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Here Come the Anointed…Election Time Again

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So we face another general Election.  I have little enthusiasm.  It will demonstrate  much of what I believe we have got wrong in the UK at the moment.

It will not be an exercise in inclusive participative democracy, but an exercise in strategy.  Hustings and town hall meetings will pale into insignificance against the media stir created by the political elite and their special advisers (not much democracy in appointing them) racing around the country in their battle buses.   Millions will be spent on the ‘Yahboo!’ politics of billboard posters, party political broadcasts and ‘leaders’ debates’.

And the only people really rubbing their hands with glee (apart from the ad men, professional advisers, pollsters and battle bus drivers) are the SNP and Plaid Cymru because of the possibility that a hung parliament will enable them to extract all sorts of concessions that otherwise the democratic process would deny them.

Most of us will have ‘pointless votes’ as energy, horsetrading and guile will be focussed on the swing seats and the marginals.  Most of the ‘anointed’ on both sides have already been installed in safe seats from which they can develop their political careers without ever having to really grubby their hands with constituency politics.  We may get a few more Portillo moments this time around – but really what difference does that make?

And the voices of the majority of our politicians simply will not be heard in this process.  We may see them kissing babies in the shopping centres or get a 2 minute exchange on our doorstep with one of their lackeys, but in general their ideas will not be aired and debated and the concept of ‘local’, while highlighted in manifestos no doubt, will fail to materialise on the ground.

And we wonder why so many stay at home on polling  day…

Meanwhile we allow ourselves a subconscious sigh of relief as these prospective leaders, and their respective machine bureaucracies of spin and presentation, promise to shoulder the responsibility for progress so that we don’t have to.

Because the truth is for most of us that we just want to elect a government, national and/or local and then we want them to get on with it.  To sort everything out.  To put it all to rights.  To reduces our taxes and improve our services.

We have to recognise that this approach, if it ever worked, has not worked for a while now.  We cannot afford to waste so much talent, commitment, energy and passion while we are bored to tears by the so very ‘on message’ and carefully crafted words of the anointed and stage-managed few.

We have to find our voices, our passion, our energy and our motivation.  And then we might just be able to build communities in which we can be happier, and of which we can be proud.  That is where I will continue to put my energies.  Building society from the bottom up.

I’ll Name That JSC in….

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Leeds City Council is inviting residents in Harehills and Chapeltown to enter a competition to name the new Joint Service Centres that are being built in their respective communities.

One of the criteria is that name should appeal to all local residents.  Good luck with that!

My vote would go for The Hayfield as the name for Chapeltown as it is built on the site of a notorious pub.

You can access the competition details and entry forms here.

Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key

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Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission.  Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated.  His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments.  He is not an easy read.  By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher.  It is up to others to put his research into practice.

So what does Sen have to say?  How is it relevant to enterprise?  Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….

  • Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It had little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity, avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business.  Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.

He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.

Anyone for enterprise?

Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key?

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Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission.  Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated.  His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments.  He is not an easy read.  By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher.  It is up to others to put his research into practice.

So what does Sen have to say?  How is it relevant to enterprise?  Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….

  • Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It had little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity, avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business.  Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.

He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.

Anyone for enterprise?

Watch Out for the Vision…

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The point about Visions of the Anointed is that, whether they are co-produced or not, they will always be problematical. They will always create winners and losers. They will always consume vast amounts of time, energy, cash and other resources. And they will always be, at best, contemporary. They never successfully anticipate, and therefore can never be built well for the future.

They provide a damaging diversion, a displacement activity, that allows individuals to continue to blame the planners, the builders and their fellow citizens instead of doing the long hard work of climbing their own personal mountains and seeing how they can help fellow climbers along the way.

Co-production in the Vision of the Anointed is perhaps an impoverished and futile version of ‘active citizenship’?

By ‘engaging’ us in polishing their visions they disengage us from our own.

Communities are the product of citizens leading active and engaged lives in pursuit of progress. Not by getting the spatial infrastructure right.  By shaping plans that we then expect others to deliver.

And if ‘citizens’ can start to set the parameters for Placemaking then we are just replacing one group of the anointed (a professional elite) with another (the proletariat). Sowells’ point in Vision of the Anointed, IF I have understood it properly, is that it does not matter how we choose the anointed, the product of their deliberations WILL be flawed.

I think Drucker was also onto this in his work on meta-economics where he argued that planners can NEVER keep up with the process of enterprise and entrepreneurship as a force for driving social change.

So let’s be careful in our collusion with the anointed in trying to build the perfect cathedral. Let’s take ourselves instead into the bazaar and work on more personal, small scale pursuit of progress.

Anyone for ‘enterprise’ (rightly understood)?