not another piece on Thatcher... a philosophy of self-deluded expediency

For a Prime Minister whose name is synonymous with a "political philosophy", Thatcher said very little that could be pressed into intellectual service to justify her eponymous approach to politics. A rare exception is her speech at the St Lawrence Jewry in 1978 which is useful in bringing to the surface origins of the fierce anti-statism that continues to drive Conservative, and indeed, mainstream British politics. In that speech she said:

What I am working for is a free and responsible society. But freedom is not synonymous with an easy life. Indeed, my own faith in freedom does not rest in the last resort on utilitarian arguments at all. Perhaps it would be possible to achieve some low-grade form of happiness in a thoroughly regimented State; but in such a State men would not be treated as what they are and what Christianity wanted them to be—free and responsible human beings. There are many difficult things about freedom: it does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the destiny of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation

What we know now is that we got instead, the freedom to be irresponsible, coupled by a diminution of basic civil liberties in the name of protecting the freedom she valued-namely the narrow freedom to get on economically and socially which for her constituted the standard of human value and character. If there was a positive side to her vision, this was it but it was left largely undeveloped. In her mind, the ideal was self-evident enough not to warrant further thought-the Grantham greengrocer needed nothing except freedom from the constraints of the state to flourish after all. But citing De Tocqueville she delegated to the church the task of moral education, and so, rather conveniently, could argue that the moral failings of today's society can be laid at the feet of the church and civil society.

The most interesting part of the speech lies in her insistence that her convictions were based not so much on moral ideas but on political judgements about the rightness of actions for a particular time...to quote the Lady, "many of the issues on which we are passionately divided are disputes about fact and expediency." Now this was no doubt a tactical move to fend off the socially progressive movement within Churches that took issue with the poverty-inducing nature of her policies but it was also, in hindsight an extraordinary claim about the non-ideological nature of her outlook. It is belied almost immediately by what she goes on to claim about the State (capital S) and the deleterious effects of assigning to it the functions of poverty relief on human character and charity. The State (sic) is not for her a particular historical or sociological institution, but an overarching ideological construct of collectivist Marxism, with the consequence that her crusade of rolling back its frontiers must necessarily be viewed anti-ideological.

A common mistake in politics is to base your convictions and policies on rectifying the past rather than looking to the future. Thatcher was no exception to this. Yet it is hard to excuse the current dominance of the anti-statist consensus on those grounds alone. The steam-roller of anti-statist ideology seems now to have gathered an unstoppable momentum, aided by the vested interests it created and it is  dismantling bit by bit the post war infrastructure that was the foundation of modern welfare state economies.  In the war of ideologies, Thatcherism has won hands down, and the price that we will have to pay for the self-satisfaction of the ideologues has yet to be reckoned.

No news is bad news?

Yesterday I woke up to the disconcerting absence of the Today programme on my radio. In truth, I wasn't that disconcerted, as I'd had a general sense that nothing very much had been happening recently; the slow news period around Christmas seemed to have dragged on a bit.

Makes sense, I thought. In general, a slower economy and fewer resources for journalism probably means less is going on.  Then I started to question whether that really was the case. What if there were lots of things happening but not being reported as they should be? Or what if the news was actually reported elsewhere but it wasn't accessible to me?

The online digital world should in theory be a boon to newsgathering and the explosion of newsblogs and citizen journalism is testament to that. However, the corollary of the explosion in information is fragmentation. Given the increased choice of news sources, it is perhaps ironic that exposure to variety and range of news reporting seems to be decreasing but this is what recent research (Ipsos Mori?) shows.  People appear increasingly to be getting their news from sources that reflect their political preferences and perspectives. As a bit of an aside, this would appear to me to signal bad news for the idea of a shared common civic and deliberative space.

As we now know, the increase in channels and platforms and the massive growth of content has simply meant increased competition for our time and attention, which remains limited and finite. This of course explains the hugely privileged position of aggregators and search engines which do the job of sifting through a gazillion possible sources of information to bring you a "manageable" choice range. The information that Google collects on you is fed into their algorithm which effectively determines what you'll see based on what it thinks you want to see. But as search becomes less "organic" and more dominated by paid for advertising and advertorials, tailored not just to your preferences and profile but to whether you form part of the target market for certain brands, the possibility is growing that you may in fact be increasingly shepharded into a specific virtual space shaped by corporates with big budgets to spend on adwords, suggested posts, trending topics and promoted tweets. A concrete example of this is the trend towards paywalls for newspaper sites, where enticing free content now sits alongside links to articles and advertorials from other, mainly commercial sites.

So there is now a very strong possibility that you may be seeing things that you did not  chose to search for, and also that your profile, as constructed from your social networks and browsing preferences may not qualify you to be within a particular target group. Those that are web-savvy know that they have to maintain a certain active social media profile in order for the best news sources appear in their feeds. In a world where information and transactions are increasingly virtual, the consequences for the non web-savvy and the non-web active hardly bear thinking about.

It seems to me that these issues are what those contemplating the future of public service broadcasting should really be discussing, rather than that old chestnut of media plurality.

Immigration, democracy and capitalism in Singapore

On February the 16th, a rare event will take place in Singapore- a political demonstration. The protesters plan to voice their displeasure at the Government's White Paper on Population, which sets out plans to provide for a population projected to grow to 6.9 million in 2030. 

When I was growing up some twenty years ago in Singapore its population was but a mere 2.5-3 million. Since then it has grown to 5.3 million and the leisurely tropical garden state of my childhood has come to resemble more and more the dense megalopolises of Tokyo and Hong Kong with their towering highrise blocks. For a tiny island of 714 sq km, such a huge increase has put great strain on public infrastructure such as transport schools, etc. Further, against a background of widening inequalities, many aggrieved "heartlanders" who have had to compete with keener and more sharp-elbowed newcomers have found it all too natural to point the finger at the influx of immigrants from mainland China who have virtually poured in through an open door. More than any other issue, it has been behind the biggest groundswell of discontent with the governing party, who has suffered an historic setback in the last election because of it, and only last week lost another seat in a by-election. 

The chief rationale for the policy of population increase is that maintaining the annual rate of GDP growth  of(average 6.3% since 2003) to which the country has become accustomed will require the population to grow by that much.

I must confess that I've been away too long from the country of my birth to be a really informed commentator.  I'm no fan of the PAP's dynastic hegemony but I do find it interesting that the most potent challenge to its less than democratic rule has been grounded in the same kind of populist anti-immigration xenophobia that we find here in Europe. That, alas, is democracy for you. 

What's more subversive though is that the opposition Worker's Party, and indeed some of the PAP's own MPs such as Inderjit Singh are now making tentative noises about accepting a lower rate of GDP growth. The Singapore model was modelled on the premise that that economic competitiveness in the age of globalisation for a country bereft of natural resources required a one-party state form of democratic rule.   It will be interesting to see how the debate around the population-growth rate develops given that maintaining a certain level material well-being is such a fundamental part of the Singaporean social and political contract. It would be ironic if the forces of globalisation are in the end responsible for undermining the Singaporean model. 

The post-disillusionment era.

In relation to the divide between modernisers vs  rose-tinted romantics, I’m probably more likely to be numbered amongst the latter. There are certainly things about the past that I miss, and feel we are worse off for having lost. And with regard to the messy hypothetical calculus of whether what we have got that is better is worth losing that which was of value, I'd say the balance feels like it's shifted towards the negative.  

I am particularly nostalgic for the visions of the future from the past. It is striking how such visions of the future tended to be more ambitious and optimistic about moral and social progress, and how imbued they were with humanism and enlightenment ideals that now feel outdated and naive. (though of course there are always important caveats about the injustices that were overlooked). Think, for example, of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and the lessons it tried to impart to us about the responsible exercise of human being's technologically enhanced domination of the world.

Why do they feel so outdated to us now? I think it is because we  have largely given up on the twentieth century faith in the potential of human institutions to change the world for the better. What has taken its place feels like a capitulation to  the inexorable and rising tide of harm that unchecked human activity causes. Call me old fashioned but in spite of the fashionability of networks, I still can’t see how spontaneous action can address the structural issues that channel human activity towards self- and planetary destruction. That’s why I’m still mourning the decay and decline of the main institutions of governance that for all their faults at least kept us sane through their promises of a better world.  

Data's eye view

Since I quit academia in 2009 (one might have said the rot set in long before that) I’ve had an irrational aversion to reading or listening to anything intellectual. But during the long drive home yesterday, having finally tired of the mindnumbing thump of Radio 1 I tuned into Ben Goldacre’s R4 programme on RCTs in public policy.

Now a deep-seated reason for leaving the civil service is that I am utterly hopeless at numbers. And from where I sat within the Treasury the rise of the onus on the measurable and the drive to quantify tested to destruction many aspects of public services that I idealised and as a wet liberal socialist, I wanted to see restored. Frequently translated into crude and moronic measures by self-serving and upward-looing middle managers at the frontline, the results often served to subvert our understanding of wider outcomes for objectives or a set of narrowly defined figures and so deprive professionals of the discretion, judgement and ability to tailor decisions and actions in ways that could help their clients whose lives and circumstances were often highly complex and multi-dimensional.

Listening to Goldacre’s plea for more, and better research in public policy gave rise to divided emotions. On the one hand, how could any rational being oppose the call for better and more research that can help us identify “what works”. How could the ideal of disinterested scientific pursuit of the truth be in any sense culpable for adverse or ineffective policy outcomes? Surely any examples of failure are better explained by a failure to apply the scientific method properly? Or perhaps the failure of the policy-maker to interpret the results that can enlighten and improve policy design?

On the other hand, the journey towards this very holy grail of public policy is full of pitfalls. It is not so much that I believe that human irrationality or vested interests will inevitably undermine the process (I maintain a belief that certain well-regulated societies are capable of keeping these at bay) but rather a scepticism that aggregate numbers can tell enough of a meaningful story about improvements in some of the more important aspects of wellbeing in individuals' lives. I am thinking here of persons' moral progress, mental well-being and the condition of their social relationships and environment. I will no doubt be accused of falling into the "holistic" camp and of posing vague and non constructive objections but I can't help feeling that at the root of this is the unwillingness of social scientists to embrace a fully normative, person-centred conception of human well-being. What however that bodes for public policy I still haven't quite figured out.

In the beginning...

This is my "words" blog as opposed to my "images" blog though someday I hope that my photographic practice will develop to the point where these two worlds converge. The world of words I still think of as a world belonging to my past while the world of images is one which my expressive ability is still that of a stuttering toddler.

Over the years that I've been observing and learning about politics, life, the world out there, various insights have occurred to me that I have toyed with the idea of putting down. But I never felt I quite had the time or inclination to further research and develop them into properly thoughtful or well-argued pieces. It's only belatedly that I've realised a) that I had best express them before they fade from memory and from the early onset of senility and b) the blogosphere is exactly the right place for unfounded ruminations.

So here we go.