Them and Us

As a Nation we still live with hangups from our feudal past. We carry over the attitude as of one subservient to his lord and master. No more so than in the workplace. We wait idle until instructed to do something, then do it to the barest limit of what was told, then wait for notice of task completed and further instructions. No initiative, no ownership just a drone working to direction. The escape excuse being, only carrying out orders, therefore not my fault, no blame can be apportioned and certainly no risk of being accused of using ones own mind. An attitude compounded and reinforced by our later day masters, our managers. As they adopt the imperious tone and attitude, brook no discussion as only they have the deities overview. Any comment from the minions can only be a ploy to sabotage and disrupt an otherwise good plan.

This was brought home to me several years ago when a German nephew was stationed here whilst a new line was brought into production. He was quite taken aback by the prevalent and hostile 'them and us' response from the English workers. So very different from the experiences he had in Germany where everyone, from manager, to Foreman, the shop steward, to tool setter, all took responsibility for sorting out a problem. All remained focused until a mutually agreed solution was found. No matter where the solution originated from, their only concern was that a solutions was found so this problem that impacted on the team was sorted. Sorted by the whole team, that included every single member of the team, none disassociating from it, until the problem was resolved. Maybe not always the fastest solution initially but paying dividends in the long run.

That is what we need now as a Nation. Finally putting aside this 'them and us'. This expectation that it is someone else's job to sort things out, arrange and put in place those expectations we have about daily life. No. This is where I think the 'Big Society' is getting it so wrong. It perpetuates this outmoded concept. The high flying intellectual is dependant on the skills of the craftsman to realise the concept as they both are on the finance man to underwrite the proposition and see it through to producing a profit. Each is interdependent on the other and it behoves neither to say this contribution is greater or more significant than an another. They all are. In my 'Small Society' we all have to shoulder the burden. Speak up and announce a need, discuss with others that need and the obstacles in obtaining it, take the initiative to suggest different tactics to achieve it, be proactive until a delivery path is found and finally to feed back appreciation for a job well done. To be actively part of the solution finding mechanisms not just a sideline identifier of a problem. Not just in the workplace but in all dealings with each other, wherever we are reliant on others to achieve our goals. So now over to you mate for your contribution.

Matrix Society

Once apon a time your community was where you were born, lived, worked and died in. It defined you and you were defined and known by it. Within the community, which had known defined limits as to who was within it and who was outside of it, there were smaller cliques. Cliques of churchgoers, the pub regulars, your school year mates and so on, many faceted loose cliques ebbing and flowing but within the all embracing sense of the known community. Of course there were exceptions people had to move about or married into new communities, but, by and large, these small discrete communities shaped the fabric of our Nation. It was the norm, there was no other model to comprehend, that was how life was and out of it emerged our civil structures of law and order.

Times have changed and very recently too. What was, is now no longer. We all are now members of multiple communities, loose communities with ill-defined boundaries and even more amorphous membership. We belong to so many discrete communities, where we live, where we work, where we spend our leisure, where we shop, where we receive education and so on. Each area of activity on the whole disconnected from any other, but of course, depending on the degree of geographical ranging, with lots of overlaps and possible interconnections. Loose memberships, drifting in and out without often without any conscious recognition by any. Not particularly bound by any loyalty to it and with little desire to make connections. Life is too busy to make meaningful contact with such a wide and diverse range of encounters with an expected short contact duration time.

This is the society that we now find ourselves living within. A matrix society with very wide but superficial connections. Yet our ideological model still assumes the tight-knit community of yesteryear when we talk about society and working together in community driven undertakings. The challenge that lays before us is to make sense of this matrix society, find ways that strengthen our membership of all the various communities we enter and work towards replacing a detached aloofness with instead a commitment and obligation. No easy task. What is sure is that we have to reestablish contact with ourselves, in all our different interconnections, if we are ever going to be able to resist this ever onward move to totalitarianism.

When enough is enough

This will be a bit of a ramble but stay with me as I think we will get to somewhere interesting. Some years ago I was a committed school governor. Then Thatcher brought in People Choice or whatever it was called. Suddenly school governors had a bag load full of obligations and responsibilities and even more than that the local area would expect to hold the governors to account for any consequences. The more I looked into it the more it struck me that the actual controls were all held upstream leaving the governors to manage the dirtyend and to be the front line for complaints. I gave up being a governor. We now have 'The Big Society'. Again this seems to a have a very familiar ring to it. Pass down to the lowest possible level, the dirty coal face of making things work and answering complaints about shortcomings, whilst leaving all the real controls at a much higher level. I could go on but that would be a distraction.

Putting the rosiest picture forward, our politician are not intellectual power houses nor consumed with a passion for a particular view of life. Just regular guys and girls. It could be chance that our new Prime Minister has read the past, learnt the lessons and is reapplying what worked. Possible but implausible. What I am getting here is an over-powering whiff of success management. My definition of success would be to be solely in control of the steering, the brake and the accelerator, to not get my hands dirty doing work and to be well off the line of fire when the spray shots of blame starts. Given that our politician are not those intellectual giants it is the civil service mandarins behind the scenes that actually run and set this countries agenda. Yes they have to work within the constraints of whatever is current political flavour but, I suspect, have long ago acquired the skills to find presentations which match political aspirations but still drive towards their own determined goal.

What I think I am sensing is a civil service that has decided to devolve power to the lowest possible levels whilst ensuring they retain a tight grip on real free decision taking. Why? We are moving towards a totalitarian society. What better confirmation than the images of citizens contained behind wire fences so as to not trouble their elected representatives, this is as cynical take on demcracy working by our leaders as you could wish for. You and I might argue the pace but the direction is irrefutable. When you view the populace as fraudster, cheats, skivers, shirkers, in all a shiftless bad lot, the only possible response is yet more control, more surveillance and more punishments. It trying to tie down and manage free spirit, it is an inescapable consequence, that government gets more and more complex, intrusive and finds it so hard to keep threads together. No wonder then that the mandarins are looking to simplify what they need to exercise that absolute control. We have a long game objective playing out here. Watch out in coming years for its manifestation in several different political disguises!

It is just another example of the glass half full or the glass half empty syndrome. If your starting premise is that citizens are liars and cheats you will readily find all the evidence to confirm it many times over. So justifying yet more control, surveillance and sanction. Sit firmly down on the can of worms. On the other hand of course if your starting premise is that citizens are proudly loyal, hard working, wanting opportunities to show and share their skills you end up with a different style of government. A style that sets out to enable, utilise and harness the energy and talent of the citizens to better themselves. For this view, only the lightest of hands is necessary and to a large extent it will self-discipline itself, leaving a minimalist government that mostly has to follow the will of its peoples. As against trying to suppress the will of the people to its objectives.

Yes of course we can all identify cheats and abusers amongst us but equally we can also identify the honest and self-sacrificing. You have to take a view, are we largely honest or largely cheats, half full or half empty? There is no doubt in my mind listening to the continual justification of measure after measure that relies on scare mongering about stopping cheats and fraudsters getting away with it, how our government see the issue!

Concomitant to the path to totalitarianism is an ever burgeoning bureaucracy that will eventually overwhelm and self-destruct. There are no cost savings down that road, the tools you need to manage grow ever larger and wider. What you save today you will spend double tomorrow. The proportion of government cost against the wealth of nation just rises and rises. We have too much government focused on the wrong end. We as a society need to sit back and rethink how we want go about governing ourselves, starting out with a much simpler model. There is of course a very entrenched and powerful voice that says you will never ever get to realise it.

Coloured bar none

It is census time again. Governments opportunity to pry into the habits of its citizens. Having benefited from access to census returns from the past I am there in spirit, if not in detail. What riles me, yet again the government asks its citizens to judge the colour of their skin. I found it offensive when the South African government ran their country on that basis and I find it as offensive that my government should ask me to judge my degree of drift from olive to well beyond doubt brown, or should I really consider myself black?

If they were sincere then they would issue a colour strips that you could place against your skin and compare your actual colour with the colour our government decries it to be. But of course you may have just returned from a sunny holiday all tanned out. So there would need to be a lightening factor strip to compare with depending on how many weeks since your return from a trip of more than four days from further south than Birmingham. What is wrong is that colour is so subjective and is totally foundered on a highly racial premise. Black people come from Africa, brown people come from Asia and so on into the more indefinables.

I cannot deny that I come from a mixed racial background. It is factual on the record for all to see and arrive at their own conclusion. That I come from a mixed background tells no one anything significant other than to raise racial expectations and prejudices. It enshrines racial stereotyping and that is why it is offensive. We are a mongrel nation and have absorbed peoples from all over the world for hundreds of years. They have mixed with us and strengthen our Nation.

The only test the government should be legitimately interested in is which of its citizens regard it as their mother country and which have bonds or allegiances with another country. Which citizens have the ambition to adopt and reflect the British culture as a way of life and which citizens look elsewhere for their models.
That is the only real test but so hard to arrive at through questions and answers. That is no excuse for going for the knee-jerk reaction and revert to offensive racial questions of skin colour. When comnpared to a sheet of white paper, how white, really white are you?

Advocates for advancement

Focus groups are the new must have assurance benchmark. Taken from a representative selection of economic, political, racial, sexual, or whatever background to accurately reflect our whole society. Their responses being the final arbiter on what is deemed acceptable. Trouble is the populace at large is conservative, looking within itself for reassurance of what might be agreeable. all very self-referential. A classic recipe for mediocrity, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, do nothing which stands out, adventurous or pushes out the established and comfortable boundaries.

There are two generalisations which my experiences have found to be true. That fifty five percent of the population will resist any change from what they are familiar with. It matters not how agreeable and beneficial the changes might turn out to be. Any change is to be resisted and grumbled over. The other thirty five percent of the population are willing to consider change and will weigh up the pros and cons for the effects on them. The last ten percent are the adventurous creative individuals who look out and beyond for new ideas and initiatives and have a personal energy to pursue and promote these distant aspirations. Secondly it takes about fifty years for a novel idea to permeate society, becoming a norm for the generations after the next, by which time, it is the acceptable norm for new change to be compared back to it.

If our society is to escape from this path to mediocrity, this dumbing down so only a small handful can find anything to complain about, to find a path to progress keeping abreast of technological developments, we are going to need a new class of leaders. We just cannot afford to wait for the masses to catch up before any new change is implemented. We need inspirational charismatic leaders but not just TV presentable smoothies with the glib sound bites that say next to nothing. We need what we had in the past, raw-edged, passionate, even verbose spokespersons but, most of all, with a vision for a future. A vision they can wrap up in words that resonate. Maybe not their own vision, may be a vision they have adopted but at least the expression of a vision of a new future. Able to offer words and images that will inspire and stir. A person able to lift the spirit to see a new attainable Eden. Not the rhetoric to be found surviving the cutting and dicing of the focus groups.

To shake off our feet of clay, the media we have now become reliant on, has to find the courage to seek out those visionaries that can see beyond to a future we may aspire too. Bold hopes. We need to be led and we need leaders able to see ahead with the stamina to get us there, overcoming all the doubting thomas's on the way.