems a bit ironic, given that nudges are meant to be minor interventions which operate unnoticed in the background. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given this is a new idea – in UK policy terms, at least. But for a number of reasons, it risks causing problems in the long run.

First, there’s the point I’ve just made: if nudges are meant to go unnoticed, will they work if we are looking out for them? One of the arguments made in favour of nudges is that they are the antithesis of public approaches to behaviour change, like didactic communication, education and regulation. Apparently, in the past we have ignored, misinterpreted or reacted against these measures. We seem to have an innate antipathy to being told what to do, but because we are not very good at making behavioural choices that are in our best interests for ourselves, we have been making poor decisions in contexts ranging from healthy eating to financial planning.

Nudges are designed to circumvent this active rejection of good advice, and overcome our inability to choose well, by changing the environments in which we make subconscious decisions and thereby influencing our actions. Essentially, they work by making us passive reactors to suggestion rather than active decision makers responding to stimulus.

If nudges are to succeed, then, it’s surely better that we don’t recognise them for what they are and what they are trying to do. Otherwise we might be tempted to ignore or react against them, just as we have with direct communication. HMRC’s plan to nudge people into paying their tax by rewording its tax letters might be more effective if we respond to the suggestive wording without thinking about it than if we are looking out for it when we open the letter. So perhaps they should just go ahead and do it without telling us all about it.

Second, the current focus on nudges attracts the vocal attention of cynics and sceptics, many of whom are arguing that there is something underhand about nudging, that it is just another form of the ‘nanny state’, and/or that it involves ‘playing with people’s brains’. (There’s a wonderful example here, which includes a total misunderstanding of the RSA’s Social Brain project.) It seems to me that much of this criticism stems from a lack of understanding of the idea of ‘choice architecture’ which should underpin nudges – a sensible theory that is not exactly Big Brother and the Thought Police. Still, the negative commentary sounds good, and can’t help.

Third, all this attention risks giving the impression that nudges are the government’s sole response to the problems facing society today. There’s certainly a place for them, but there’s no way they can address deep-seated issues such as obesity, social isolation and binge drinking on their own. They’re more paracetamol than radiotherapy – they might have an impact on the surface and around the edges, but they won’t address the causes of more serious and long-term problems.

I can see why nudges are attractive at the moment – they’re cheap and light-touch, which is just what the government wants. But while they’re useful, they’re clearly not a panacea, and giving the impression that they are risks undermining support for them.

Nudging seems to me to be a good idea, and certainly worth a try. So perhaps the government should stay quiet about what it is planning, and just get on with nudging. If it works, they can tell us all about it afterwards.

Oh, and if I come across another blog post titled ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ I think I’ll scream!

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.

Can you cut it when the cuts come?

With the recent publication of the Localism Bill and the release of information about cuts to funding from central government, local authorities and local communities now have a clearer idea of what the future looks like. It’s hardly news to say that many will not like what they see, and that the poorest areas are facing the largest cuts. But it is perhaps worth dwelling on the impact that the combination of these two developments might have on communities in different parts of England.

Ironically, councils with the most deprived residents seem to be facing the deepest cuts precisely because their residents are the least affluent. They receive less council tax than local authorities with more affluent residents, which means that not only are they more reliant on funding from central government (which is what is being cut), but also that they are not eligible for so much subsidy from central government to compensate for the coming freeze in council tax payments. As a result, inner-city councils such as Tower Hamlets and Southwark in London are facing cuts that are twice the size of the national average, and larger still than in many affluent areas.

The effects of these cuts might be mitigated by the provisions of the Localism Bill, much of which seems to focus on releasing councils from the control of central government, and releasing local people from the control of their council. Basically, councils will have greater flexibility to spend their (reduced) budgets as they see fit, and local people will have more power to take on services themselves, buy up local buildings, exert greater control over planning decisions and so on.

In theory, this double removal of red tape and restriction might soften the impact of the cuts on the local services people receive, and perhaps allow communities facing more stringent cuts to narrow the gap between themselves and those in areas where cuts are to be lighter. But I think there is plenty to suggest that in practice the opposite will happen, and that the empowering effect of the Bill will be weakest in the very areas where cuts are to be deepest. If this is the case, the effect of the Bill is likely to be to widen the gap between communities, not narrow it.

I’m guessing that people are most likely to take advantage (if that’s the right way to put it) of the extra power offered by the Localism Bill if they are a) part of a strong community and feel it will be worth making the effort on behalf of others, and b) used to taking the initiative and getting involved in council-type issues, and know how to go about this.

I’m also guessing that these kinds of communities and people are more likely to be found in affluent areas than deprived areas.

Evidence for this comes not least from the RSA’s Connected Communities project, which is looking at social networks and access to power in New Cross Gate (a multiply deprived area in Lewisham, right next door to Southwark and Tower Hamlets). Social network analysis has revealed that large numbers of people in the area not only feel that they have no direct access to sources of local power and influence, they also do not know anyone else who might be able to put them in contact with such sources. A quarter of the people interviewed effectively felt unable to change things locally, either directly or indirectly. The analysis also shows the extent of social isolation in the area and the sparseness of local connections more generally.

All this suggests that many people in New Cross Gate are not used to getting involved, do not know how they can access power and are unlikely to feel it will be worthwhile trying. Contrast this with well-publicised middle class efforts to set up free schools and the well-known phenomenon of the pushy middle classes getting better services because they know how to ‘use the system’ and make themselves heard. These are the people who appear to be most able to use the provisions of the Localism Bill to mitigate the effects of the cuts – and they tend to live in more affluent areas which will be less seriously affected in the first place. By comparison, the residents of Tower Hamlets and New Cross Gate are in for a double whammy of deeper cuts that they can do less about.

The Connected Communities project is looking at ways to reduce social isolation and improve access to power in New Cross Gate and elsewhere; it seems that the events of the past few days have made this more important than ever.

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.

Where’s our ideology when we need it?

Ideology is an amazing thing.  Take the examples of France and the USA.  Both liberal democracies which permit their citizens to express their views by voting, organising, demonstrating, discussing and publishing.  Both states up to their eyeballs in debt.  And both polar opposites in the way in which those views are being expressed and that debt addressed.

France has been living beyond its means for decades, providing an enviable state-subsidised lifestyle for its citizens that has simply been unaffordable.  President Sarkozy’s determination to change this situation and bring the state finances under control, most famously by raising the retirement and state pension ages, has been met with widespread protest as French citizens seek to protect their privileges regardless of the reality of the situation.

The USA, on the other hand, is dealing with a financial crisis of much more recent gestation, but which has nonetheless placed the state under enormous strain.  President Obama’s determination to deal with the situation by spending more rather than less, and to provide a better level of public service and welfare to a wider section of the US public than ever before, has also met with widespread protest, most famously through the Tea Party movement in the Republican party and the recent shift from blue to red in the mid-term elections.

What both divides and unites these two nations and their citizens’ and politicians’ attitudes to state services and welfare is ideology.  France and the USA may be guided by two very different concepts of state responsibility: they are about as divided as they can be on the question of how far a democratic state should support/intrude into (delete as appropriate) the lives of their citizens.  But the passion that underlines these beliefs, these ideologies, is also what unites them: their citizens have in common the fact that they know what they like and want, and they are prepared to get active and organised to protect and achieve it.

How different we are in the UK.  Until the student demonstration of last week, the British public has been accepting its government’s handling of its own financial problems with barely a murmur.  Indeed, the student demonstration, which focussed on a single aspect of the government’s plans, only serves to highlight the lack of public reaction to the rest of the package.  I find this rather worrying, not because I think we should all be out on the streets or setting up radical political movements, but because it shows how socially and politically apathetic we are, or can be made to be, and how unwilling or unused we are to organising ourselves for our own good.

The combination of spending cuts and moves towards a Big Society means that many people in the UK will find life harder and/or have to play a more active role in their communities and local services.  I can imagine citizens in France, once they had made their feelings about the change felt, channelling their passion and organising zeal and coming together to accept and work with such a new reality.  But will citizens in the UK do likewise?

I have argued elsewhere on this blog that this convergence of spending cuts and the Big Society agenda is unfortunate.  I still think the current confusion of the two issues, which allows the Big Society to be portrayed as a ‘fig leaf’ for cuts, threatens to undermine public support for what could be a great opportunity to foster and encourage pro-social behaviour and attitudes, with all the benefits around social capital and quality of life that that would bring.  But, nevertheless, might the cuts actually be needed to inject some life into the Big Society idea?

At the moment, it looks as though we are sleepwalking towards a world with fewer services and less public support than what we have come to expect and rely on, without taking the initiative needed to strengthen communities and fill in the gaps left by a shrinking state.  That’s partly because as a nation and as a collection of localities we have never in recent memory needed to do this before, and unlike France and the USA we have no recent track record of doing anything  similar.  Perhaps the cuts, when they start to bite, will be what’s needed to spur us into action, and give us some of that organising zeal and ideological determination to look out for ourselves that we’ve seen across the Channel and the Atlantic.

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.

http://twitter.com/#!/sophiarc1/status/5248402799464448

http://twitter.com/#!/Moondamp_Roses/status/5261552026394624

http://twitter.com/#!/JohnatBryson/status/7746449341161472

Some are more unequal than others…

Like many people, I’ve been mildly fascinated by last week’s events at Manchester United.  For those of you who are totally detached from football, Wayne Rooney declared mid-week that he wanted to leave the club, claiming that it lacked the ambition and funds to compete at the highest level in the future.  He then, at the end of the week and after much agonising in the press and the Man Utd boardroom and changing room, did a complete U-turn and signed a new 5-year contract which doubled his income to £180,000 a week.

We’ll never know whether this was an extraordinarily crude negotiation ploy to double his salary, naivity on Rooney’s part, or guile on the part of Sir Alex Ferguson the manager – or a mixture of the three.  But whatever lies behind the scenes, what I find really interesting is the way in which the saga has been reported, and the apparent response from the Man Utd fans, because it speaks volumes about British attitudes to inequality and community.

This is the week in which 500,000 public-sector job losses were announced; in which cuts in spending and public services have been vigorously denounced as regressive and defended just as strenuously as fair; in which Goldman Sachs felt obliged to cut its ‘compensation’ fund for employees but still offered an average of £236,000 per employee; and in which the Downing Street website published salary details for senior Whitehall civil servants in the name of transparency.  Inequality and fairness are as high on the agenda as they have ever been.  And yet the fact that a 25-year-old footballer will now earn the median UK annual income of around £25k every day for the next five years has attracted considerably less attention than the heartache the uncertainty has caused fans and the task Rooney now has of winning back their trust.

It seems likely to me that such gross inequality is seen as acceptable in Rooney’s case, but not in the case of bankers and public servants, because of the influence of community.  Man Utd fans have a relationship with Rooney that, while not truly personal, is intense and two-way.  They love what he does on the pitch, appreciate the effect that he has in cementing the community of fans, and at some level recognise that he makes their lives better.  He’s also ‘one of us’, and could be the boy from down the street.

The opposite is true of bankers and senior public servants: despite the fact that they probably contribute more to this country, as far as the average person is concerned they are faceless, remote and disconnected from any aspect of community life.  As a result, they are pilloried for having incomes which, while considerable, are a fraction of Rooney’s.  (It will take Rooney a whole week to earn what the top civil servants take home in a year.)

My point in all this is that the context in which inequality manifests itself is all important.  Obvious inequality has been painted as a negative force, leading to increased stress, violence, health problems and other pathologies.  But perhaps it can also be used ‘for good’.  The RSA’s Connected Communities project has investigated community ties in New Cross Gate, a multiply-deprived area of South East London which borders the more affluent Telegraph Hill conservation area.  There is considerable local inequality here, as I highlighted in a previous post on the RSA’s Projects blog, and little interaction between the two areas.  But there is also potential for this inequality to be put to good use, if Telegraph Hill residents can be encouraged to engage with their neighbours in New Cross Gate and use their greater affluence, connections and capabilities to improve lives and community ties.

Inequality in the UK is not going to go away, but does it need to? The goals Wayne Rooney scores are more important to Man Utd fans than the fact that he earns so much more than them, and fans recognise that he wouldn’t be playing for them if he didn’t earn so much.  Could the same be true in areas like New Cross Gate; could local inequality not only be overlooked, but also appreciated, if it is put to good use?  And if this happens across the UK, in the context of the Big Society or otherwise, could greater engagement between rich and poor start to change the terms on which inequality is viewed?

Also posted at RSA Projects – the link’s on the right.