]]>First, the remarkable 'take off' of the Right2Link Campaign which has touched a nerve in the new economy and set the agenda far more quickly than we had all expected. Follow the Twitter account for the latest news which includes a news on a Clause put down by The Lord Lucas to the Digital Economy Bill.
Second, although we remain cautious about 'recovery', our sister company, Pendry White (which is also handling much of the implementation for Right2Link), has been seeing a surge of activity and this has pulled the As It Happens editorial team into the new business fray.
So, apologies to regular followers, but ten more days of this and we should, with a fair wind, be back on stream ... in the meantime, here are some thoughts on psychology ...
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The picture of humanity that is emerging today from the fast-moving world of behaviourial psychology and from the new cognitive sciences is very different from the 'tabula rasa' model that so long impressed policy-makers, especially those of the Left, often against all the instincts of common folk.
As animals, we come out as a lot less flattering to ourselves than we might have liked but before we go any further, we must state our prejudice - a distrust of science-derived theory being applied too easily to social relations. We alluded to this in our climate change and anthropology postings.
Psychology & The Normal
There is a particular problem that arises out of psychology - the 'science' of psychology is solely a method since no human, let alone collection of humans, can be knowable in the way that inanimate matter or even animals can be known.
Psychology is thus only partially a science. It is a series of experimental probabilities and of 'norms' of highly variable reliability. In this, the science of normal perception seems to be far more reliable than the science of normal behaviour and this should be constantly borne 'in mind'.
The quintessential psychological tool is the Bell Curve. There is a danger that the centre of the Bell Curve is given a normative rather than a descriptive value - that the process of describing the Bell Curve both lessens the 'value' of the rims of the Bell and over-values the 'norm' at its centre.
The 'norm' of Victorian or German fascist or Soviet Communist thinking would horrify our contemporary liberal. The 'good person' in all of these societies would, by modern liberal standards, have been normalised out of existence as we try to normalise out prudes, racists and reds today.
But contemporary psychology, neuroscience and sociology are often funded by the public purse and so are part of the political process. Even contemporary liberalism has its totalitarian aspects. The association of these 'soft sciences' and power needs to be placed under permanent critical scrutiny.
The Psycho-Arms Race
Nevertheless, great strides in understanding the working of most brains in most circumstances have been made in the last two decades.
A picture is emerging of a sort of arms race between the normal person's instinct to take the easy way out in dealing with data, in order to process the vast amounts of it coming into the mind through perception, and organised attempts to manipulate that laziness for commercial or political reasons.
As psychologists uncover the tram-line aspects of most people's behaviour under most conditions, so some, in learning these truths, learn also to resist manipulation and to build relatively independent world-views.
The corporate and political manipulators, meanwhile, create ever-more sophisticated means to manage those who either cannot (for reasons of intelligence or access to information) or will not (for lack of will or excess of comfort) question their situation.
It could be argued that people in the advanced Western societies are falling into three broad classes of person in any one particular situation.
A large majority who are unaware of or uninterested in their own manipulation, a class of manipulators for profit, power or (increasingly 'security') and a minority who see what is happening and either fight it or seek to insulate themselves from the process ('fight or flight').
The last group which is far from small is made impotent by the sheer weight of numbers of the first group although, to be cynical, the weight of numbers depends on that weight being well fed and entertained.
It may be that this is just the normal condition of humanity - as applicable to the Roman Empire as the modern West: a struggling mass, a manipulative ruling class and those who cannot but see how the trick is performed.
Knowing Is Resisting
However, a new factor may be the degree to which an understanding of psychology itself arms the 'rebels' as much as the elites.
For example, the experimental work in the wake of the authoritarian fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, notably that of Stanley Milgram, caused horror rather than emulation and it drove ruling elites increasingly towards 'soft' forms of social management.
At the same time, Milgram's work is known to far more people than just the 'rebels' in society and this has helped them become more resistant to blind authority and command.
Ordinary soldiers are increasingly volunteers from the least well educated and poorest comunities and are less likely to be conscripts for good reason - better educated conscripts are no longer prepared to accept authoritarian claims to knowledge.
Perhaps some personality types pine for a simple world of command and control and military obedience but the cultural norm is (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) one of a presumption of liberty and questioning to which ruling elites have now had to adjust.
Governments - as in the recent announcement that the British Government will be using military drones against its own population - are thrown back on intense surveillance and on the isolation and marginalisation of the people who are at the extremes of the political Bell Curve.
In addition, fuelled on the centre-left by the post-Marxist interpretations of thinkers like Gramsci, they are more intent than ever on guiding the centre of the social Bell Curve into territories of automatic self-willed compliance with an authority that presents itself as benign, inclusive and liberal.
One suspects that this master plan of social management will last only so long as the population does not grow hungry. It is designed for a world in which economic decline for large numbers of people is small, incremental and steady rather than precipitous or sudden.
Whether this system can remain both effective and benign with a large angry population on the streets is another matter.
The Problem Of The Sociopath
Fortunately, psychiatry and abnormal psychology (in the sense of conditions that cause serious distress to a person) have been de-politicised fairly effectively by the medical establishment's historic compromise with the anti-psychiatry movement.
But we should not be complacent - the sociopath (a biological reality) is in danger of being quasi-medicalised as complaints grow about a 'broken society'.
Sociopaths used to make up marginalised criminality and the highest ranks of the elite, with social order containing them in the levels between the two. Today, social order has partially collapsed leaving far freer rein for the sociopathic personality, especially in the lower ranks of business.
Similarly, sociopathic behaviour by one sexual predator at the expense of others is much easier in a liberal society. The problem of the sociopath preying on communities under pressure has become salient as case after case of child abuse, including by children on children, horrifies the British at least.
The solution - the systematic reintroduction of community and reversal of thirty years of radical liberalism - does not fit the time-scale of electoral politics so clumsy state intervention, weakening civil liberties and a form of 'liberal terror' against problem communities seem likely.
The irony that it is the sociopathic and authoritarian BNP that is emerging to defend beleagured poor communities from a sociopathic crisis is merely an indication of the depth of the failures of liberal governance.
The Rationality Of The Irrational
At the other end of the social is the personal. Contemporary psychology paints a fairly grim picture of our general inability to think or act rationally or altruistically. In fact, psychologists tend to exaggerate what this means.
Given their particular conditions of life, 'irrational' thought or conduct (including delusions and apparently self-destructive behaviour) amongst the disempowered may be wholly rational - a truly rational assessment of those conditions might well lead to despair.
Some of the most interesting recent research is into 'irrational' modes of thinking although the inherited positive value attributed to 'reason' makes us blind to its flaws and accidentally judges the 'rational-'irrational' behaviour of the masses, irrationally, as somehow 'bad'.
The existence of 'group think' as an observable phenomenon encapsulates why New Labour is consistently incompetent in its decision-making.
There is also useful research from the behavioural economists on why we make dumb decisions on investment and cannot seem to get out quickly from a failing situation. Such research should be required reading by anyone active in public life or in business.
Unfortunately, most of the people making the decisions that affect us do not read books like this and it may take a generation before some of this commonsensical material feeds through into the wider public domain.
The Construction Of Memory
Another area of interest is memory. We construct ourselves and our society on narratives of the past. Yet we forget and remember selectively even if different people have different tendencies in this area, whether towards repressing trauma or sensitising themselves through a talking repetition of trauma.
One can see how there would be a natural conflict of interest between these two main personality types amongst Jews in dealing with the Shoah. Some would want to put the horror behind them and create a new life. Others would want to tell the world and get them to understand and empathise.
This happens in families with child abuse histories, even if the 'talking' might be displaced onto other related subjects. In the case of the Shoah, the narrative required by Israel and European guilt forced the pace and gave the edge to the 'talkers'.
Positive Thinking
One powerful tool for transforming individuals has been Cognitive Behaviourial Therapy and we should also not be too dismissive of its happy-clappy cognate, Positive Philosophy.
Critics might say they merely create a better class of delusion but, if our aim is not to sink into the unproductive gloom of critical theory but to live long, prosper, love and be happy, then these practical applications of experimental psychology are wholly beneficial.
It is tough out there. If people can use the discoveries that the mind is malleable and that life can be made more tolerable and even be improved through thinking in a different way and positively, then psychology (so dangerous in the hands of governments and corporations) can be a liberating force.
Indeed, a mentality of positive thinking might, eventually, help direct the mind to thinking not only about how to improve one's own condition but why our rulers are so signally failing to assist in that process. In our current crisis, a 'positive politics' is sorely needed and can only come from below.
Cognitive behaviour therapy seems to be particularly useful for conditions where distress (such as depression) is caused by a negative narrative of life that has been built up in the past for good reason but has become increasingly dysfunctional over time.
Improvements in the treatment of mental illness in recent years have been considerable and are only be held back by lack of resources.
If the £8bn spent by the New Labour Government on the Iraq War had been directed into mental health services and improved community conditions, a great deal of human distress might have been avoided in two nations.
The Complexity Of Intelligence
Another positive development is in the increasing sophistication of psychological work on intelligence. This has two countervailing potential results. The first unnerves liberals but has to be faced - we are not all equal in general intelligence and general intelligence matters.
The 'tabula rasa' view is defunct and not only in relation to intellectual equality but in relation to gender difference. We can safely predict the imminent death of the extreme version of egalitarian ideology (though not that of the equal value of all persons regardless of intelligence).
The countervailing discovery (still uncertain in the detail) is of many different types of intelligence to be found in humanity, painting a picture of complexity of talent that no longer privileges people according to their place in a pecking order of general IQ.
This means that a simple stratified society is likely to be sclerotic. The dynamism of society depends on it being a society of all the talents. This opens up society once again to people who may not be formally highly intelligent but have massive advantages in particular types of intelligence, skills and aptitudes.
It also suggests a society of respect for the potential of everyone rather than obeisance to a privileged exam-passing few.
Respect For Difference
The shift from a stratified world of fixed roles to a tabula rasa world of forcing individuals into an egalitarian straitjacket (often under the malign influence of the behaviourists) is now becoming a further shift from the 'tabula rasa' to a respect for difference.
Nowhere is this clearer than in gender relations where the feminists of the 1970s school have found themselves on the run as society rediscovers the fact that boys and girls are fundamentally different even if you can get very boy-like girls and very girl-like boys where the Bell Curves overlap.
There may be an alchemical truth in the magical position of the hermaphrodite where the curves meet but the real message is that is no longer regarded as helpful for women to strive to become like men.
The model is one not of separate but equal (with all the apartheid implications) nor equal and not separate but of complementarity and difference yet equality in worth and access to resources.
This more sophisticated formulation has been seized upon by younger women (as sex-positive or 'lipstick' feminism) as far more truly liberatory than 'traditional' feminism.
Although the new could not have taken place without the struggle of the old, the new really is based on the science that we have in place so far.
Language too now looks as if it follows Chomsky's model of having innate characteristics even if one can dispute the detail.
Deep brain structures imply profound predispositions in learning, language, behaviour and gender difference - not to the extent of presenting any silly predestination arguments but as representing natural constraints on radical versions of existentialism.
Why Psychology Matters
Brain matter, in short, matters. Anyone who has been at the birth of his child knows that twenty years later aspects of personality present then are present now.
The history of psychology is full of half-baked nonsense - the Rorschach inkblot test, phrenology, simplistic Freudian and Behaviourist ideas, discredited left/right brain theories - and there may be half-baked nonsense in the new ideas but we are moving forward all the time.
Much past experimentation is redundant and even silly so that, as tools for understanding oneself, or for creating a dialogue about personal meaning, Tarot cards and dream interpretation are now as one with the ink blot (and that does not mean that they are not useful).
Freudianism increasingly looks daft in its potty theorising about repressed sexuality but it was a vital stepping stone in exploring the unconscious even if the path best taken was back into neuroscience and into imaginative cultural studies (Jung) and investigation of particular drives (Adler, Reich).
Behaviourism too seems more like an ideology than a considered exploration of the mind but its experimentation in conditioning has proved central to effective treatment of phobia as well as providing further proof in its findings that cruelty and conditioning can debase both child and man.
The new wave of research is taking us into fresh territory with real public policy implications. The tendency to enforce conformity, the use of psychology in the struggle between authority and freedom and the problem of the sociopath are all live issues in contemporary politics.
Of equal importance is a proper understanding of how individuals are pre-set to irrational decision-making, to selective memory and to their talents and gender. The ability to improve lives through behavioural therapies contain the seeds of liberation but also of political manipulation.
]]>All that has happened over thirty years is that the threat of a public sector monopoly over productive capacity has been replaced by a duopoly of power in which innovation and infrastructure have shifted into private hands but provision of services remains state-led.
Decentralising The State
Radical conservatives (including many who purport to be on the centre-left) were moving to change this balance in the boom years before the 'credit crunch'.
This position has gone underground while the public is forced to place more trust in the State as a guarantor of last resort against financial system failures - but it has not gone away. The British public sector is now readying itself not just for spending cuts but for a possible administrative revolution.
Currently, our national administration is operating on a 'care and maintenance' basis because of the uncertainties of the coming General Election.
It may take months after the result is announced to get things started again (if only because new ministers will not rubber-stamp predecessors' decisions). By the time that they do, in the Autumn, the mantra will be cost-savings and cuts, regardless of who is in office.
The current theme, partly dictated by the full employment and votes requirements of the incumbent Government but also by economic strategy, is that capital investment is to be cut but head-count ('front-line' services in the speeches) will be sustained.
This is, of course, absurd in the very long term. It is capital investment that creates sustainable wealth and greater efficiencies (as well as jobs). Having lots of people working within a crumbling infrastructure is tantamount to embedding long term economic decline for fear of short term unemployment figures.
Beyond Cynicism
What can be done about this? The first and most cynical thing to say is that this delay in cuts affecting head-count is only partly to do with keeping the economy going. It is also a determination by an incumbent not to disturb a public sector whose votes will go to it all things being equal.
Another cynical observation would be that one cost, neither truly capital investment nor head-count, that might be cut to buy time is the elimination of consultants (before the election) and the quangocracy (after the election) - just work the existing staff harder. We'll come on to that.
If the economists are wrong and if the IMF manages to hold the line in the outer rim of Europe and we are not faced by a sterling crisis, then, perhaps, just perhaps, the infrastructure of the State and 'frontline services' will hold together and we can go back to business as usual in due course.
Through natural wastage and slow growth, with such a strategy, the State can retain its role in society as something more than law enforcement against the surly unemployed. The remnants of social democracy, which is always civil servants' natural preference, might be preserved.
However, we hold to the view (based on experience) that all institutions have an acute sense of their own survival. The machinery of the State cannot be identified entirely with the people who pay for it and whom it serves. It has a politics all of its own.
State Survivalism
As the months go by, you are likely to see at least three 'survival tactics' emerge that are quite new and are designed to preserve the core of the State against radical decentralisers who have emerged on the Right of New Labour and, above all, in the Tory Party.
The new Tory Parliamentary intake will include many experienced local government 'cutters'. Influential Tory 'intellectual' politicians like Douglas Carswell are pushing hard (with some Liberal Democrat sympathy to be expected) for a significant decentralisation of power.
We have already noted the first 'survival tactic' - the slashing of the use of consultants, in effect a decision to throw the private sector hangers-on who have benefited so much from New Labour approaches to private/public partnership overboard to sink or swim.
The second is to start bringing in academics to 'nudge' the population into acceptance of the value of the State and the third, perhaps most interesting of all, are tentative moves to try to quantify the value of what Government does in preparation for aggressive media and PAC questioning.
Away With Agents & Consultants
Since we are associated with the public relations industry, this might be the place to start looking at signs of what is to come. Government communications are an easy target for a new Parliament of Tory provincials - they represent 'spin' and they cost a lot.
On December 11th, PR Week 'revealed' that the COI was going to undertake a highest-level review of government communications with planned efficiency savings of £650m from marketing and management consultancy spend.
Some of the savings will come from an eventual assault on the quangocracy (123 bodies seem to have been targeted for merger or abolition across Government). The claim is that overall consultancy spending in Whitehall will be cut by 50% and marketing by 25%.
What is perhaps most interesting (especially to those exercised by what the centralisation of gritting roads says about New Labour) is the hint that the COI will become more powerful as the central point for all Government communications efforts, which is certainly logical in terms of economies of scale.
This, of course, centralises the State's effort even further into 'one message' communications. This is a challenge to the Tory instinct for the decentralisation of power, although it might suit the Right to have a smaller State communicating more clearly.
However, before we get too excited, New Labour is not cutting a steady-state marketing capability. The COI spend on PR and news management (according to PR week) in 2008/2009 was actually 50% up on the previous year at £41m so a big slash could merely return it to 2007/2008 levels.
The suspicion of Tories has always been that the relatively recent surge in expenditures on education and health communications was 'political' - designed to increase awareness of New Labour's zone of electoral advantage.
A true cynic (not us!) might wonder whether this was legerdemain. A surge of expenditure in the run-up to a known election year and then newspaper-friendly responsible cuts - back to normal once the vote was in. Surely not!
Nudging Approval
We have already raised concerns in As It Happens and elsewhere about the politicians' new fascination with anthropology and the cognitive sciences. This is a general phenomenon, to be found in Cameron's circle as much as anywhere else.
We have cruelly likened it to the fashion for race politics in the first half of the twentieth century that led to the death camps. It is imperfect science within an undeveloped paradigm seized upon by politicians desperate for a solution to their problems of social order and legitimacy.
In the same edition of PR Week, having announced cuts in consultancy and agency, the COI also announced a new raft of advisers - a planned panel of 'behaviour change experts' (i.e. psychologists, behavioural economists, anthropologists and sociologists) to assist in PR planning.
There are philosophical issues here - should your or my money be spent on systems that try to change my behaviour rather than just require compliance with the law? Should a democratic state be using techniques designed to sell goods and services against its own people?
This is the famous 'nudge' approach to public policy and probably as doomed in the long run as all such theoretical and manipulative interventions into our lives, but we can rant as much as we wish - clearly Government thinks that this is the way forward.
In fact, much of this is benign. There is an obesity problem and behavioural psychology can legitimately be used to change behaviour in the interests of the public (assuming they retain the right to be obese by choice). What we have to watch for is drift into projects that suit them and not us.
The point is that the State is now shifting from simply being the client to agencies who take the cash and communicate messages into a more complex animal that learns how to manage perception of itself and so the skills institutionally to embed itself in society against threats to its legitimacy.
This is a major challenge to libertarians because the main claim against the State at the moment is, in fact, that it is not truly competent (often unfairly so but a widespread perception). Changing perception does not change competence but merely perception of competence.
The COI And Value For Money
We leave the best to last. Hidden away but public domain on the COI 'big thinkers' blog is a paper boringly entitled Payback and Return on Marketing Investment [ROMI] in the Public Sector. It is what it says on the tin and the tin was opened up to consultation within the COI family at the end of November.
We don't propose to analyse it here but it is very significant and very creative. In essence, it is taking the bull by the horns of value in marketing (an old debate that has created a mini-industry of evaluation in public relations for nervous corporations).
It is a pre-emptive strike against Parliamentary scrutiny. Under the current regime, 'spin' is good if the Cabinet office or the Prime Minister's Office thinks it is good. There was no need to evaluate. But things change.
'Spin' is not going to be good if New Labour loses the next election (any post mortem will place the collapse down to a history of public manipulation going back to the mid-1990s) and the COI is going to have to demonstrate quantifiable social benefits to ministers under increasing backbench pressure.
Although all these initiatives relate just to one key Department (the Central Office of Information), their appearance at the end of 2009 in anticipation of new conditions by mid-2010 is neither accidental nor unique to communications.
The threat to the State is not simply sheer lack of funds but also legitimacy under conditions where more funds are being raised from the private sector through taxation for services that are undoubtedly going to weaken through cuts - and this may go on for many years.
The new Parliament, regardless of Government, is going to have a phalanx of cost-cutting anti-statist libertarians in place hungry for decentralisation and placing constant pressure on the State to justify its existence against starving packs of private sector rivals and angry letters from constituents.
Legitimacy & Cuts
These three strategies: bringing business back in-house, using academics to build strategies for legitimacy and demonstrating value to Parliament more quantitatively: are three survival tools of value to public administration in very difficult new times. They are pre-emptive strikes against slash and burn.
One last note - the agencies and consultancies who are about to be pushed out may have little to say in the matter (though they will no doubt be lobbying to get back in when things pick up) but many civil servants are not going to like Mark Cross' initiative at the COI one little bit.
If you are used to making relatively unstressful decisions based on your Oxbridge judgement and keeping your head below the parapet to avoid fairly rare Parliamentary scrutiny, Cross' initative, if it spreads through Whitehall, sounds like a lot of hard work and risk.
The Luddites would be mistaken. It is not just the Tory backwoodsman that the State has to worry about (after all most will sink back into relative laziness or end up on the payroll vote after a while) but the new breed of citizen journalist and blogger.
In the coming decades, the issue is not whether Parliament backs the State but whether the public backs both State and Parliament. Parliament is in bad odor with a written warning in its HR file. The State needs direct public legitimacy if taxes are to be paid and laws obeyed.
And here's a thought that should concentrate minds - what if an enraged and angry electorate decides that not only should bankers' bonuses be clawed back but also 'fat cat' public sector pensions? Unlikely, yes, but Luddites ought not be complacent - the anger out there is palpable.
We should take the current planned cuts with a pinch of a salt and be highly suspicious of government by 'nudge' but the COI's initiative on ROMI should be welcomed and encouraged - in the public interest.
]]>How New Labour Might Return From The Dead
New Labour's return to power under Gordon Brown looks unlikely but it is far from impossible. Its coalition might yet remain solid while the opposition, although a majority in the country and almost certainly in Southern England, splits into its Tory, liberal and radical nationalist components.
The New Labour coalition has some pretty good reasons for holding together and getting its core vote out. The trades unions fear political evisceration under a vengeful Tory Government and the public sector always suffers more in terms of cuts under the centre-right.
The Celtic nations and decaying Northern urban communities have lived off the fat of the South. They know that the machine for taking Southerners cash and re-laundering it back to them via the EU, and more directly, will come to a sharp halt as the Tories look for quick and easy cuts.
Finally, there is a large middle class quangocracy and a fair body of liberal progressives who like the redistribution of English cash to the emerging world. Neither trust claims of compassionate conservatism despite Cameron's attempts to win classical social liberals over to the Tory cause.
For all these reasons and others, New Labour could squeak back in with a majority but if and only if its traditional voters walk out of their front door on the day, forget their rage and frustration - with wars overseas, failures to deal with poverty and 'political correctness gone mad' - and vote.
Compass
And this is where Compass comes in - a sort of ersatz Leftist movement, led by Jon Cruddas, MP, a key figure in the liaison between the trades union political officers and New Labour in the early days of the party's 'modernisation' but now reinvented as the main Left challenger to the consensus.
Its latest mailshot (admittedly to the faithful) is red in hue, its main symbol the internationalist one of a man holding a globe and weighed down by the responsibility, with much talk of 'change' through action (an obvious nod to the Obama phenomenon).
It claims 30,000 members and supporters which, if true, is significant in recent political terms. It is probably 10 times the size of the real membership of the last grassroots revolt within the Party in the mid-1990s.
If Compass succeeds in mobilising its growing number of discouraged activists, students and fringe intellectuals into a machinery for winning Labour a victory in 2010, Jon Cruddas and those associated with him can justifiably demand preferment. Cruddas is Cabinet material under such circumstances.
Ersatz?
I used the harsh word 'ersatz' to describe Compass but I write objectively not to denigrate what Cruddas and his supporters believe themselves to be. They believe themselves to be of the Left because they have taken radical positions within an essentially conservative movement.
Naturally they continue to avoid the 'S' word. Socialism frightens the English horses and is now unacceptable to a progressive mentality that hated Sovietism more than 'American imperialism'. If they are attempting anything, it is to take over the contested word 'progressive' and own it.
Instead Compass speaks of 'greater radicalism' (as if New Labour has been radical at all). This term radical refers back to a late nineteenth century pre-Labour Representation Committee culture of dissent before the socialists and Fabians muddied the waters and confused trades unionists with theory.
To back this up, in their fund-raising and recruitment campaigns, Compass makes seven claims that define what they are and how they want to capture the Labour Party and, through the Labour Party, the Government:
Assessment
This is not a bad record over eighteen months or so - certainly so when compared to the complete failure of any Left challenge to the prevailing order within the Party since the middle years of Kinnock's leadership.
But it is not quite as impressive as they claim. The determination in their literature to tell us that 63% supported a High Pay Commission and 67% supported the windfall tax on energy tells us that the campaigns are still not built on principle but on populism.
Compass is not a coherent ideological challenge to New Labour. It is pitching for a place in New Labour's sun, adopting its assumption that power derives from political mobilisation. Compass will claim its place on mobilising votes for New Labour rather than by mounting a cogent critique of its failures.
Nor has it achieved a great deal of a practical nature. The changes to the Companies Bill may be irritating to business but they are insignificant. The windfall tax and the postponement of Royal Mail part-privatisation and Trident owe far more to straightened economic circumstances than Compass.
Compass' power resides entirely on its ability to mobilise disillusioned activists to vote for a Party that has (by any standards) been involved in illegal war, been a mere adjunct to a foreign power and reduced basic civil liberties (albeit in return for increased 'human rights').
It has also been administratively incompetent, done little about inequality and presided over a disastrous economic meltdown built on an unsustainable use of credit to promote growth. So, the critique of particular policies rather than the system is telling - loyalty and solidarity trump analysis.
The Limits of Compass
Closer analysis of Compass' claims show that its power is extremely limited. The big wins are merely postponements of controversial policies. The use by the State of their street pressure to mount windfall raids on the prosperous are not signs of a shift to the Left but of economic weakness.
The particular failure to position housing (a sector which cheap credit was designed to deal with) as ring-fenced, alongside the educational and healthcare expenditures that most concern the swing middle classes, shows that Compass is still mostly noise and fury.
In fact, the Government has done very little to claw back bonuses or deal with high pay as a structural issue. It bought into 'international competitiveness' arguments about the City, on which welfare spending now largely depends. Compass has no consistent alternative critique of this strategy.
Compass is being used by New Labour to give itself the opportunity of stabilising and even advancing its vote in the street. Compass offers the Party the chance to mobilise activists to knock on doors and show enthusiasm on the day without having to make any promises it has to keep!
Hope Again!
What New Labour needs is students and activists on the doorstep able to counter negative arguments with a message of hope and hope is best spread by believers and not by bureaucrats.
We have covered hope before in our postings - it is a very powerful political tool but also one that raises expectations. Growing disillusion with Obama in the US is the price paid for using hope as a campaign weapon. But New Labour is now desperate - later disillusion it can live with, loss of office it cannot.
Any New Labour Government that emerges on a bit of populist Left legerdemain will not be radically different from the one that it replaced. It will still have a PLP dominated by the centre-right of the Party and figures like Mandelson and Miliband, even Purnell, will be of more significance than Cruddas.
If Brown remains in office (it would be hard to dispose of an election winner for perhaps another two years), the Brownites will be manouevring to protect their future. Cruddas and the Compassites are likely to be seen as merely the mobiliser of the OMOV vote in a Leadership contest.
But this is where Compass pays off for its PLP and union promoters. It builds bridges across the Party to non-Party progressives. Its real power will lie either in its value as a chip in a leadership contest if existing factions are prepared to bid for its vote or in the immediate aftermath of a defeat.
Compass' populist stance has thus nothing to do with the country and everything to do with the Party. If it can 'own' the grassroots activists and then pull disillusioned outsiders into the party for the first time or as returnees, it could, with trades union support, transform the balance of power within the Party.
What Compass Means
This is what Compass is about - the recapture of the main centre-left Party by the Labour Movement so that it can resist, in coalition with progressives and the regions, a vicious class attack from the Southern middle classes.
What the Labour Movement fears is the ending of the New Labour commitment to full employment, deregulation of the labour market and cuts in public spending affecting their members. Civil liberties, issues of war and peace and national sovereignty are trivial next to these concerns.
A beaten New Labour Party with a disillusioned and divided activist base might open the door to decisive action by the Conservatives to break the link between the trades unions and politics, decentralise public services (removing union bargaining power) and turn the labour market into a free-for-all.
For trades unions, the best and only option is to ensure the return of a Labour Government against the odds so that the Tories collapse back into a futile English nationalism. But if that option fails, the second line of defence is a united 'resistance movement' that has forgotten the failures of New Labour.
So, Compass is not unimportant. It is of no direct political consequence currently in terms of policy but, as a tool of Labour/trades union recovery, as a potential influencer in the next Leadership contest and as a centre of labour resistance to Tory 'reform' on defeat, it needs to be watched.
But, at the end of the day, it is still an 'ersatz' Left. It has no coherent ideology other than a general and vague progressivism and labourism where labourism represents a decreasing number of people.
Labourism just wants more 'working class representation' within an existing Blairite politics. Compass, in this context, replaces coherent thought with populism. It suffers from the same disease as New Labour - a preference for power over principle.
This is not its fault. The structures of New Labour offer no alternative to challengers - and there are signs that Cruddas may be sympathetic to reform of those structures. But what Compass offers to anyone outside the special interests operating within Labour coalition remains unclear.
]]>]]>An analogy might be with traditional catholicism where a catholic can be faithful to the entire belief system and yet be anti-clerical in private, cynical about a particular priest yet never the Church.
The point is that the priesthood is sacred but a man in office may be accepted as flawed - an attitude that permits a believer to be resilient in the face of allegations of (say) child abuse in Ireland. The men in the Irish case were weak but their weakness has no effect whatsoever on the message of St. Peter.
Modern science is slipping into the same situation as it matures into our shared social consensus. If few doubt scientific method, many now doubt, thanks to increased knowledge of psychology, sociology and even anthropology, that scientists are anything other than as flawed as the rest of us.
The Roots of Scepticism
Scepticism comes from a variety of sources. The first source of scepticism is our contemporary awareness that paradigms change and supplant one another much as Thomas Kuhn initially proposed in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962).
The Social Darwinist, racist and eugenicist nonsense of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was scientifically valid in its time but vicious and ultimately proven to be wrong. Naturally, an intelligent sceptic asks: "if such models were so flawed then, why not current models equally so ..."
The partial answer, of course, is that we know more now than we did then to which the reply will be - " ... and we will know more in the future so let us be cautious in accepting any theory while a single anomaly continues to exist". An attitude about which we will have more to say later ...
The second source of the sceptical caste of mind is everyday human experience. People have 'interests' and will 'talk their book' - and they are quite capable of deluding themselves in order to maintain their livelihoods and status. This is true in business, politics and the churches so why not in the sciences?
Any biography of a scientist of note will show the reader that science is very social - who you know and what you belong to will often dictate success and patterns of behaviour.
Scientists are also quite capable of inordinate ambition, negativity towards others, competitiveness and even downright malice. They can also be surprisingly cunning, selfish and stupid - just like the rest of us. Though great scientists often are great men or women, the scientific community can be small-minded.
If scientists are no better than priests, civil servants or local newsagents in terms of their moral worth and scientific communities are as 'human' as Parliament or the Institute of Directors, then it is no surprise that the public are wary of trusting to their authority more than anyone else's.
Interest and Climate Change
Alongside suspicion that no paradigm is certain and that scientists are flawed even where their methods are not, we have patronage. In a system where a patron (now generally a State which has a political agenda) makes it known what it wants, scientists will gear research to meet that expectation.
A proposal on (say) monkeys in the Amazon becomes a proposal on the effects of climate change on monkeys in the Amazon because funding bodies are more interested in climate change than monkeys and the monkey scientists need funds to study their monkeys. Ergo, they study climate change.
The leak by Wikileaks of e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia was a reminder of all these 'softer' aspects of scepticism - climate change just might be a questionable paradigm constructed by experts with an interest in the subject. For example, an observer might wonder ...
Faith-based arguments from authority, a single line that excluded debate and insult and vilification of heretics, positioning scientific critics as little better than creationists, suggest something closer to the worst excesses of the early Church rather than rational scientific debate.
What was not being discussed with the same fervour were the costs of action for developed countries, the historical injustices to developing countries and whether adaptation might be a more sensible strategy than political fixes designed to get a global commitment to a policy at Copenhagen.
What we had here was a movement in which the primary driver was not rational investigation of facts and anomalies or an objective debate about costs and solutions but a coalition where politics was dictating posture and language. Politics is, as we will see, not science.
Cold Fusion - A Case Study
We are not arguing against the propositions of the climate change lobby. We do not know who is right or wrong but we retain our right to a degree of scepticism about the assertion of claims from 'experts' that go beyond their own area of competence or are taken up by faith-based movements.
Our own working model is that there may well be global warming taking place but that the best way forward is not to spend vast resources trying to resist change or get a unified global response but that we should, as a nation, begin to invest in a necessary adaptation to change.
But rather than argue though what is only a belief based on concern that the scientific community has been pushing their luck in allying with particular political interests, I think we might usefully look at another case where science has shown itself unreliable in its political reactions - cold fusion.
Again, we have no idea if cold fusion will bring us unlimited safe energy in the future. Somehow we doubt it. But it is not absurd to consider the idea that chemical reactions at 'room temperature' might generate the same conditions for fusion that high temperatures can create as a hypothesis, no more.
In 1989, two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved cold fusion. The 'achievement' was recognised as limited by themselves but, as so often, they were bamboozled by university PRs into endorsing a news release that claimed more than they had a right to.
Cold Fusion - Fifteen Year Pariah
These were not young graduate students but serious scientists with a track record and what happened next is a lesson in how science really works - remember, the two scientists had merely undertaken an interesting experiment. It was an ambitious university that had over-promoted it.
The claim was tested by the US Department of Energy and they were negative. Pons and Fleischmann, the most experienced in the field, were treated as pariahs, no funding was forthcoming - and no bright young graduates dared to go into the field, certainly not ask for funds on their own account.
From an initial blunder, the entire machinery of the scientific community moved against these two scientists and their careers were ruined. Cold fusion was widely regarded as a joke. And yet ...
A rare moment of praise for the military-industrial complex and an argument for diversity in science ... the US Navy continued to explore cold fusion on the quiet, renamed as 'anomalous effects on deuterated systems', and, sure enough, another scientist Melvin Miles reproduced Pons' and Fleischmann's result.
Unfortunately, reproduction of these results proved a hit and miss affair and, when naval money dried up in 1996, Miles became, according to Michael Brooks, effectively unemployable - because of his association with 'cold fusion'.
Another very prominent scientist Julian Schwinger became a figure of near contempt because of his scientific interest in the theory of 'cold fusion'. In 1991, three years before he died, Schwinger wrote:
The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.
More Than Meets The Eye
So far so unfortunate, but so what - maybe Pons, Fleischmann and Miles were not quite so good as they thought they were and Schwinger had gone a bit weak in the head in his latter years. Maybe the ruling scientific 'paradigm' was so strongly established that these people were no better than creationists.
But Schwinger was simply thinking like a scientist should. He did not say that there was or was not something called 'cold fusion'. All he said was that there was an anomaly and that the anomaly should be investigated. Could nuclear energy be produced through chemical (atomic) manipulation?
He tried eight theories and none quite made the grade but still he tried. Oh, by the way, Schwinger had co-shared a Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics but, well, let's just put that to one side, shall we?
Finally, in 2004, a decade after Schwinger's death, the Department of Energy changed its mind - there might be something in this anomaly, an awkward fact on the ground, after all!
Things had changed. The naval research was now available in full and it turned out that one of the original and most damning reports on which the original Department of Energy had made its funding assessment had been ... flawed.
Interestingly, a blunder in 1989 that led to the resignation in protest of MIT's then chief science writer meant that an MIT report of the anomaly did not appear in the original report until after it had been presented to Congress. So that was that then ... the politicians had decided. End of story until 2004.
Lessons For Science and Politics
With subsequent research showing that the anomaly is real - that some kind of nuclear reactions are going on - we find ourselves wondering what had been happening here. Science was not happening. Politics was happening. Cold fusion was pariah. The consensus had decided.
We can be pleased that, in the end, the facts on the ground eventually led to opportunities for research being reopened some fifteen years after the first misreported experiment and Americans can be gratified that American bureaucracy permits multiple agencies to compete on establishing the truth.
But careers were ruined or placed into doubt and scientists were deprived of funding not because these were bad scientists or cranks but because the weight of community opinion had witch-hunted some into a corner on the basis of surmise and a misreading or distrust of what few facts were available.
It is not that cold fusion will solve our energy needs (it probably will not) but it is a fact on the ground that needs explaining. Science is not served by ignoring anomalies or forcing scientists into some paradigmatic, conceptual or ideological straightjacket - in the liberal West any more than Stalin's Russia.
Currently, research is just interested in the anomaly, that is all. Current thinking is that a nuclear reaction does take place under certain conditions and that this has yet to be explained - it is not by any means necessarily a sign of extra energy, heat production or nuclear fusion.
Brooks' quotes the Economist of 1989 with approval - whether right or wrong, Pons and Fleischmann's experiment was 'exactly what science should be about'. But what does all this have to do with the climate change debate?
The Politics of Science
A consensus in science only expresses a probability until all anomalies have been explained. While there are legitimate scientific critics of the prevailing consensus, who are independent of special interests and with insights from their field, we should assume nothing. Crushing dissent is bad science.
At the moment, a sort of existential panic has set in - especially on the centre-left. The fear is that if we do not do anything now about 'climate change', we will all end up on the film set of 2012. History tells us that such hysteria usually leads to serious and often irrecoverable and expensive policy mistakes.
But this is about politics, not science. It is about a centre-left that has lost its way and is desperate for a universal cause (and why not the 'planet' as substitute for humanity!) and about Western governments trying to retain their influence in the world while their populations grow restless.
[The facts of the cold fusion story were culled from '13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our Times' (2009) by Michael Brooks but the opinions are entirely those of TPPR]
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