This is the full text of Labour policy review head Jon Cruddas’s lecture to The Centre for Social Justice.
Thank you to CSJ for inviting me. I am a great fan of your work.
From early years intervention, work on gangs, exploring the experience of poverty, tackling problems in family life.
This is the detail of ordinary everyday life and it’s something that has too often been missing from our politics.
In the last thirty years British politics has been about the market and the state and not about society. But people live in society. Society is about our connection with others that provides us with meaning in life, a sense of belonging and identity. A market without society, a state that dominates society are the enemies of our wellbeing.
The subject of my lecture tonight is the state and the good society.
The kind of state we want must be shaped by the kind of society we want to create.
What does society mean for the British?
We’re rebellious. Non-conformist. Willing to challenge power.
We are loyal to the institutions we’ve grown up with: the NHS, the BBC, the monarchy.
We believe in the equal dignity of every fellow citizen.
Treating our neighbours as friends not strangers; a belief in duties and obligations to others.
We have a strong sense of getting back what we put in. Willing to help others when they do the same.
Not just rubbing along but being connected by reciprocal relations and mutual obligation.
But my general sense is that England in particular is divided between two traditions.
Between utilitarianism, which tends toward thinking of us as rational, calculating individuals.
And what I will call a one nation politics that recognises it’s our relationships with other people that matter most.
Between a politics of maximising self-interest
And a politics of sociability
Fundamentally, I believe that people aspire to the common good – to work hard and to look after their families.
But something has gone wrong.
Too many young people leave school without a job, without training, without a sense of what they want to do in life
Too many people are depressed, and lonely.
Too many people feel angry that the institutions that affect our lives – the banks and energy companies are anti-social. And often public services too.
Too many feel alienated, ignored or humiliated
We are in danger of becoming a disconnected society, a people who feel a sense of loss and a politics driven by anger and grievance which bleeds away compassion and our shared humanity.
Let’s think about this crisis of authority
Those with authority have broken their covenant with society.
There is a lot of good leadership in both the public sector and business.
But too often leaders of our institutions imagine their job is to administer the system not listen to people.
If there’s a crisis, the answer is always the same – it’s someone else’s fault.
The banks were interested in profiting from their complicated mathematical systems not building relationships with their customers.
The energy companies put profits before their customers. They blamed the system for the high prices but we know now the prices were fixed. It’s a moral failure not just market failure.
The problems in many of our public institutions have the same cause.
Our institutions view people as units of calculation.
Most of the people who work in our schools and hospitals, job centres and local authorities are driven by a sense of duty and a desire to care.
But too often they are forced to act like machines where these human virtues are crowded out.
They are forced to treat the contact they have with the people they serve as a series of isolated transactions.
They have not time to build up relationships.
Take social services. In some places, 80% of care budgets go in assessing need not paying people to care.
Friends and family who want to help aren’t supported, even though it’d cost the taxpayer less if they were.
The system doesn’t support people’s relationships with each other. It views us all as isolated individuals with rigidly defined needs.
Take our education system.
Too many of our schools judge ‘improvement’ by nothing other than the number of pupils getting 5 A*-C at GCSE. Teachers want to instill the joy of learning. But they are told to follow the system and teach to the test.
Curiosity and a connection to the world outside the classroom gets ignored. Even our ‘good’ schools see education as a set of hoops to jump through.
Arguably, young people are disengaged from education because we take this transactional view rather than a belief in creating wise, virtuous citizens.
Even our brightest students often leave school with no sense of what they’re going to do afterwards. Few have a sense of vocation or of being part of something bigger than themselves.
Those who are driven and committed often just see education as the means to earn a high salary. Those who aren’t can end up feeling alienated from almost everything in their lives.
We need exams. But we need an education system that teaches self-discipline and gives children a sense of passion and purpose. We need schools that don’t just teach transferable skills but can help develop students’ sense of what they are going to do in life
It’s the same problem with banks and energy companies.
Leaders too often think their job is to administer the system, and don’t take responsibility when things go wrong.
We’ve taken a wrong turn.
I would suggest that the real dividing line in British politics now is not between statists and free marketeers, or between centralists and localists.
It’s between two different ideas of what society is.
It’s about the difference between utilitarianism and one nation politics- actually it is a debate within all the major parties.
Let me outline what I mean by these two ideas.
Utilitarian politics
The utilitarian view treats people as isolated, calculating individuals.
For utilitarians, our satisfaction is something that can always be quantified. It was Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, who invented the word ‘maximise’.
It’s a view that says the good things in life can always be given a monetary value. “Welfare”, happiness, joy are things that have a price.
University education is measured by the average salary of their graduates.
The quality of our environment, our forests and our landscape are given a cash value.
The quality of care we give to an elderly person in need is defined in a number on a spreadsheet.
Bentham would have approved of all these things.
Where everything is quantifiable in terms of its derived utility. We lose the sense of doing something because it is good and right. And we lose the ability to challenge our leaders when things go wrong.
But it’s not just about the market per se. As the utilitarian market needs a strong state.
Utilitarians say people don’t know what their own interest is. They believe in an elite that makes the rules. Who push people to ‘maximise’ their satisfaction – as the elite defines it.
So we end up with too many predatory markets and a bossy class of distant administrators, whose job is to force people to act ‘rationally’.
We are left with a form of capitalism that dispossesses people and fails to provide millions with a decent livelihood.
The state doesn’t protect people against risk. It sets guidelines and targets. Coerce, cajole, manage, nudge, direct –never care, support, build, lead.
Whether it’s the state or the market, utilitarianism tries to manage people with huge impersonal systems where no one’s in charge.
One thing sums up this attitude for me: a refusal to trust people.
Utilitarians are suspicious of what happens when people get together, when they have freedom to put across their point of view, when they argue, debate, negotiate.
They think our different interests and perspectives mean we can never agree our maximum derived utility. It tends toward a rejection of the idea of a shared common life- rather the aggregation of individual transactions.
So there’s no place for workers and managers, teachers and parents, health workers and to sit down and agree how they can work together for the common good.
They tacitly reject the notion of one nation. We’re just a country of 60 million competing, individuals, out to ‘maximise’ our utility.
As a result, utilitarian politics tends to diminish institutions that bring people together. Such as trade unions, school governing bodies, professional associations.
It’s about being neutral and ‘fair’. It insists on equal treatment – in theory. But it’s an idea of equality with no room for people. It has at times dominated each of our major two political parties and exiled other competing traditions
We’re left with endless freedom of choice but no power. We end up with very little to love, to cherish, to protect. We advance our self-interest, but have corroded our sense of what’s good. And we don’t have the institutions or organisations to fight for what’s right.
And there’s no one left who’s willing to take responsibility for doing what’s right.
This utilitarian project has been challenged by another tradition that started long before Disraeli.
One Nation
One nation politics starts with our interests. But it says we can only find fulfillment with others.
For me, the inspiration is Aristotle, not Bentham standing over there in Gower Street.
We try, in our lives, to pursue what is good. That involves virtue, friendship and love, not just calculation. Human society, as Aristotle put it ‘comes into being for the sake of living, but is for the sake of living well’.
This is miles away from the system design of Bentham’s Panoptican
Human satisfaction depends on the way we live together with the people around us. A common life, indeed a political life, provides the basis of our personal fulfillment.
Our purpose must be to create and protect this common life against the tendency of both big business and bureaucracy to dehumanise.
In Britain, the idea of creating ‘one nation’ was born in the early nineteenth-century, in response to fears about the effects of the industrial revolution. The new factories and industrial cities saw the growth of poverty, dirt, disease, dispossession, dislocation as well wealth and opportunity.
One nation politics didn’t resist change, but wanted to civilise, to humanise the process of transformation.
One nation politics is about organising people in institutions that conserve what’s of value in the face of dislocating change.
It began as a radical project.
It started as a call for reconnection not revolution.
E. P. Thompson showed how English radicals drew from long-standing ideas about the obligation of rich to poor to argue for their inclusion in Britain’s political and economic institutions.
But you could never trust the powerful to look after the interests of the powerless. The answer was always the same: people needed to organise together.
The campaign by Chartism to give working people a place in the constitution. Put into practice with the Chartist Hustings and the Peoples Parliament.
The patriotic radicalism of William Cobbett
The ‘villages of cooperation’ built by Robert Owen to create a new world of reciprocity and mutual obligation
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These are founding moments in the history of the Labour movement.
They were driven by the sentiments created by our history of sociability, not by abstract right or narrow economic interests.
They argued that our factories and councils, courts and parliament, needed to be held to account by voices from every part of the nation, not just the propertied elite.
There’s always been a strand of the Labour movement that’s been more about sociability than social science.
Sometimes it’s been hidden; often in the last century exiled. At times we’ve imagined socialism could be created by slide-rules or spreadsheets – the technocrats, the Benthamites have had their day- often described as Fabians. There were moments when we came close to losing our soul.
But in the early years of the twentieth century, the Labour movement was about creating a responsible society, driven by collective self-help. It was about nurturing a common life in the face of the dehumanising force of industrial capitalism.
In 1948, G.D.H. Cole could argue that the ‘social-service state’ the Labour government created was something founded on ‘democratic mutual aid and organization of the community spirit’, not top-down provision.
The 1945 government was less about state socialism, and more about the creation of a responsible society built in the everyday world of Haileybury House in Stepney and the 1920s ILP radicalism of Clem Attlee’s East End.
It made mistakes. It believed too much in the spirit but not practice of democracy. It didn’t give people real power as much as it should have done. Labour believed too much in the voice of the technical expert, and not in the power of ordinary people.
But the 1945 government built institutions that brought people together: the National Health Service, the National Parks, the Festival of Britain. It was one nation politics in practice.
It’s not an argument I’ve time to make here: but my hunch is that it’s the Conservatives who’ve been the real centralisers.
Crisis
I’ve argued tonight that the crisis in Britain today is about the way our institutions are run.
The leaders of our institutions have broken their covenant with society.
We’re in danger of forgetting that people are motivated by more than individual self-interest. We’re at risk of creating a society in which no one takes responsibility, and no one has a genuine sense of authority.
This coalition government isn’t going to fix things, because it’s been taken over by the utilitarian approach. It is a tragedy for modern politics and not just the Conservative Party.
David Cameron’s leadership bid for the Conservative Party was a challenge to Labour for getting too technocratic and top-down in the way we governed. His ‘ big society’ and the ‘post-bureaucratic age’ were good ideas. Personally, I still support them!
His pro-social speeches were about compassion, community and responsibility. The same as Tony Blair until 2000.
Cameron started to push the Conservative Party back onto the common ground of one nation politics. That’s why people liked him. I liked him.
It was a bold move. But it failed. The big society needed good economic times. The 2008 financial crisis sunk it. The party is now dominated by its right wing – unpatriotic in pushing the Conservatives off the common ground.
Without effective leadership, I fear the raw utilitarians are becoming the loudest voices.
Instead of wanting one nation they are creating a divided country.
Their idea of progress and modernisation is cold and calculating.
They think the Tories will win next election with a combination of big infrastructure projects, marketisation and an intensification of free market ‘modernisation’.
It was their voice that dominated the Conservative response to Ed Miliband’s one nation conference speech.
The charge was led by Michael Gove, in a speech to think tank Politeai last month.
Gove used his critique of Ed’s speech to attack the tradition David Cameron is part of. The speech marks a break in modern-day Conservatism, the abandonment of one nation politics and its replacement with an unrelenting utilitarianism.
Gove makes one important point. He talked about the way our public culture doesn’t have room for experiment and failure.
But for there to be experimentation to work, you need to trust people, to allow different ways of doing things to happen. We need, in other words, institutions where people have a say, where there’s warmth, love, compassion. Where public sector workers and users have the time and confidence to support one another, to innovate, take initiatives, improve productivity.
I’m not saying we should forget about efficiency and productivity. In these tough financial times, we need to be efficient and productive.
But efficient transactions happen when people trust each other, when there’s personal contact. Tough conversations go better when people are honest and have a good relationship with each other. Efficiency happens when people are part of a team that is motivated by a sense of common purpose.
It’s about a leaders’ authority coming from the way they respond to being challenged.
But instead of getting people together to support each other, Gove tells a classically utilitarian story: we need more market and more government, more competition, but also more state.
Look at what’s happened in the ministry Gove runs:
We’ve seen compulsory phonic testing for six year olds.
We’ve seen restriction in the choices schools make over the curriculum.
We’ve seen a relentless focus on one way of measuring a pupil’s progression – the English Baccalaureate. As Alison’ Wolf’s excellent review of vocational education argue, good maths and English are essential for all young people.
But that’s not what this government is saying.
-Instead, they’re telling us there is only one way to be success in life: A–levels and a university degree from a Russell Group institution.
With the economy on tilt, and preparation for life after school so poor, it isn’t working out like that for even the brightest children in our schools.
Gove says: we can’t trust parents to hold teachers to account. We shouldn’t support teachers in finding their own ways to develop their students. They need, minute by minute, to be directed by regulations from a distant administrator.
It’s hardly surprising that one of Gove’s own advisors, John McIntosh, said last month that teachers were giving ‘robotic’ lessons’ because they’re trying to follow pressure from Ofsted.
In short, we in Labour need to build our own story of the big society. Cameron’s version was too abstract.
It was based on a simplistic distinction between state and society. It was all about creating active citizens without changing the way the state or market worked. It failed to recognise that it’s the way our institutions work which stop people getting involved.
There was no effort to reform public institutions or businesses to reflect people‘s sociable instincts.
The result was a kind of sham localism. A localism bill that gave ministers more power over local government.
Police Commissioner elections for a post no one knew about, with no effort to involve people in the conversation about local policing.
A public ‘right to challenge’ local authority service provision which gives local residents the power to trigger a compulsory competitive tendering process if they don’t like the way a council runs a service. From then onwards the market, not people, will decide.
This government is more interested in administering the system than reforming institutions so people can hold them to account. Cameron’s big society had no democracy.
So I suggest, with some sadness, that the Conservatives are increasingly ruled by an interest, an instinct and an ideology that is out of touch with the sentiments of people in this country.
The interest is finance.
It means we’re stuck with the same short-term, financially-driven approach that got us into this mess in the first place.
The instinct is that you can’t trust people.
The Conservatives don’t trust what happens when people get together, when they associate, talk, organise. Their idea of authority comes from a sense of hierarchy, not of dialogue and democratic accountability. It’s a view that leads to an extraordinary concentration of power.
The ideology is neo-classical economics, and the mad belief that all preferences can be priced, and market exchange result in ‘optimum’ outcomes.
The trouble is not that the market isn’t free enough. Faceless systems whether they’re created by the market or administrative rules, leave no space for authority that can be held to account.
What is to be done?
The Labour policy review is developing ideas about how we change the way we govern. For example, am emerging debate about the relational state and about relational welfare and about self-regenerating communities.
But I think we need to challenge the terms of argument in a more fundamental way.
We need to start talking about restoring the covenant between those who lead our institutions and the British people. To rebuild the vocation of political and managerial authority in our public sector.
For me, public leadership is not the technical task of delivering ‘outcomes’.
It’s the moral practice of getting people together. It’s about unlocking the capacity we all have to work collectively for the common good. It’s the same at every level, from the Prime Minister to the teacher in a primary school.
It’s about relationships and reciprocity.
It depends on a relationship with the people who work for you and who you serve. The back and forth of conversation, the personal touch, the ability to listen not just communicate ‘key messages’.
It’s about a sense of reciprocal obligation. The right to receive carries an obligation to help others in return.
The salaries we pay our public sector leaders aren’t the market price we pay to buy their skills. They are a consideration paid in return for their commitment and duty to those they serve.
We’ll only have public institutions with deeper relationships and a stronger sense of reciprocity if we change the way we hold their leaders to account. The power of the citizen, not the regulation written in Whitehall should be the force driving the improvement of our public services.
I’m not saying targets, exams, national guidelines aren’t sometimes useful.
But too often, the managers of our schools, hospitals, job centres see themselves as accountable to distant systems and processes. As a result many have lost the art of practical leadership which allows them to respond to the real voice and needs of the people they serve.
It creates a sense of disempowerment and loss of responsibility amongst the people who should stand up and take charge.
Our policy review is looking at ways to make the organised voice of citizens the driving force behind public sector improvement.
We’re drawing on the work of think-tanks and academics, but also people with practical experience of organising to create a common life in our public and private institutions.
Like London Citizens, with their work in fighting for the living wage and building relationships to make our neighbourhoods safer places.
Like Locality helping a new generation of community leaders
In the Labour Party, Iain McNicol and organisations like Movement for Change are building community organising into the party.
And the social enterprise Participle, with projects like Circle and Backr which create social networks so older people can find help and those out of work find jobs.
We want workers on the board of private companies, service users and workers to be involved in the governance of public institutions.
But its not just boards and governing bodies. The authority of our public sector leaders needs to be more visible, better able to publicly respond to challenge.
The leaders of schools and hospitals need to be skillful at conversing with the citizens they serve, able to tell a clear public story about their purpose, not just adept at managing data and filling in forms.
We need to renew the autonomous sense of virtue and vocation amongst public sector professions. Professionalism is about having pride in the quality of one’s work and having the confidence to be open to citizens’ challenge.
So we could see the leaders of public institutions held to account before annual assemblies. If we were bold, we could have public confirmation hearings for new public leaders. We could give local service users the power to challenge someone they think shouldn’t be in post.
It’d connect with the sensibilities of the British people; loyal to institutions that support us, but rebellious when people in power get ideas above their station.
We need to give local authorities more power over public spending, so they direct a greater proportion of public funds in response to democratically decided need. But we need to make sure councils don’t just become another out of touch bureaucracy on a small scale.
Their role should be to broker conversations between citizens and local institutions, weaving the different interests together in a place to create a single story about its future.
As a movement and as a government the criteria we use to judge whether to do something will be whether it brings people together; whether it will unlock the energy of people who want to care and work for the common good.
How do we build intermediary institutions that become the heart of their communities, where people meet, relate and create a common life.
That might mean shifting resources to fund public institutions which provide support in kind – free childcare, schools that become community centres, job-centres where people with skills volunteer to help nurture the talents of the unemployed.
Putting power in the hands of local citizens, users and workers means we need to take it away from the centre, reducing the scope of Whitehall to instruct and cajole.
Labour can only be a movement about association if it becomes the party of deregulation.
But we won’t deregulate to hand more power to the market. It’s about giving freedom to people to get together and work for the common good on their own terms, not compete. We should cut red tape to strengthen the power people have to hold institutions to account.
All this means a new style of national political leadership. It’s about telling a story about the destiny of our counties, towns and cities, then persuading citizens, and institutions to get involved.
There’s always tension and argument. Our politics needs to be more comfortable with disagreement than it is now. But, it must be driven by the faith that, if they are treated as dignified human beings, if they are giving a voice and real power, people can work together for the common good.
Politics is about the tension between hope and despair. Despair is made convincing by the utilitarianism of our political language. It leave little to live for.
Hope will come from our rediscovery of our sociability.
It will take a return to our rich traditions of volatile, inspirational cultures of non-conformity and creativity. Over centuries, English, Scots and Welsh radicals resisted efforts by the central state to mould society in its image. Our politics needs to take nourishment from that spirit.
We need a renewal of authority. But it can’t be based on the enlightened reason of a technocratic elite. It needs to be rooted in a new covenant between those in power and our vibrant, creative society. For Labour it is literally going to be a journey of self discovery- about what we have been and what we might be again.