John Hudson

According to BBC Newsnight: the main new policy announcement in Gordon Brown’s Labour Party Conference Speech tomorrow will be a plan to tackle the digital divide amongst young people. This will be done through a voucher scheme that will subsidize the cost of a computer or an internet subsciption for low income households with children…. if that is the case then it is an interesting development.

Obviously this is a hugely important speech for Brown. If he is pinning his political hopes on the headline grabbing potential of a plan to address the digital divide then this marks something of a return to the fore of the ‘e-galitarian’ rhetoric I wrote about in 2003. It will be a clear attempt to respond to Cameron’s claim that Brown is an ‘analogue politician in a digital age’ by plugging, once again, into the modernising imagery of new technology, but doing so in a way that suggests modernisation must be tied with a concern for equity that is the traditional hallmark of Labour (and, by implication, alien to the Conservatives, no matter how modern they might now appear.)

That the scheme will only be for young people is a nod to the human development potential of the internet for those in education: investment to boost equality of opportunity for learners rather than a social right for all. Internet access is not, it seems, regarded by Brown as an end in itself, but merely a means to an end, a way of improving human capital by boosting learning and, in turn, of improving social outcomes through a more level educational playing field.

In short, the plan has all the hallmarks of the limited, fragmented vision of e-galitarianism rather than the universal, comprehensive egalitarianism of Old Labour.

South Korea’s former President Roh Moo-hyun is making waves in the press at the moment after launching a new e-democracy website called Democracy 2.0 that is designed to foster greater public debate. It’s an interesting move for lots of reasons and seems beyond the run-of-the-mill political websites that regularly spring up around the world.

Firstly, Korea is one of the most wired nations on earth, and the participation rates in social networking sites such as Cyworld outstrip anything seen in countries like the UK. Already, some of the previous attempts at e-democracy (many instigated as part of Rho’s presidency) have had some interesting, albeit limited, impacts.

Secondly, there have been some recent signs that citizens are beginning to use the internet as a serious tool for political participation. Indeed, recent demonstrations against imports of US beef were largely organised online and the International Herald Tribune talked of a ‘new generation of Web 2.0 protestors‘ when reporting on the protests. In a relatively young democracy (in only its 20th year now), where political parties and political coalitions are still in a state of flux, web based movements perhaps have an added potency.

Thirdly, and not unrelated, the conservative government against whom the above mentioned protests were aimed are reportedly looking at restricting some online political activism in order to reduce the flow of misinformation it feels contributed to the anti-US beef import demonstrations. Rho’s site must be seen as some sort of direct response to this. And, his e-democracy credentials become bolder still when it comes clear that he is also in a battle with the current government over his attempts to keep hold of confidential government papers relating to his own Presidency that he downloaded from a government intranet he established during his Presidency.

The big question now, it seems, is whether all this points to Rho becoming politically active once again - and, I guess, whether he will look to harness Web 2.0 technologies to help him in doing so.

Hopefully posts to this site will start to be a bit more regular once again: with Densen’s help (well, they did pretty much all the work while I drank coffee), I’ve moved from Movable Type (MT) to WordPress. The MT platform was struggling with spam overload, which took the fun out of blogging, and constant (complicated) upgrades to try to address this were a pain in the ass. Plus it lacked the cool iPhone app that WordPress has!

Repointing the domain took a bit longer than planned, but by happy coincidence this means the new version of the blog has gone live on OneWebDay.

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Summer School at King’s College, Cambridge. It’s a tremendous event - and one that has been going since just after the Second World War - which is attended for one week by around 100 members of DWP staff as ’students’. They are joined by senior staff - who deliver lectures and host seminars and workshops - and the school can usually count on featuring an appearance from at least one minister, the DWP’s permanent secretary, several agency heads and programme directors and sometimes even the Cabinet Secretary.

From 2002-6 I was a tutor at the Summer School, which was then organised and delivered largely by academics, but from 2007 onwards the DWP decided to organise the school internally and adopt a more internal focus. This year, however, I was invited back to deliver a lecture on the ‘Changing Context of Welfare’. This provided me with the odd experience off delivering a talk dealing with the demise of the Keynesian welfare state not only in Keynes’ old college but in a lecture hall named after Keynes and featuring a bust of him on the stage! Slides below via Slideshare…

I have spent the past few days at the Joint University Council Public Administration Committee Annual Conference (aka PAC conference), which was at the University of York this year (so pretty easy for me to attend!).

Headline speakers included Jocelyne Bourgon (President Emeritus, Canada School of Public Service), who delivered the inaugural National School of Government Lecture, and Rod Rhodes (ANU and University of Tasmania) who delivered the Annual Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture. Both speakers offered some interesting challenges to the audience. Bourgon, whose career has mainly been in public service at the top echelons of the Canadian civil service, gave a talk that was clearly very strong influenced by some of the latest thinking in complexity theory, eschewing standard linear approaches to policy making and governance, and advocating a more networked form of policy management. Rhodes, meanwhile, continued to push his interpretive approach to policy analysis, drawing on his detailed (essentially anthropological) research on senrior staff in Whitehall to offer an intricate narrative of how the modern day civil service operates. Both, however, raised more questions than they offered answers.

Other interesting sessions included two linked panels examining the competition state thesis, in which the key exponents of the thesis (Phil Cerny of Rutgers and Mark Evans of York) both made theoretically focused presentations and others offered more empirically rooted papers testing/extending of the thesis (Sarah Radcliffe, Neil Lunt and Dan Horsfall - all from York).  Dan’s paper - From Competition State to Competition States? - won the Sage sponsored prize for best paper presented by a postgraduate. Oliver James (Exter University) gave what I thought was an interesting and carefully crafted presentation on whether top management team turn-over affects public service performance - reporting findings from an ESRC funded project that has involved the collection of a tremendous amount of data - but he got a bit of a rough ride from an audience that appeared largely hostile to quantitative research, which was a shame.

Myself and Jim Goddard (University of Bradford and current JUC Chair) hosted a round table discussion on the links between social policy and public administration - based around a presentation we delivered titled ‘Social Policy and Public Administration: Marriage or Divorce’ (slides below - though the charts won’t work on Slideshare for some reason) - and, hopefully, will lead to the JUC hosting some joint social policy-public administration events in the near future. I’ve always found the split between the subjects a little frustrating, not least because my interests span the two.