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I do like the fact that I can message my MP Stehpen WIlliams on his facebook and that he genuinely seems interested in getting back to me. Better than a soleless letter, but does it make a difference? I guess that it the hurdle new mobile and online communications have to prove in order for them to be successful...
What risks are you talking about?
For instance, I can look back to my grandparents bringing up a family in the late 1930s and see far more "profound social risk" than now.
Indeed my grandmother was left in London with two kids and bombs raining down on their heads while my grandfather was forced to follow Montgomery through North Africa and up through Italy whilst being shot at. That's risky.
What is particularly profound about the risks we face now in comparison to the past?
Of course, these are not all new risks and the 1930s is a good candidate for a previous period of risk. But I was using the term (and should have made this clear) in the contemporary sociological sense employed by writers like Ulrich Beck. What they argue is that, after the scientific enlightenment, in which humans believed they could tame nature, we now find ourselves in an age of unintended consequences where things go wrong not because of lunatics like Hitler or Stalin, but because of systemic risks that policy-makers can neither predict nor control. It was indeed risky for your grandparents, but the government of the day knew pretty clearly what it had to do. My point was that politicians today are often unable to make clear policy because they simply don't know where problems are coming from or how to fix them without making them worse.
Is this a roundabout way of saying that politicians don't know what they are talking about?
If so, what makes you think that our current politicians are less informed than previous generations?
As you say many of these are not new risks or they're not really risks at all if you analyse them sensibly. There are arguments, from the likes of Adam Curtis for example, that these risks are in fact an invention of the political class.
The risk of nuclear terrorism, for instance, is remarkably low. Building a nuclear weapon still requires vast resources and knowledge that are still only available to advanced western-style states. Believe it or not, you can't really build nuclear weapons - James Bond villain style - in the caves of Tora Bora.
The age of high nuclear risk is actually behind us at present. During the Cold War we were genuinely eyeball-to-eyeball with the Red Army - probably the most viciously effective fighting unit in human history - backed by very real nuclear weapons.
This was a whole lot more of a riskier situation than we have now with a few loud mouth, stateless, Islamist loonies broadcasting a few empty threats on Al-Jazeera while, in the real world, only having the resources to fund a few cheap rockets to fire aimlessly at Israel, plant a few roadside bombs in Iraq and run an unwinnable insurgency in Afghanistan. The present situation is more akin to a minor global security threat than the imminent end of civilisation I'm afraid.
Next on your list is ecological disaster. Are we really expected to live in fear of the weather?
Killer Viruses? In the 80s AIDS was going to kill us all if you believed the newspapers.
Uncontainable social mobility? This is a weird one. The story of the last 30 years is about vastly reduced social mobility. Its consequences, for progressives, are one of the genuine political issues really facing us.
Ideological fundamentalism? Compared to a 20th Century of Nazism, fascism, Stalinism etc. there's not much of it around is there?
Cultural incomprehension? Not sure what this is. But it sounds like it's been cooked up by liberal relativists ...
No it didn't. The briefest look at the politics of the 30s reveals a remarkable cross-party/cross-ideological consensus from the political class for appeasement, here and in France at least.
Everyone from apologists for Stalin on the left like the Webbs, through to the mainstream of the Labour Party, led by a pacifist, to the Tories under Baldwin and Chamberlain and out to the far-right wing Moseley backed appeasement - the entirely wrong thing to do - all the way.
My point is that things have changed remarkably little. Then as now we have a small political class, hard-selling supposed ideological differences and "risks" to us, to disguise the fact that they all think exactly the same - to the point of having mostly gone to school and college together - and have exactly the same interests at heart.
That's why politicians have always tried to be "judged less on the basis of ideology or even policy than personal persona and integrity". Because they're all the same.
What was Chamberlain doing waving a menu around stating "peace in our time"? Try taking a look at newsreel footage of his regular political broadcasts to the nation and see how carefully they were worked to create a persona. What was Wilson doing with a pipe when he didn't smoke one? Gladstone's wood chopping? Disraeli's alleged popularity with Queen Victoria?
The political class has always created an aura of being "visible and reachable" and it's just that. An aura. They just try to con us on the internet now.
I don't however think it can be disputed that some of the rules are changing particularly relating to politicians being visible, approachable and challenged. A recent example is Hillary Clinton Trip to Bosnia "expose": http://youtube.com/watch?v=8BfNqhV5hg4, before that and perhaps more appropriately, because it wasn't mass media who caught the moment, the downfall of Sen. George Allen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0PMnKwI
Whereas Wilson brought his pipe out once a week politicians are having to be more careful about what they say and do, OR they may have to say and do what they really think. They may have to be more honest and accept the consequences like Nick Clegg's admission that he didn't believe in God (Radio Five after becoming Leader) and has slept with more women than a politician has admitted to so far (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7324541.stm).
Citizens are confused. Because they expect politics to work like X-Factor. We vote (or demo) and policy changes. How is that going to affect things at election day? Is the politician who promises to be one of us - Barack Obama, David Cameron going to win? Will that change anything?
Can we hope for that discussion as part of the RSA Journalism Network that you are developing with the Reuters Institute of Journalism? It looks promising - but from information to date it is going to be a private affair for professional journalists http://snurl.com/2376u . Maybe that private pace is needed - in which case should we be looking for another forum for citizen-politico-journalism discussions?
I'm not trying to take a pop at RSA-Reuters Institute here - just raising the issue of how non-professionals best get a look in. Is that a bigger version of what's happening here?
Might the BBC plans for linking their online activity to local blogs and other sites help construct a better environment, and also provide a focus for discussing codes etc? http://snurl.com/236lo
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/wow/0aelec...
It's interesting how cultural this is. In Europe, we are scared of GM food but relaxed about stem cell research. In the US, the reverse is true.
So which of these is right?
Is GM food a profound social risk, or not? Nuclear power? (We say yes, the French say no) Asteroid attack? Terrorism?
Are we talking about the reality of social risk, or the perception of it?
International treaties, conflicts in policy objectives, a mass media that has the attention span of a gnat, and public opinion that rarely seems settled as well as a generation of politicians who've emerged through think tanks and as SPADs makes for cautious politics.
It's not cautious politics; it's high-risk profligate politics for the private sector that's the problem.
Here in South Bristol what's needed are simple and straightforward redistributive policies around, for instance, transport, health, housing and education.
How can it possibly be incautious for politicians to invest £100m into public transport in south Bristol but it's not apparently a risk at all to squander more than that on a doomed PPP for the London tube, Metronet?
Or why is it impossibly risky for them to spend money on providing simple ante-natal physiotherapy classes but not a risk at all to throw hundreds of millions at a failed NHS computer project?
They seem to love risk.
If we're talking about the changing nature of citizenship in the 21st century, it's helpful to think about how the state itself is changing. The consensus view is that its redistributive role is being replaced by an enabling one, in 'partnership' with a plethora of other actors, including citizens themselves. But a lot of citizens, and maybe a lot of councillors too, don't always buy into notions like shared accountability, co-production, pooled resources and joint working practices. They see only blurred responsibilities and that unsettles them. Isn't this the source of a lot of the 'bewilderment' - the lack of clarity about where the important decisions are being taken and which arenas or channels of participation it's worth our while using to try to influence anything?
Moreover, the Bristol Blogger might well be right that in a lot of situations a politics of distributed power and knowledge isn't a very effective way of getting the things people want done. On the other hand, the call for straightforward redistributive policies presupposes that the local state has the authority and legitimacy anymore to direct resources unilaterally.
My question is this: can you cordon off some policy spheres (transport, health, housing and education were mentioned) for 'traditional' types of state intervention (and 'traditional' modes of citizenship (voting the rotters in and out while leaving them to get on with it in between times)?
Or does the extolled 'new' settlement between state and citizens, based on power-sharing and all the uncertainties and risks as well as the potential for innovative solutions that come with it, necessarily apply across the board (if one accepts it applies at all)?
PS I really must stick my head next door for a chat one of these days, Stephen (C) ;-)
(Yes - it's odd that we're doing similar work in next-door offices within the Leeds University Centre for Digital Citizenship and it takes a Bristol-based blog to get us exchanging ideas. Let's meet.)
'Enabling' is one of those words that's littered around local government without its meaning ever really being pinned down accurately by those that use it.
But what you seem to be talking about is the decline of that old deal that most of us have signed up to where we pay the tax and the state delivers the services. If this has changed then this has not been terribly well communicated to us and when do we get our money back?
Most of us are paying around 40%-45% of our incomes in taxes for services. If the state is no longer willing/able to deliver them then we obviously need that money to enable ourselves to buy the services don't we? Otherwise we are effectively being 'disenabled'.
To give a slightly soppy example: last week Stephen Hilton wrote about the government setting up interactive health and wellbeing websites. This amused me because I was sat there at the time with toothache, courtesy of a chipped tooth, because I can't afford to get my teeth fixed while feeding my two year old son cheap and nasty Nestle yogurts full of chemicals from Asda because it was the end of the month and we had no money left.
Now I know what to feed my son - Rachel's Organic Yogurts (no sugar kids!) - but I am simply not able to because I'm handing the money I could buy them with over to the government so that they can enable me to make informed healthy choices that I then can't afford to take! Bonkers isn't it?
At present we don't seem to have an enabling state. We have a we'll-have-our-cake-and-eat-it-state whereby we pay for through the nose for a service that tells us we have to go out and buy services.
Why does the cheap "enabling state" cost as much - if not more - than an expensive "redistributive state"? I don't understand.
A lot of citizens, and maybe a lot of councillors too, don't always buy into notions like shared accountability, co-production, pooled resources and joint working practices. They see only blurred responsibilities and that unsettles them. Isn't this the source of a lot of the 'bewilderment'
It's not bewilderment. It's outrage. Most of these organisations you refer to - SWRDA, West of England Partnership, the Regional Assembly, PCTs, Safer Bristol Partnership etc, etc - are quite obviously government organisations quite obviously spending huge sums of government money but they're appointed rather than elected and therefore not accountable. A democracy without accountability is not a democracy is it? And a democracy based on patronage is better called an oligarchy.
On the other hand, the call for straightforward redistributive policies presupposes that the local state has the authority and legitimacy anymore to direct resources unilaterally.
Well they seem to be able to when they want to - the Olympics, Millenium Dome, Channel Tunnel rail link, billions gone into the NHS etc.
My question is this: can you cordon off some policy spheres (transport, health, housing and education were mentioned) for 'traditional' types of state intervention (and 'traditional' modes of citizenship (voting the rotters in and out while leaving them to get on with it in between times)?
Or does the extolled 'new' settlement between state and citizens, based on power-sharing and all the uncertainties and risks as well as the potential for innovative solutions that come with it, necessarily apply across the board (if one accepts it applies at all)?
To be honest I find the idea that the state is somehow unable to run schools, straightforward health services, build transport infrastructure and influence planning and housing slightly unbelievable.
For a thread that's proclaimed the end of ideology, there's an awful lot of it about isn't there?
I believe that a new genereation of politicians will be connected with real life issues and play by modern rules of communication. The older generation will fade away in the end. So there's hope, I think.
1. How long will the fading away take?
2. Are the 'modern rules of communication' likely to lead to a better quality of democracy or a slicker PR machine?
Fat Man on a Keyboard