Sir Andrew Foster, former CEO of The Audit Commission, called this week for what seemed like a radical (and welcome) inversion of the relationship between Citizen and State. The State, he argued, has continued to build years, if not generations, of increasingly irrelevant policies based on the fundamental principles of the Welfare State without offering a wholesale re-appraisal of Beveridge’s sentiments and their application today.
I paraphrase only slightly to illustrate a point – and Foster’s argument seemed as much rooted in the issue of shared cost and responsibility for payment, as one of principle. William Beveridge created a system that was understandably a child of its war-ravaged time – but this was also a time of hierarchical authority and state-imposed systems, not one of bottom-up democracy, increasing citizen freedom and impending renaissance. The Citizen, not the State, has a greater power and a greater ability to guide his or her own destiny today.
There is of course an irony deeply embedded within the paralysis in which we find ourselves now, certainly as far as state provision of health and education is concerned. Increased state imposition (rules, regulations and endless league tables of compliance) moves us all further away from citizen influence and effect at the very moment when that role is not only more urgently needed but also more easily accessible. The State, thinking it exists to liberate the citizen, in fact becomes its greatest hindrance.
One of the seminal moments in Rupert Murray’s and Charles Clover’s excellent docu-movie ‘End Of The Line‘ sees a group of European Commissioners adopting legislation that flagrantly violates the best recommendations of expert scientists on the issue of fishing stocks and quotas. Then Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw is quoted as saying that this is not Europe’s finest hour, as political pressure from the Mediterranean fishing states sees a limit agreed which is twice that of the recommended level for replenishment and indeed survival. Worse still, the Big Fishing Corporations, so the movie argues, will abuse these rules still further – and will double again the amount of stock fished in the oceans. If the scientific advise says ten tonnes, the end result is sixty tonnes – and we wonder why there is genuine alarm (with its huge global social consequences) that we are reaching the end of the line.
If Sir Andrew’s thoughts on Beveridge determine a re-think of the rules on which we base our political judgement, so the moral of the End of the Line is that we need judgement based on principles and not rules (let alone political expedience). In both cases, the Citizen stands to benefit – either through the provision of better social services – and the empowerment to participate therein – and/or through a sustainable planet, with sustainable food supplies, equitably distributed between the global north and south. In both cases, the Rules have gone wrong and need to be broken.
The Government’s own Committee on Climate Change called out one such grotesque inconsistency in recent weeks – vocalising the contradiction between an (already tough to deliver) 80% commitment to Carbon reduction by 2050 and the approval of a third runway at Heathrow, which will most likely double air traffic by 2030. Here is a clear decision to impose new rules based on no principle – despite, irony of ironies, the commitment to 80% reduction being legally binding and self-imposed by the very same government. Rules are set and then rules are, well, if not broken then certainly massaged with the distorting delicacy of a Uri Geller hand.
While Governments manipulate and contradict, business leaders continue to worry – yet struggle to defeat the inertia to act. The rules which bind companies to state compliance give little room for principled behaviour – and so the leader who steps away from the rulebook is both visionary and brave. Yet this move is now more critical than ever before. As Sir Brian Hoskins (see blog posts passim) has warned, we are all doomed if we think that business can emerge from the current global crisis deploying the same business models with which we entered it. We need to shift from a society of wants to a society of needs and we cannot do this unless there is a radical and fundamental re-appraisal of the principles within which we work. Rules of the lowest common denominator – even if more harshly set and more rigorously applied – will never change the world. Bankers with Big Bonus’, please take note.
‘There is more to life than GDP’ argued Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz in the Financial Times last week. His calls for new and better measurements of well-being of course chime with one of the central tenets of Citizen Renaissance, where we look at GDP as a Grossly Distorted Picture and consider economic wealth in the context of non-material happiness and fulfilment. Stiglitz argues, as do we, that not only is GDP an imprecise and arcane measurement of wellbeing, but that we must not confuse the measurement of Wellbeing as an end in itself. Of course, William Beveridge called for a loosening of the citizen dependency on the state as economic conditions (i.e. wealth) improved. Wellbeing was supposed to grow in parallel. But Wellbeing has been flat-lining since the 1970s – proof positive that the rules have gone wrong and that Foster, Stiglitz and others are right: we need an altogether different debate and a real, citizen based re-appraisal of the principles on which our society is based and on which progress is properly determined.
