Matthew's RSA blog

Do as I say, not as I do...

Yesterday we had David Runciman discussing his book Political Hypocrisy. Then today, Mangus Linklater comments on a similar phenomena in The Times.

Runciman begins his thesis by arguing that the easiest way to defeat a political opponent is by showing them to be a hypocrite. He then takes us through a history of policital hypocrisy and ends by defining two types of hypocrisy in the political sphere.

The first is personal hypocrisy, when, as in the case with Eliot Spitzer in New York, ones personal behaviour doesn’t match up to the political ideals that you have been advocating. The second is political hypocrisy, when a politician draws a veil over the political realities of a policy in order to deceive the public.

We, the public, are obsessed with personal hypocrisy which blinds us to the political hypocrisy taking place all around us. We hold politicians to impossible standards, comforting ourselves with the thought that they chose to live their life in the public eye, and therefore they must be the best of us.

And yet I wonder, given that we are all hypocrites in one way or another, aren’t these politicians that we castigate just demonstrating that which we say we want – humanity. There is nothing more human than the desire to hide your worst self, and surely that is even clearer in the mind of a politician.

We need to realise that if a politician has made mistakes in their life, or changed their view on a political position, that may well make them better people, and better able to make good policies in the future. It is not a character flaw to change your mind.

What is different and objectionable is when people judge others. That’s ultimately why the Conservative’s ‘Back to Basics’ policy failed. It sounded as though they were judging the public, and so when their personal peccadilloes came to light it was so profoundly damaging.

The public is easily swayed by the rhetoric of hypocrisy precisely because the public has lost trust in politics and to a certain extent in themselves. Although the argument still rages, again see the Daniel Finkelstein piece from this week, we can at least say that rising affluence is not resulting in rising levels of contentment and fulfilment. People are apparently less happy today, less content despite being more materially affluent than any time in history. The perception gap that I have referred to so many times is part of the public hypocrisy – enough is never enough.

Arguably, democratic politics contains at its very heart a meta-hypocrisy. On the one hand politicians pretend that it’s about doing what people want, when in fact representative democracy is little more than the process by which we can get rid of bad governments.

On the other hand politicians claim the public complains too loudly about their every decision; as if, somehow, our politicians would attain a state, where their behaviour would delight us.

We the people are constitutionally dissatisfied. These two myths, that of democratic accountability and of political venality are the two expressions of the position we find ourselves in – we are a people unwilling to be governed and yet not ready to govern ourselves.

This is a much more profound ‘hypocrisy’ than politicians who call for virtue but are sometimes guilty of vice.

I completely agree with Runciman’s recognition that hypocrisy is a particularly English, or at least English-speaking phenomena. I was reminded of the fact that not all countries have this puerile obsession with politicians bedrooms by the famous Mitteraund response to the Parkinson and Hawke affair when he said “Imagine having to resign because of adultery. If we did that in France, there would only be the poofs left in the cabinet!”

Commentary on the Commentariat

Tonight I am chairing an event hosted by the media analysis firm Editorial Intelligence (their events can be as good as ours but, as a business, they charge!). The subject is The Power of the Commentariat and more specifically a pamphlet with that name researched and written by Julia Hobsbawm and John Lloyd.

Based as it is on interviews with columnists and political insiders the research is largely anecdotal and the conclusions broad. Commentators generally claim neither to want nor to expect to have much impact beyond entertaining readers. However, politicians and their advisors say that columnists – particularly the most high profile and respected – can influence public opinion and decision makers.

Although newspaper readership is falling, many columnists are now bloggers and arguably the opinionated, iconoclastic tone of the political blogosphere represents the next stage of the ever expanding realm of opinion which has seen the number of national newsprint columnists rise from a handful thirty years ago to several hundred now.   

Although I am a blogger I am no great fan of the opinion piece. In general, their one sidedness, polemical tone and overwhelming tendency to present politicians as self interested second-raters (something which of course distinguishes them from the selfless generous, socially transformative profession of commentators themselves), the tide of columns in daily newspapers contributes to the unhealthy atmosphere in which politicians find it ever harder to confront people with the difficult choices we face as a society.

My disillusionment with the commentariat (which has nothing at all to do with the fact that no one has ever offered me a regular column) was sealed when I developed an intellectual game based on reading the most opinionated columns.

The game is simply to read the column then consider your view. Then spend a few minutes constructing the best, equally opinionated, counter piece. Not only is it easy to do, but at the end of the process you will tend to find yourself now holding a diametrically different opinion.

Subject to even a cursory deconstruction columns reveal (and of course there are exceptions) not reality but the lens through which the columnist is viewing reality. And because we, their fickle readers, prefer to feel self righteous than challenged, that lens is generally one in which the poor reader is the blameless victim either of the venality or our rulers, or of some other class of citizens who are comfortingly described as being completely unlike us in their motives or interests.

What has arguably made the rise and rise of the commentator more pernicious is that over the last generation the profession has moved from being similar to a theatre critic - experienced, informed, authoritative, somewhat aloof - to being a rowdy audience, seeking to disrupt the performance on stage with catcalls and rotten tomatoes.

What matters less now is the weight and coherence of the opinion expressed more the capacity of the writers to whip up the rest of the audience – me or you – into a state of self righteous rage, booing the actors and demanding our money back.

I am chairing a panel of commentators tonight so may be it will be my turn to be thrown off stage. 

Local Elections

News pages will continue to be consumed over the bank holiday weekend by the fall out from the local elections. I’ll no doubt be asked to do some punditry, and I will make sure that this is in my former capacity, rather than my current one, and that my observations are as impartial as possible.

But I’d like to offer up a few observations now.

It’s not clear whether these elections are more analogous to the 2004 elections, from which Labour recovered, or to 1995 which marked the beginning of the end for the Conservatives.

I don’t perceive a fundamental shift in public priorities as was witness in 1995, but on the other hand the Conservatives are showing the kind of optimism and self confidence we haven’t witnessed since the early years of the Blair project.

But perhaps the most interesting result from yesterday was the turnout in the London mayoral election. By all accounts it is much higher than the previous election and this highlights three things.

1. Voters are more motivated by voting for people than parties
2. Having charismatic candidates helps fire up the public imagination
3. Voters are more likely to vote when they think the result is close so their vote matters.

In the wake of the disappointing turn out in 2001 much ink was spilt on the inexorable decline of public participation in the democratic process. In all the reports, conferences etc on how to engage people in politics post-2001 what wasn’t recognised is that modern people are both more sophisticated and less deferential than their predecessors, so they’re more likely to make rational choices about how and when to use their voting rights.

As I’ve said before, it’s not that people aren’t interested in collective action and collective decision making, just that the ways in which we seek to engage people needs to be more responsive and tailored to their new ways of thinking and living.

So of course there will be moaning about the lack of turn out in elections around the country, but how many races had the sex appeal and glamour of the London mayoral election – or for that matter could honestly say the results would as directly affect people’s lives? This backs up a recent IPPR report which says that if we want to have a more vibrant political debate there is a strong case for having mayors in all major UK cities in order to enable people to have a stake in local democracy.

Injustices and waiting lists

This week’s events began with a screening of the BAFTA nominated “Taking Liberties”. The film follows the stories of normal people whose lives have been turned upside down by injustice, while using humour to emphasise its serious message. Set against a striking contemporary soundtrack, the film provoked a fascinating discussion with director and producer Chris Atkins and Jess Search, Chief Executive, BRITDOC.

RSA Thursday examined the question: The Secular State – the best option for British Muslims? Featuring Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, columnist for The Independent and co-founder of a new organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Inayat Bunglawala, writer on Islam and current affairs, Dr. Usama Hasan, Director of the City Circle and Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and deputy director of the counter-extremism think-tank, The Quilliam Foundation, this spirited debate was clearly too short for the audience! Though time defeated us in the Great Room, after the formalities audience members packed the Vaults to carry on the discussion over drinks. The RSA will continue to provide an independent platform to address these important issues in the coming months, both on and offline, via the Fellows Networks platform and future public events - so the debate is far from over...!

The increasing popularity of our events programme makes it all the more useful to have audio downloads and soon we will also have “Vision” to look forward to. More and more events are fully booked within days of their release and with long waiting lists, it’s great to have an alternative available for those who have missed out.

Put that in your pipe...

Is the Government really intent on reclassifying cannabis despite the advice of drug experts, police officers and the evidence that cannabis use is becoming less popular among young people?

This policy is apparently based on the idea of ‘sending a message’ about society’s disapproval and the harm caused by drugs. But is legislation the best way of sending a message, particularly to young people?

As the father of teenage sons I sometimes hear them talk about their peers smoking ‘weed’. For them it seems to be an aspect of identity, with smokers seen as a subset of what used to be called grungers; teens who wear baggie jeans, have long hair and spend a lot of time in their bedrooms listening to bands like Nirvana and their various imitators. My sons have different lifestyles and reference points so they tend to be disparaging about this particular subset of teen culture.

The point is that in all these discussions I have not once heard the idea that young people’s choices about cannabis are based on the law.

Indeed it is almost the reverse, as cannabis (the majority of which is now grown in the UK) has become easier and easier to get hold of it has lost some of its connotations of rebellion leaving young people to take a dispassionate view of its effects and its effects on those people who take a lot of it.

For me, and this is a view which echoes the excellent work of the RSA Drugs Commission, the more we can encourage young people to talk openly and pragmatically about drugs the more likely it is that most young people will make an informed choice.

While experimentation, rule breaking and pushing the boundaries of experience are all a natural part of growing up, spending most of your adolescence in a haze and becoming less mentally and physically fit than your peers is simply not a very smart thing to do.

The more you criminalise an activity the harder it is to have such a debate; ‘it’s against the law, what is there to discuss?’

Whatever happens in today’s elections the Government has some work to do to reconnect to voters. For a Government that claims to be both progressive and evidence-based, being seen to ignore evidence and good governance principles in favour of headlines in some newspapers (as it did yesterday in the decision not to increase the prisoners’ maximum weekly wage to the princely sum of £5.50) means that the battle of the headlines may be won but the war of credibility will be lost.

Mohamed, Osama and Steve

It has been a mammoth week of lectures with some super-stellar names. We continued our partnership with booksellers Blackwell's on Tuesday as we welcomed poet Simon Armitage to the house all the way from the hills in Yorkshire. Simon treated attendees to a reading from his new book, Gig: the life and times of a rock star fantasist as he regaled us with tales of a life intertwined with music, gig-going and poetry.

On Wednesday we saw a totally different crowd of lecture-goers stream into the Great Room as Charlie Leadbeater and Matthew Taylor discussed the ever-changing and collaborative nature of world of the web. This coversation was continued by Jonathan Zittrain on Thursday evening as he pondered the future of the internet. Lucky lecture-goers received a free copy of his new book with the generous support of AOL.

For our weekly RSA Thursday we were delighted to have Steve Coll over from America as he lifted the lid on the Bin Laden family and gave some interesting insights into a family whose power and money have been used to frighteningly varied ends.

We are pleased to also announce a few new additions to our May events programme;

On Tuesday 6 May, at 1pm Ray Tallis will be speaking about the most complicated part of our anatomy, the head.

RSA Screens continue at a gallop as we welcome director, Joshua Dugdale for a screening of his carefully crafted documentary, The Unwinking Gaze in which he followed the Dalai Lama for 3 years chronicling the many challenges that he faces.

And to continue our partnerhsip with Channel 4 we will be screening film-maker and journalist, Jon Ronson's Reverend Death.

We hope to see you all soon at some of the fantastic events that we have coming up over the next few weeks. As always, our events are all available as podcasts so if you missed any of this week's four remarkable and varied speakers you can listen again. 

Faith - the New Labour way

I was asked on to the Today programme this morning to discuss my former boss’ speech on faith. It’s a well-argued and passionate speech, worth reading whether you are religious and not. I try to think of something original to say on these occasions, but this morning sitting in the Millbank studio I couldn’t get far beyond summarising the speech’s main points.

It was then I was struck by something very familiar about Blair’s analysis. The speech is a New Labour approach to faith. When he became leader of the Labour Party, Blair had two messages for his Party: ‘reform or die’ and, ‘if we do reform we can prove to a sceptical public that our values are more relevant than ever before’.

This is exactly what he argued last night in Westminster Cathedral, but this time it was a speech on behalf of the faith party. Blair’s case was that if moderate people of faith can win out over the extremists and the sectarians they can show faith to have a new relevance in meeting the challenges of globalisation.

I don’t personally share Blair’s belief that religious faith is the most powerful inspiration for altruism. However, as Roberto Unger said in his recent lecture here, globalisation will always feel threatening unless we explicitly allow it to take different forms in different places. Sensitivity to the tensions between globalisation and faith based values is crucial if globalisation is not to be experienced by people as a wrecking ball. Indeed, much of the background to recent uprising in Tibet is about indigenous people objecting to the pervasiveness in their country of the Chinese form of global consumer capitalism. 

I find myself more convinced by some aspects of Blair’s inter-faith strategy. In particularly his attempt to get different faiths to put aside their differences to tackle the millennium development goals seems to me more credible than his hope that faith difference can be overcome by focussing on the common features of faiths themselves. To use a trivial example, as a West Brom fan (wish me luck at Wembley tomorrow!) if I wanted to work with a Wolves fan I probably wouldn’t suggest we start off talking about our views on football!

The RSA is an enlightenment organisation. We won’t find common ground with forms of religion which are reactionary, sectarian or anti-scientific. But many of our Fellows are people of faith (as indeed were many of the fathers of the enlightenment) and it is faith that is often the driver of the kind of ‘pro-social’ altruism we argue is a necessity in the modern world. My reservations aside, Blair’s speech is an important contribution to the debate and I hope Fellows agree that it would be interesting to ask him to write a piece along these lines for our new, improved Journal.    

'The centre cannot hold'?

I know, I know, everyone tells me to write shorter blogs…maybe next time

Looking forward to Jack Straw’s speech here tomorrow. The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (as is his title) will be officially launching our Prison Learning Network. I understand that Jack plans to say some very interesting things about how to embed the criminal justice system more concretely in local communities.

I’m sure there will be a couple of new announcements in Jack’s speech. These will add to the seemingly unstoppable tide of policy ideas, proposals and commitments emerging every day from Government. Although I find myself agreeing with a lot of what I hear, I can’t help wondering about the sheer scale of the Government’s objectives.

The scope of central Government is subject to continuous and sometimes substantial change. In the 1980s the privatisation of utilities meant Government went from running industries to providing a framework of regulation. More recently, Labour’s alleged ‘control freak’ tendencies have been somewhat belied by two massive transfers of power away from Whitehall: the independence of the Bank of England and devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

But the extra items coming onto the Cabinet agenda dwarf even these shifts away from the centre. As well as all the responsibilities Labour inherited in 1997 has been added the whole slew of law and order, security and identity management issues, responding to climate change, and a growing set of complex ‘behaviour change’ challenges like obesity, poor parenting and binge drinking. Gordon Brown is also seen to be prioritising international development and national values and identity. Yesterday it was briefed that the Government plans major reforms on Party funding, the House of Lords, a Bill of Rights and the voting system.

I am all for constitutional modernisation and – recalling how difficult it was to get senior Cabinet ministers to sign up to this kind of thing when I worked for Tony Blair – I envy the political authority Number Ten has to drive radical change. The question is whether any corporate centre, even one as full of clever people as Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, can manage this scale of external challenge and internally generated initiatives. 

There are libraries of research and recommendation about modernising public services and the civil service but in a brief internet search ahead of writing this piece I couldn’t find anything that spoke directly to the sheer scale of central Government’s task. Among some of the more thoughtful newspaper columnists there is a growing critique of Labour’s competence in governing, but while some ministers may be overactive, terrorism, climate change and binge drinking weren’t problems made up by Whitehall.

The obvious strategy to deal with central overload is devolution, and as I have said before, the Government really does seem to be trying to hand more power to local authorities. But is this enough, especially when central Government will still be held accountable for overall public service performance and if things go badly wrong? I have spoken about the need to move from a ‘government centric’ to a ’citizen centric’ way of thinking about social change but can Government itself facilitate this?   

This is a very broad brush attempt to open a debate. Another way of kick starting it is a proposal of my own. How about Government transferring responsibility for major areas of constitutional and democratic reform (like voting system, Lords and party funding) to Parliament? Parties would still have their own policies to which they would be accountable at election time, but the task of policy development, consensus building, as well as the detailed drafting of legislation would move from Downing Street, the Cabinet and Whitehall to MPs backed by a beefed up Parliamentary secretariat. This would arguably be in line with Gordon Brown’s commitment to enhance the status and powers of Parliament. It would certainly take some tricky items off the Cabinet table.

New Horizons

This week we explored new horizons by filming our speakers for the first time. Clay Shirky fulfilled the title of his talk, “Here Comes Everybody” by packing out the Great Room and leaving the chair of GDAC to fend off a huge number of calls from disappointed people who couldn’t get in. Clay told us it was the best audience he’d had recently – it’s nice to know we have the best audiences as well as the best speakers.

We also filmed the eminent Sir Ronald Cohen who shared his thoughts on entrepreneurship. After finishing the talk early to accommodate his busy schedule, he found that his popularity had beaten his diary - and signed books for a very long queue of people in the lobby. Many thanks to him for giving up this extra time as well as sharing some valuable insights.

And speaking of new horizons, Liz Winder, our Head of Lectures and member of the RSA family for eighteen years, is leaving to explore some of her own. (The Chair of GDAC has been so distraught she could barely concentrate on Monday night’s “Damages”). Matthew has paid formal tribute, but the Lectures team would like to add that Lectures life will never be the same again. To say that Liz has been the mastermind of many Lectures triumphs, and the best manager any of us could hope for, simply wouldn’t be enough – and there also aren’t sufficient words to express how much we will miss her.

Liz’s best moments include an event with Ronald Reagan which was followed up by tea with him and Nancy; the BBC “Any Questions?” event with Lord Tebbit and Peter Tatchell together, and more recently events with Al Gore, Kofi Annan, David Cameron and Alistair Darling. Her worst moments include finding out that the office of a top international speaker had neglected to put his speaking engagement in the diary…but all ended well as the person in question ultimately honoured their commitment!

So long Liz – it’s been wonderful working with you and we envy whoever bags you next!

International relations

An amazingly busy week for us here in the events team. We started on Tuesday with a joint event with the Equality and Human Rights Commission where David Cameron and Trevor Phillips drew a buzzing crowd to talk about Sharia Law amid the controversial comments that have recently hit the headlines. MT then bumped into DC on his bike outside the Houses of Parliament when DC had only positive things to say about the RSA.

From religion and law to arts as Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller spoke about social and environmental challenges with John Wilson of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in the second of our Arts & Ecology Exchanges. With Wednesday came an international slant on education, as Ray Simon, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education travelled to the UK for the first time to speak on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. And from America to Russia as our popular RSA Thursday took on the Russian Presidential elections with an expert panel. Speakers included Edward Lucas who has recently published The New Cold War: How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West.

Finally we finished off the week with acclaimed director and self-proclaimed master of hype Tony Kaye with an exclusive screening of his epic documentary Lake of Fire. After a massive 15 years in the making this black and white film tackles the ever-dividing issue of abortion head on.

We step into March with an exciting and varied range of events, including a mini-series on Iraq five years on from invasion. We start with a bang as British filmmaker, Nick Broomfield joins us for an exclusive screening of his new film, Battle for Haditha.