Without the state

Free Country?

By a free country, I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.

Lord Salisbury
Speech to the Kingston and District Working Men's Conservative Association (June 1883)

Do it yourself

In a recent talk,  Edgar Cahn, the founder of the Timebank movement described two economies: the monetary economy and what he describes as the Core Economy. The first is monetarized and has 2 major components: the private, market economy & the public purpose economy (government & philanthropy). The second is not monetarized and includes family, neighbourhood, community, civil society. It has been estimated that at least 40% of economic activity takes place in the Core Economy and is not reflected in GDP

That economy, the Core Economy, uses a different production model and a different distribution model from the Market Economy

…

There is no family that I know where someone holds up a drumstick and asks: what am I bid for this – or divides the mashed potatoes based on the market value of the tasks performed (walking the dog, putting the garbage out.)

In a study of Chicago neighbourhoods  extending over more than 15 years, Dr Felton Earls found that the biggest single influence on the health and well-being of both individuals and neighbourhoods was the capacity of local people to act together on matters of common concern – whether improving a piece of derelict land or dealing with rowdy teenagers on a street corner. The term he coined for this is ‘collective efficacy’, a rather dry sociological term for an important concept.

More on Dr Earls here. A colleague working on the same project is Professor Robert Sampson. You can read more about him and directly access many papers here.  

I don’t think anyone would dispute that successful community action of the sort described by Professor Earls adds value to the community and hence to the lives of the individuals in it, even if that value cannot be monetarised in any formal sense (although perhaps there is some impact in the form of property prices). What does this mean for community action? Edgar Cahn draws an analogy between this sort of activity in the ‘core economy’ and your PC operating system. When Windows fails,  no amount of fiddling with your word processor will restore your PC to health. So with society; when the core economy fails, no amount of experts – whether planners, police or politicians – can restore it. Massive professional service programmes, huge redevelopment schemes with capital investment for physical reconstruction may appear to be highly successful but almost always fail to deal with the real issues of the core economy. In Cahn’s language, what is needed is to rebuild the operating system.

What does this Core Economy do? What DOES any economy do? It produces and it distributes.

So what does this economy produce and what does it distribute?

Infants, Children, teenagers and peer groups, families, care for seniors.
It produces safe vibrant neighborhoods, community, democracy, civil society
It produces love and caring and coming to each other’s rescue and sharing 24-7.

If Cahn is right, what does this mean for action in the community and by the community?

Most of us at some stage will have come up against accusations that the community groups in which we work are ‘un-democratic’. I know I have, many times. While I suppose it is the nature of politicians generally to want to do things, there is too often general mistrust of any group trying to do things for themselves rather than waiting for the local Council. This is more serious than simple petty mindedness. It impinges on the legitimacy of community-based action – action by and for local people.

We can examine what is really going on by considering a simple example. When an organisation like say Marlborough Area Development Trust acts, what is going on? In what way is that action different when the appropriate District Council takes it? (The choice of organisations is purely for illustration purposes - please don’t draw any conclusions from my choice.)

There may of course be differences in the quality of the action and there may also be different choices made in the first instance – in other words local authorities may choose to act in different ways to local development trusts. However, common sense would surely say that for a given course of action there is no intrinsic difference caused by that action being taken by different organisations. So – is there anything in the idea that action by the local authority is in some way more ‘democratic’ than action by a community group? My belief is that there is not. Simple accusations of lack of democracy are almost always special pleading in favour of a competing organisation. The only valid criticism would address not the structure of the organisation, but what it does.

Is the possibility of a local community group getting it wrong, enough to give local authorities a monopoly of action in these areas? This isn’t idle philosophising. Local Government over the past 40 years has been subject to greater and greater control by central government, to the point where it could be argued that they are no longer ‘local’, but simply agents of the national state. In the circumstances therefore, does so-called ‘local government’ have the capacity to act in ways that meet the needs and aspirations of local people? Even if it does, if local people are willing to act for themselves, does the state – local or national – have a legitimate case for stopping them (assuming the action proposed is otherwise legal)?

Over the years there have been many who have argued for both positions. Some base their argument on the premise that the free market is a better tool than government for the delivery of services. Others argue from a perspective of social justice or equity, that the market will not meet the needs of those unable to pay and the intervention of the state is needed to redress that imbalance. It seems to me however that what we have now is neither of these cases. We have a market that is heavily regulated and controlled, while government increasingly tries to apply a market model in areas like health with conspicuous lack of success and a forecasting model to areas like housing and retailing with similar failure.

One technique of planning large human settlements developed in the past hundred years has been the device of establishing ‘projective need’. This means guessing the future physical and social requirements of a community or city and then basing present spending and energy so as to achieve a readiness for the projected future state. In planning schools, beginning students usually argue that people’s lives in time are wandering and unpredictable, that societies have a history in the sense that they do not do what is expected of tehm, so that this device is misleading. Planning teachers usually reply that of course the projected need would be altered by practical objections in the course of being worked out; the projective need analysis is a pattern of ideal conditions rather than a fixed prescription.

But the facts of planning in the last few years have shown that this disclaimer on the part of planners is something that they do not really mean. Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment housing, of inner city renewal projects have treated challenges from displaced community groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a natural part of the effort of social reconstruction. Over and over again one can hear in planning circles a fear expressed when the human beings affected by planning changes become even slightly interested in the remedies proposed for their lives. ‘Interference’, ‘blocking’, and ‘interruption of work’ – these are the terms by which social challenges or divergences from the planner’s projections are interpreted. What has really happened is that the planners have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance, as more ‘true’ than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of human lives.

“The Uses of Disorder”; Richard Sennett 1970

This quote is taken from a book published in 1970, but is still relevant today. It applies moreover not just to what we conventionally call planning in the UK, but to all those other areas where the state attempts to predict what will happen in order better to work out how they – which means we – will pay for it.

This doesn’t mean that these predictive methods are invalid or wrong. However, at the root of such predictive thinking is an idea of perfectibility that runs counter to all we know of human behaviour. We will never have enough information; we will never have enough money to do everything. Expecting the state nevertheless to act as if it can do just that is surely dangerous. Civil society is built not on political prescription or ideology but on the day-to-day interaction of people, individually and in groups. A society built on the precept ‘they should do something’ is unhealthy and in the long run, unworkable. It implies a willingness to accept the imposition of a pattern of life on individuals and a lack of willingness to take responsibility for our own lives and for those dependent on us. As the poet John Donne said,  ‘no man is an island’. There is inevitably a need for collective action in society, but that collective action must be taken in the light of an acceptance of our own responsibilities.

Originally written for an e-newsetter I produce.

Some bloody common sense at last

It’s Shane’s Teeth That Are Scary, Not What Passes Between ‘Em

Shall we be pedantic for a moment? A song like “Fairytale” is tantamount to a fictional narrative. It’s about a brawling, fractious relationship between two Micks* in Gotham. MacColl and MacGowan were never romantically involved in real life — thank Christ — and so her playful mockery of him as part of a working-class domestic routine should not be seen as her, or the songwriters’, actual mode of tabletalk. And even if it were, the fact that such tabletalk exists means that art has a moral responsibility to represent it faithfully

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, originally uploaded by ibanda.

The great divide is coming into focus...

Henry Porter in the Observer, takes a sizable chunk out of his colleague Polly Toynbee in the Grauniad.

The breathtaking dishonesty of her argument is to describe anyone who opposes Labour on these grounds as a being a right-winger. In our democracy liberals exist in all parties - thank God - and it is eloquent of her desperation that she seeks to portray those who stand for liberty, rights and privacy as being individualists who are seeking the aura of victimhood, which of course decrypts as privileged middle-class dilettantes. The allegation comes from the hard-line sectarian communists of my student days, and it is hardly surprising to find the same generation still at it in New Labour, yet now adding notes of vanity, self-righteousness and priggishness.

The striking thing is how few in the government and among its supporters really grasp the substance of our complaints about liberty over the last 10 years. With dismal familiarity, we watch them move hastily from the matter in hand to rattle on about social justice. The trick, you see, is to portray concerns about liberty as a luxury for the privileged classes when what really matters is poverty and inequality. She must know that there can be no social justice without liberty, and vice versa. Besides, as the gap between the rich and poor widens every day, New Labour and its cheerleaders are at risk of causing nationwide symptoms of motion sickness when they strike this particular pose.

We are all victims of Labour's authoritarian laws but often the people whose interests New Labour claims to represent are especially penalised - for instance, the defendants who are pressurised in police stations to plead guilty by video link to crimes they have not committed because there is no adequate legal representation to hand. Why doesn't Toynbee write about the measures smuggled into the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act which will combine with the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act to make it legal for bailiffs to enter someone's home and seize property on a civil order? Jack Straw's Department of Justice is currently formulating the rules that will govern the force that may be offered to single mothers, old ladies, teenagers and young children who happen to be at home when the bailiffs come. Will she be reminding us that Labour has buried 400 years of protection against this outrage?

Help me put Gordon in jail

Mark Thomas is trying to put Gordon in jail.

Last month I had to get police approval to hold a banner saying, "Support the Poppy Appeal".

If the wearing of a brightly coloured proboscis constitutes a protest, then the unveiling of Nelson Mandela's statue must do so too. After all, it celebrated the collapse of apartheid (a political cause), honoured a man who organised the armed struggle in South Africa (definitely political and quite possibly glorifying terrorism) and pledged to fight poverty.

So, being civic-minded, I wrote to the police asking if I needed permission for a gathering at the statue. My event had speeches - in fact, they were extracts from the original speeches made on the day by Mr Brown and Mr Mandela. Yes, the police informed me, I did need permission to demonstrate - which I duly applied for and received. Unfortunately for the prime minister, it seems no one bothered to get police approval at the event he spoke at.

...

One person can constitute a demonstration, but what exactly is a demonstration? In law, there is little to go by, but for various dictionary definitions, such as "an expression of opinion". It is my duty as a law-abiding citizen, therefore, to add to the legal letter served the names of MPs seen holding forth on political issues on College Green, urging the DPP to investigate them for breaking the law and demonstrating without permission. It does not matter that they are being interviewed for news programmes - the law allows no exceptions or exemptions. In fact, the news organisations could be guilty of organising unlawful demonstrations by asking MPs to speak, so I have reported them as well.

All of this may seem ridiculous, but hey, they started it, and making a crap law does not exempt you from its provisions. So I am calling on all fair-minded citizens to report any MPs seen giving interviews on College Green or in Parliament Square. You can do so by photographing the offending MP and posting it to www.shopanmp.com.

Mark Thomas is a comedian and political activist; to support the action, you can buy an "I put Gordon Brown in the dock" badge for £2 at www.markthomasinfo.com. Any money not used in the legal challenge will be donated to Index on Censorship

Stumbling and Mumbling: Taxing men

From: Stumbling and Mumbling: Taxing men.

Could it be that the government taxes income for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - because that's where the money is?

10 GOOD REASONS AGAINST

Ten GOOD reasons why extending pre-charge detention is a BAD idea:

1. UNDERMINES one of our most basic rights, enshrined in UK law as far back as Magna Carta and now at the heart of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which UK is a signatory: the right for anyone who is detained by the state to be told promptly why they are being held and what they are charged with.

2. COMMUNITY relations will suffer if the Muslim community appears to be particularly targeted for prolonged pre-charge detention. This could have an impact on intelligence gathering and policing, and could undermine positive efforts to engage with Muslims in the UK.

3. IMPACT on any individuals detained for such a long time - in terms of their job, family, house, friendships and relationships within their community - would be devastating.

4. QUESTIONED widely by experts - Lord Goldsmith (former Attorney General), Stella Rimington (former MI5 Chief), Sir Ken Macdonald (Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service) and parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights.

5. UNDERMINES presumption of innocence -Two months in prison is roughly equivalent to the length of time someone might serve in prison for assault. Lengthy pre-charge detention would impose what is in effect a 'sentence' of two months on somebody who may never be charged with any crime.

6. UK ALREADY has by far the longest pre-charge detention period for offences related to terrorism of any common law state.

7. INTERNATIONAL STANDING - it is much harder for the UK to criticise the human rights records of other countries that lock people up without charge when we are doing so at home. This measure would give other countries a 'green light' to curtail civil liberties.

8. HISTORY - from Northern Ireland and Amnesty's experience all over the world - shows that locking people up without charge doesn't work.

9. STATEMENTS obtained from suspects could be deemed inadmissible at trial if detention conditions are considered to be unduly harsh.

10. SAFEGUARDS discussed are insufficient - the kind of judicial oversight proposed is in no way the same as charging someone and giving them the chance to defend themselves in a fair trial.

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=17539

Join the Facebook group and spread the word.

Semi-privatised empires | Joe Public | Guardian Unlimited

Link: Semi-privatised empires | Joe Public | Guardian Unlimited.

What I was witnessing - this has been the history of housing associations in recent times - was the progressive alienation of public property and the creation of a sort of semi-privatised empire dependent on public funds without any of the accountabilities or safeguards forced on the public sector itself. Foundation trusts in health are a parallel.

This is a point also made recently by Laurence Demarco

Community controlled housing associations (CCHAS) are increasingly establishing parallel Development Trusts as vehicles for wider community enterprise activity.  Such diversified CCHAS provide a powerful model of Anchor Organisations with the impact to empower communities.  The governments housing green  paper 'Firm Foundations' fails to appreciate this potential and deliberately favours the role of the larger housing associations without local identity.

Flatulence ban for club pensioner

Link: BBC NEWS | England | Devon | Flatulence ban for club pensioner.

A social club in Devon has banned a 77-year-old man from breaking wind while indoors

I'm surprised he hasn't had an ASBO...