You make a very important point that there is a progressive case for public sector reform. You should know that I am one of those business school academics who nonetheless is critical of the unchallenged spread of managerialism in the public sector.

Yet we should recognize that in the drive for what is called New Public Management there was often a progressive agenda. It was as much late 1980s demands for fair employment for ethnic minorities and women as it was Thatcherism that led to the establishment of processes which are now seen as best human resource management practices. So you are hooking into a noble historic tradition, which you could argue goes back to the early Fabians.

Yet, again, there is much about the public sector which is as good as — no, better than — the private sector. An example: the notion and sense of vocation. Vocation is why, historically, nurses, teachers, and even some university lecturers did great work for little money, but with the perk of society’s respect. The latter cost the exchequer nothing, but delivered the public sector lots and lots.

In the meantime, people’s experience of the private sector is not good — and it may be that it is one of those issues which demonstrates the out-of-touchness of political life. I am one of the Google generation, and the web certainly has changed my patterns of engagement with the private sector. But read the money pages of all the quality newspapers. They are full of stories of private sector incompetence and rip-offs. I’m kind of guessing you haven’t in your life had to spend hours waiting on a 0870 number (do you know what that means?), nor had a disappearing e-ticket, nor had an internet service company help itself to cash from your account. Most people have.

So, yes, there is a progressive case for public sector reform. But what is needed, and maybe is impossible to achieve within the political setting in which you have to work, is nuance and pragmatism, rather than big change initiative one after the other (with, perhaps, the exception of IT based change). For me there is a simple rule. Look to outcomes first over processes.

Targets, fine. But assuming particular institutional frameworks (e.g. quasi-market) might be better than others, particularly when it is hard to get disinterested advice, is problematic. Of course, there must be a care for delivery. But maybe you need to engage the progressive people engaged in delivery to work out how best it might be done.

Yours,

Bill

Dr. Bill Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Organizational Analysis at The University of Manchester, Manchester Business School.

Tony Blair’s sally into the world of Euston certainly has all the hallmarks of a classic, using the techniques that Jamie Whyte mercilessly pilloried. There are instances when banality poses as profundity — what on earth does “We are a much older people than we were” actually mean? These are supported by generalisations asserted without empirical foundation — I am sorry, Tony, but being employed in the public sector feels more like being a participant in a continuous revolution than working in institutions that “were established in something like their current form in the 1940s”.

However, the heart of his appeal for the support of the left in his programme of public sector reform is more important and is contained in the following statement.,

“There is always a progressive case for reform. What progressive case is there for the status quo, except in utopia?”

The obvious question that arises is what reform? The introduction of compulsory human sacrifice to propitiate the Gods would certainly be a reform, but hardly a progressive one. The debate is not about reform versus stasis; it is over which out of a range of reforms are preferred. Trying to make a case for reform per se is not enough to convince.

There is more though. There is a progressive case to be made against change. This was beautifully put by Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook:

We began to wonder if the reason why parties advocating radical change were so unsuccessful was because they were striking against the resistance of people who had changed, who had been compelled to change, too much. … In this context the desire to conserve, to protect, to safeguard, to rescue, to resist becomes the heart of a radical project. A form of conservatism — to be most sharply distinguished from its multitude of imitations, its travesties and caricatures, and scarcely know to those who carry the banners of conservatism in the modern world — becomes indispensable to this work of resistance. This conservatism leads us to search for all those valuable resources that have been thrown away in the process of eager industrialisation. For the greatest casualties in this version of development have been human, perhaps even more than material, resources.

The Revolt Against Change. Towards a Conserving Radicalism. Vintage, London. 1993. pp.3 – 4)

Part of the reason for the decline in Labour support does not lie in those issues that the media obsesses over, notably Iraq, but in an inchoate desire for a more stable and kinder future. Blackwell and Seabrook saw these ‘forces of conservatism’ being the centrepiece of a left project. They were ignored. Instead, they are David Cameron’s secret weapon. Labour take note.

Choice is not power

One of the more bewildering aspects of the language of New Labour is its penchant for picking two irreconcilable concepts and saying that Labour is neither, yet is also both - simultaneously. This is what happens in Blair’s defence of choice.

It is more subtly stated here but is present none the less. The first phase of public sector reform is described by Blair as being based on “strong central direction and public targets”. The current phase is now, apparently, a process of “transfer of power from providers to citizens”. Note the language here; it is a transfer of power from providers not government. Implicit in this is a view that the public sector behaves as a monopoly with, at best, complacency, and, at worst, an intrinsically hostile attitude towards its users. In this way there is a supposed unity of interest between government and citizens against the recalcitrant providers of public services. The circle is squared. Centralised government direction can happily co-exist with the devolution of power to citizens whereas I had always assumed that increasing the ability of people to decide for themselves had to result in a reduction of central power.

This analysis would be fine if it were true. Those of us in Adult Education, which has long operated in a genuine market with provision solely driven and determined by consumer choice, are acutely aware that there is currently a shared interest between providers and users against the government as it uses its powers of funding to effectively impose a narrow model of instrumental education to be delivered at NVQ level 2, regardless of the choices of citizens. A swathe of popular adult education provision is disappearing across the country because it does not match the government’s funding criteria.

In reality, choice is a very limited form of power compared to ownership, control and democratic governance. This is even more so in a model based on central direction and targets. What results is not a choice of provision, which will remain centrally directed, but a choice of provider. In other words, “you can have any colour as long as it is black - but you can choose from all these showrooms where you buy it”. This is hardly, “Power to the People”.

Peter Ryley works at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Hull. He blogs at Fat Man at a Keyboard.

1. David Grant suggests that I take free trade and the globalized markets that it is generating to be inevitable processes. This is not the case. They are the result of economic policy decisions and international agreements. Like him, I see free trade as an engine of development that has the potential to produce the wealth necessary to improve living standards and eradicate poverty in the third world. However, precisely because global markets, like all markets, are social artefacts rather than forces of nature, their design reflects the interests of the forces that control them. If they are shaped entirely by private capital and the political agencies which represent it, then the wealth that they produce will be concentrated in the hands of a small business elite. In order to achieve an equitable distribution of this wealth that serves the interests of labour and consumers, as well as producers and investors global markets must be constrained and socialized by political interests that also represent the former. Private business alone cannot promote social or environmental rationality. Moving from the robber baron capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to the welfare state of the post war years involved such a social rationalization of the market within western countries. This achievement is now seriously threatened by the emergence of global markets that bypass the constraints and redistributative mechanisms of the traditional welfare state. Refashioning them for the global market place is the primary challenge of a renewed social democracy.

2. Grant asks about how I envisage the role of the state in a globalized social democracy. On the model that I am sketching nation states do not disappear, but they enter into federative structures that define open, socialized markets. The EU provides a precedent for this approach. However, to work on a genuinely global scale such a federation will have to include underdeveloped countries and provide for significant investment in them. The emergence of an integrated socialized market of international dimensions will require an extended and complex historical process, as did the transformation of the European Common Market into the European Union.

3. Grant requests that I clarify the grounds and extent of my opposition to the obsessive campaign of privatization that is the focus of much neo-liberal economic policy. Clearly I am not proposing nationalization of industry and finance on the Soviet model. My concern is with the destruction of the robust public domain of services, infrastructure, and utilities that have formed the backbone of the modern welfare state. These have been steadily eroded by the juggernaut of neo-liberalism that has dominated many western economies for the past twenty-five years. These policies have produced disasters like the privatization of British rail and the water companies, the steady decline in British higher education through underfunding, the undermining of the NHS by internal markets and cuts in primary care staff, and the widespread dissipation of municipal services. Neo-liberalism has promoted a massive shift in public policy away from social investment in order to achieve low taxes on business and capital. This has generated a sharp rise in social inequality and a significant reduction in economic mobility for the poor and the middle classes. Wealth is increasingly monopolized by a shrinking economic elite that represents a diminishing proportion of the population. The emergence of global markets has greatly facilitated these patterns. Mobile investment capital and production can maximize profit by moving to low wage countries that impose minimal burdens of corporate taxation and regulation. Neo-liberal trade negotiators seek to use the World Trade Organization as an instrument for undermining public services and social investment in the markets that free trade agreements open up to external competition. They construe these services as a form of government protection that prejudices the interests of private companies looking to enter the fields of heath, education, transportation, and energy. A social democratic approach to free trade will formulate trade agreements and regulatory mechanisms to protect public services, equitable taxation, fair labour practises, and environmental concerns as part of a socialized open market.

4. Celso Rocha points out problems with global unions. In fact, I indicated that such unions would emerge only after vigorous local unions were first established in the low wage economies of the new emerging industries. These will engage in protracted industrial struggles which, if successful, will contribute to a rise in the standard of living in those countries that will contribute to the convergence of economic conditions in the developing countries and in western economies. This process will require a considerable amount of time. On the approach that I am proposing it will also be facilitated by the social investment and regulatory constraints of the international free trade agencies designed to promote a socialized global market.

It should be clear that I am sketching a general approach for redefining the social democratic project, rather than a set of detailed policies. This sketch is intended to provide the basis for ongoing discussion through which the viability of this approach can be tested and clarified. I am grateful to Grant and Rocha for raising important issues as part of this discussion.

Shalom Lappin is Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Philosophy, King’s College, London