John Hudson

Interesting profile of the Milibands in Saturday’s Guardian magazine.

Two articles in the Guardian this week (

The Guardian published David Goodhart’s Prospect essay Discomfort of Strangers yesterday. In it he discusses what he believes to be the ‘progressive dilemma’: that solidarity and diversity conflict.

While I think there may be some truth in this, the welfare state literature certainly hints at some important weaknesses in his argument. In particular, he could learn much from a closer reading of Swedish history. Much of his argument rests on an ‘America v Sweden’ claim: diversity and minimal government or homogeneity and solidaristic social democratic government. As he puts it: ‘You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogenous society with intensely shared values’.

While it is true that Sweden is an ethnically homogenous society it is a gross oversimplification of its history to therefore suggest its generous welfare state results from ‘intensely shared values’. Indeed, as Peter Baldwin has demonstrated the Swedish welfare state didn’t emerge from a ‘oh - we are all the same, let’s be nice to each other and share our wealth’ altruism - could politics ever be so other than in a childish imagination? - but from the same intense political bargaining and conflict found in the USA or, for that matter, anywhere else. Working class were pitted against middle class, urban against rural, industrialists againsts trade unionists, employed against self-employed.

Where Sweden differed from countries like the USA & UK - as Esping-Andersen has argued - was in the way its political institutions favoured comprise and consensus politics over adversarial winner takes all politics. A proportional voting system and a strong parliamentary system of government have allowed the progessive core to dominate the political system and produced the gradual move towards a socialist system of which the Fabians would have been proud.

Goodhart says it was Conservative MP David Willetts who first drew his attention to the progessive dilemma. If the UK had a more progessive constitutional settlement the chances are Willetts and Co would be talking of a different progressive dilemma: how to break the Lib Dem-Labour coalition’s stranglehold on power given the fact that some 2/3 of the UK electorate persistently back progessive parties at elections.

Interesting poll on Labour party members’ views on Blair in today’s Guardian.

According to the figures (raw data), 39% of Labour members want Blair to go before the next election… but 35% want him to continue on until the election after next. 47% say he has got it about right on policy… but 33% that the government has gone too far to the right.

‘The impression’, say the Guardian in their leader, ‘is of a party that respects its leader, rather than loves him, but is far from withdrawing its backing’. Significantly, more (55% to 30%) say they’d vote for Blair than for Brown if there were a leadership election today.

Went to see the e-Envoy speak on ‘The Future of the UK e-government’ at the London School of Economics last night. Curiously enough he had relatively little to say about the future of e-government - and I didn’t get the chance to ask what would be happening when the Office of the e-Envoy is disbanded this year or what this change will mean in terms of e-government’s position in the policy agenda.

Despite this it was still an interesting enough talk (rough notes taken on my IPAQ). Pinder was very open in expressing his disappointment with progress in delivering information age government. In particular, he criticized the ‘tick box approach’ resulting from the 100% target - departments and agencies delivering ‘brochureware’ to satisfy the target rather than thinking about how services might be repackaged or reorganized.

Interestingly, he said much more thought still needed to go into devising services that would be relevant to the needs of a more fragmented, individualised citizenery and into tue marketing of these services. He described government as being stuck in the Fordist era of one size fits all and suggested e-government is still the way forward here… if change can be delivered.

Here, however, we get to the crux of the matter: he implied that resistance from within has been a key problem - ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ being his phrase - because of worries that e-government might threaten existing jobs and practices. This in turn hinted at another problem: rather than breaking down departmental silos, e-channels were creating additional silos, internet, call centre and physical services often being run in isolation from each other. It was here, Pinder suggested, that the key problem lay, for even when web services are being joined-up they aren’t being joined-up with other channels. There has been too little effort put into managing and mixing the channels and, ultimately, too little thought about how e-enabled services might open up a broader re-engineering of processes.

In short: we are still a long way from the vision of citizen-centric government touted in the early days of the OoEE’s existence.

Schr

An interesting discussion about the policy process yesterday when Blair appeared before the House of Commons’ Liaison Committee. John Denman pressed the PM on why the government are forging ahead with their tuition fees policy, asking:

Was it the case that the Secretary of State for Education, who I think would have been Estelle Morris, came to you and said, “I have studied this, Prime Minister, and I’m convinced we need variable fees,” or did the policy emerge in a different way?

and, as a supplementary:

In the past in some policy areas like the rehabilitation of offenders the Performance and Innovation Unit has been commissioned to publish a very detailed and evidence-based assessment of what the best policy would be. Why was the decision taken not to commission any report of that sort to inform the White Paper?

Blair’s response was interesting in light of the rhetoric surrounding ‘evidence based policy making’ and underlined the political imperatives that will always hamper such movements:

You do not always do that. Obviously you have to take a decision as to whether that is necessary or not. I think part of the issue here was that no one disputed that the universities faced a funding crisis. So you did not need a study to tell you that that was a fact that everybody accepted. You then have a number of different ways you can raise the money. I am always a bit bemused when I read of the 40 different options we had, I never came across that. There were basically only two, you either got more money out of the taxpayer or the student pays more.

Could this even be described as evidence informed policy making? Blair seems to be implying that there’s no need to look at the evidence if you already know the answer… and that if you think you already know the answer then you can decide from the outset that a review of evidence is unnecessary! I’m not one to blow the trumpet of the evidence based policy making school - far from it - but the exchange seemed to me to expose the hollowness of the claim that New Labour have moved to a post-ideological era in which ‘what counts is what works’. Barry Sheerman didn’t let the PM off the hook on this one though:

Prime Minister, you have always believed, I know, in both a pragmatic approach to problems but also an evidence-based approach to policy. What is in a sense worrying about what you have just said is that it seems to gloss over that role of real policy scrutiny in Number 10. You have a lot of people employed in there to give you advice on policy but what seems to have emerged on a number of issues in which the Government has run into problems, like top-up fees and variable fees, is that either your policy people are not doing the work and getting the credit for it or they are just not publishing it. In terms of scrutiny, as you said, our select committee looked closely at the Higher Education White Paper. What we were astonished about later on is that Government ministers said that the foundation of this policy rested with Professor Barr in the London School of Economics. Given that you have a Policy Unit why was it not much more closely involved in trawling over possibilities, potentials, pitfalls?

Blair’s response was to point to the role departments outside of No 10 play in putting together policy and the pressure for change from outside lobbies, particularly service providers. In short, he confirmed the primacy of policy networks over policy evidence in the decision making process. Interestingly, in what might be seen as another sign of his becoming a ‘conviction politician’ - or at least one convinced of the need for leaders to make decisions based on their own subjective judgements rather than external validators of ‘best practice’ - he then argued:

I have got to tell you that my experience of this stuff is that process and debates about process become a substitute often for people making up their minds on the policy.