The political backdrop

I realised recently that political theatre has changed quite substantially in the last decade in the UK. When I think back to 1997, the background to the Blair campaign was all about big crowds waving flags and placards and cheering and clapping. I think it was borrowed from the US with those huge party conventions with booming “The Next President of the United States” introductions and balloons falling from the ceiling.

But today that’s gone. The backdrop for the emerging UK political generation is their own front room. Cameron doesn’t do big speeches — he speaks to a webcam. The only place he can have a cheering backdrop is at Tory party conference and they’ve changed the format of that away from a set piece speech for the leader. Also — historically at least — the party hasn’t really attracted the cheering type.

I guess it might be a practical. It’s hard to find enough supporters to make a convincing crowd in an age where political party membership is low and party funding is too tight to manufacture those kind of opportunities. Peter Hitchens said this morning on Start the Week that he thought the two political parties would disappear — something I wrote about a while back with Tom. It still wouldn’t surprise me to see one of the main parties go into receivership.

But I also wondered whether the shift of image is deliberate. Maybe the Tories have made a calculation that people have less trust for the kind of politician who needs a cheering crowd. It would make some sense of Peter Mandelson’s comments over the weekend that imply Labour should skip a generation. Love him or loathe him, his ability to spot political currents ahead of time is probably unrivaled. He well knows that the style of the next generation of Milibands, Balls, Coopers and Lamys is a much more laid back, low-key politics rather than the fist clenched, booming Brown.

Puzzles and Mysteries

The Enron story seems to be everywhere at the moment. The movie was on the TV the other night, the papers all have bits about the sentencing of various lesser players and Malcolm Gladwell has written a piece for the New Yorker which he describes on his blog as a ‘semi-defense’ of the company. His basic argument is that the investment and business journalism communities were just as much to blame because they didn’t spot what was going on.

The piece isn’t purely about Enron though. He describes information problems as either ‘puzzles’ or ‘mysteries’ and gives a number of other examples of approaches to solving them, including how to find Osama Bin Laden and how the Allies worked out that the Nazis were developing the V1 bomb during WWII.

It made me think back to The Long Game which I helped write along with Paul Skidmore and Jake Chapman. Jake is a professor of systems theory and he encouraged Paul and me to think of regulation as a complex problem rather than a complicated one.

A complicated problem is one where if you understand the constituent parts you can make an assessment of what’s going wrong. A complex problem is one where you can’t; you need to look at the way that the parts are interacting and even then it will be difficult. In the pamphlet we called complicated problems ‘difficulties’ and complex ones ‘messes’.

Regulators are part of the systems that they are trying to regulate and don’t have the level of perfect control that they (and other actors) sometimes try to portray. This is one of the reasons you often get unintended consequences of regulation and why almost all policy dilemmas are messes rather than difficulties.

Commuter humour

Lovely quip from Sandi Toksvig on the News Quiz:

“You’d think with a Government as right wing as ours, at least the trains would run on time.”

Brown’s green bit

Ok, so the Pre Budget Report was a bit boring. Generally a steady as she goes kind of speech. But there was a sneaky commitment in there which seems better than most commentators have given Brown credit for.

He said that the Government would make all newly built homes carbon neutral by 2016. Now only 0.8 per cent of the houses in the UK are built each year, but my calculation that means that by 2050 this single little announcement will mean that 31 per cent of the UK housing stock will be completely climate neutral. That’s not bad when you consider it doesn’t include anything we do to improve the existing housing stock too.

The Good Society

Compass is a name that is cropping up more and more in the newspapers and on TV news. It’s a pressure group set up by Neal Lawson to try and influence the Labour party’s policy direction after Tony Blair leaves the helm. I’ve been involved a little bit and was a member of their Good Society working group, which has published its report as a short book today. It’s an interesting read and will certainly get people thinking.

Hetan and Jonathan who co-ordinated the process and wrote the final report have a piece in the Guardian today.

Neal’s blog on the way to a book is also well worth a read.

Would you trust Team 32?

The Department is the finest thing on radio for quite some time. Every show in this series has been brilliant but this week’s installment about what to do with science and technology was a particular gem.

“You can be pretty sure that a few seconds before the world ends, a scientist somewhere will have uttered the word ‘oops’.” is one lovely line. You can tell these things are catching on when the real Radio 4 presenters join in — this time it’s Cornelius Lysaght from Today.

I swear working with Demos sometimes had similarities to team 32.

Only in London

Now I’m not normally one to name drop (ok, I am), but I went to watch a movie with John Prescott last night. I certainly didn’t mean to, but while I was waiting outside the cinema for my friend Charlie to arrive, a dark green Jaguar pulled up, and a big guy wearing an earpiece jumped out to open the back door for his passenger. After a quick double-take I realised the guy getting out was the deputy prime minister.

At first I thought he must be going somewhere else, but no, he strode into the foyer, bought himself a ticket (and two for his bodyguards) and went downstairs. At this stage I didn’t know which film he was going to see but then I walked past him in the queue for snacks and he was on his mobile phone telling someone that ‘I’m going to see a film about Enron’. Which was funny because that was the film I was going to see, and sure enough, a few minutes after I took my seat, in walked John and sat a few seats along from me on the same row. His bodyguards installed themselves in the row behind.

Enron: the smartest guys in the room, by the way, is excellent. One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Ok, I am slightly obsessed by studies of organisational culture but as a story of how a bunch of guys became the seventh biggest company in the US in the space of 15 years it’s brilliant. They did it by essentially puffing up their own worth and intelligence and pulling the wool over the eyes of regulators, investors and in some cases their own staff, although you never quite know how much the place was really run by the groupthink of the traders.

The best thing about the movie is the depth it goes into over the character studies of the main players — Jeffrey Skilling and the mysterious Lou Pai, CEO of Enron Energy Services, stick in my mind.

I couldn’t help wondering what John was making of it all — or whether he had met any of these people. After all he’s been in Government since 1997 (four years before Enron collapsed) and it’s not unheard of for him to meet up with American businessmen.

I think it was about half way through the film that I realised Tony Blair was now on holiday and that the guy sitting a few seats to my right with a bucket of popcorn on his lap was running the country.

I’m still not sure what I think about that.

Bentley on Blair

Last Friday was Tom Bentley’s last day in the office at Demos. After seven years as Director (and three as my boss), he’s off to Melbourne, Australia to take up a job as adviser to the Premier there.

By the looks of this article in the Sunday Times, I don’t think he’s afraid to burn a few bridges with the Blair camp. Have to say I pretty much agree with the analysis: a bit done, a lot of opportunities missed and not much scope for doing anything else until the next generation come along.

I’ll miss Tom a lot, he’s taught me a vast amount, but apparently they have email in Australia too 😉