Author Archives: Hilary
Politicians Must Do The Dialogue, Not Just The Drama
Motives for dialogue between people of hugely different perspectives may be complex, but the need maintain communication is reiterated across at least modern history. Politicians as disparate as Winston Churchill, Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton have all maintained this view at various times.
‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’, in U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill‘s famous line at an American White House luncheon in 1954, is consistently good advice.
Churchill, as is well acknowledged, was not averse to drama alongside dialogue – he actually won the 1953 Nobel Prize for literature for his ‘mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’. But he knew the talking was always at least as important as the posturing.
Consensus across the divides
It’s interesting to see this position reflected half a century or more later in the position of two modern American politicians who stand both apart from Churchill and from each other.
First, we had right-wing U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice visitng the U.K.’s then-Foreign Secretary, the centre left-wing Jack Straw in North West England, and proclaiming herself comfortable with the protests which greeted her at some events. “Oh, it’s OK, people have a right to protest and a right to make their views known,” she is reported to have said.
And then we learn that Senator Hillary Clinton has kind things to say about the ‘charm and charisma’ of President George Bush, the Republican who followed her Democrat husband into the White House. Senator Clinton said of the President that she had been “very grateful to him for his support for New York” after the attacks on September 11 2001. Though the two had had “many disagreements” he had been “very willing to talk”.
Mixed motives, but still sensible?
We can all of course guess that things are not really as proclaimed, when politicians of different hues profess a keeness for dialogue between themselves. Condoleeza Rice very probably wanted to make things a little easier for her host, Jack Straw. Hillary Clinton was, it is thought, attending to the need to ‘woo the right’ in her bid to secure the next Presidential election.
But mixed motives don’t necessarily make for bad action. Given a bottom line, almost every one of us would prefer that people keep talking, to the alternative. Better to keep the lines open, than to close them, wherever and whenever we can.
Love Parks Week!
This week sees the first Love Parks Week, each day with a theme to encourage everyone to think about their parks and green spaces. So how will this excellent idea be followed up in each town and city, and by whom? Here’s something really worth sustaining all year round!
This week, with the Summer Solstice, sees the first ever Love Parks Week. It’s been organised by Greenspace, the charity (formerly known as the Urban Parks Forum) dedicated to planning, maintaining and the use of parks.
One very good idea about the Love Parks Week event is that each day after Sunday 18th (the Launch, with a huge picnic in Manchester’s Platt Fields Park) to Sunday 25th has been allocated a different theme. Monday is Skills and education, Tuesday, Climate change, then follow Culture and community, Children and young people, Sport and recreation, Health and wellbeing and, finally on Sunday 25th, The nature of parks and green spaces.
An ambitious agenda
This is an ambitious and timely agenda. Many parks and open spaces across the country are involved (including Liverpool’s own Sefton Park, with Africa Oye, and Calderstones, with its International Tennis Tournament, as well as a Summer Solstice evening at our historic Otterspool Promenade and Park).
Perhaps an initiative like this will see more families enjoying our parks, come the Summer break. Making our parks more visible in this image-led age can only be a good thing for everyone.
So the next question has to be, how will Love Parks Week be followed up, and by whom, in each town and city? Here is an opportunity to promote the use and enjoyment of our essential green spaces for the whole year which should be grasped with both hands, not just by Greenspace but by all of us.
Magna Carta Day (15 June)
The Magna Carta story of 1215 is dramatic, with its dissenting Barons, overbearing Pope, double-dealing King and, finally, wise boy Monarch. Good really does win out in this one. So why not indeed have June 15, the actual date of the signing of the Charter, as a Bank Holiday to celebrate ‘Britishness’? Inviting everyone to remember how their liberty was first won – whilst also enjoying a ‘free’ day – could do a lot for democratic involvement in these apparently non-political times.
Today is Magna Carta Day. On June 15th 1215, the Magna Carta was signed by King John as a way of resolving a dispute between his Barons and himself.
I’m no historian, but I think we can all grasp the essentials of this occasion, why it was so momentous. For the first time ever (in English history at least?) a limit was put on the power of the King. At that time, when the authority of the Monarch was perceived as absolute and God-given, this must have seemed an outrageously daring, if not downright dangerous, thing to do. (What if God had objected?)
Indeed, the Pope (Innocent III) – who had actually also been in dispute with John about who could tell whom what to do – was deeply affronted by the idea of regal power being limited (except by the Pope himself as God’s representative on earth) and immediately ‘released’ John from his agreement with the Barons, saying that the deal was ‘shaming and demeaning’. This suited John very well, as he had had no intention of observing the agreement, especially as it had been forced upon him by the Barons – who, as relative moderates not wishing to embark on civil war, had taken London by force on June 10th in order to ensure that John had no option but to sign.
Clause 61
Like some public documents in our much more immediate past, the real devil was in the detail of particular clauses of the Magna Carta. One really big issue was Clause 61, in which the concept of distraint was for the first time applied to the King.
The ‘agreement’ was that if 25 Barons, having renewed their oath of fealty, later decided it was imperative to overrule the King, they could do so if necessary by force, seizing his castles and possessions if need be. Distraint was not a new idea, but applying it to the King certainly was!
Clause 39
Another Clause, 39, was also a breakthrough for the idea that the law stood above anyone’s individual authority, even the King’s. It required that No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
With rules like this, it was little wonder that John felt no compunction about renouncing the Magna Carta as soon as his Barons had left London. And thus commenced the First Barons’ War. But for once in those troubled times things worked out for the better. Just a year later John was unfortunate enough to die, on 18 October 1216, in the middle of his war, simply from dysentery.
Henry III takes over at age nine
Thus it came about that John’s son Henry was crowned King, aged just nine. The royalists believed correctly that Henry, still a child, would be a more acceptable as Monarch than had his father, and that the war would then cease.
Once Henry had been crowned a weakened version of the Magna Carta was re-issued by his regent, minus Clause 61 and some others; and in 1225, as soon as he came of age, Henry himself reissued it in a generally similar abbreviated form.
And finally, in another stroke of good fortune for those who followed, Henry was the longest-serving English Monarch of the Mediaeval period, so that by the time he died, in 1272, the Magna Carta had become firmly established in legal precedent.
A great story
Here is by any standards a dramatic tale – a staged challenge to the highest authority in the land, and indeed to that of the Pope himself; a kidnapping and enforced treaty; immediate reneging on the deal; and salvation through the crowning of a boy king, who in his adulthood shows himself to be fair and strategically wise in his judgement. All with a bit, but not by the standards of the day really an excess, of swashbuckling action and contest.
What more could any History, Politics or Civics teacher ask for?
A Bank Holiday on 15 June?
A recent survey showed that large numbers of people think we in Britain should have an extra Bank Holiday – and that the best day to have it would be Magna Carta Day, 15 June. This perhaps indicates a greater degree of political consciousness than some give us all credit for, and it would, it has been suggested, provide us an excellent opportunity to celebrate ‘Britishness’.
That date’s pretty close to our last Bank Holiday, at the end of May (and it still leaves a yawning gap in the grim stretch between September and Christmas), but this suggestion has a point. The story of King John the Bad, the Good Barons and the Wise Boy Monarch is stirring stuff, and if it could capture the imagination of British citizens of all ages and beliefs, that’s a big plus.
The more we can celebrate sound politics, democracy and fairness as the overt hallmarks of our nation, the better.
Defra Is Five – And Has A Special Blog
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been going now for full five years, and it’s showing an impressively modern approach to public engagement, with its very own personal Blog, inviting public involvement, by the new Defra Secretary of State, David Miliband.
I was really pleased when, a few months ago, I heard that I was to be appointed Lay Member of the Defra Science Advisory Council , which is the scientific advisory body to Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
I can’t think of much which is more important than trying to get environment and food right. I have a lot to learn as yet about the inner-workings of a large Government Department, but I certainly found my first meeting, in April, quite fascinating. Here is a group of people, the actual Members of SAC and the secretariat and advisers within Defra itself who have hugely impressive credentials and take environment and all that goes with it very seriously indeed.
New Secretary of State, new Blog
Defra is quite a new Department, with an even newer Secretary of State, David Miliband, who was appointed just five weeks ago. The Department came into being on 8 May 2001, very soon after the 2001 General Election, in response to a recognised need to bring together various aspects of what is now its remit. That makes it five years old today.
So Defra may be just a youngster, but it’s a youngster with admirable attitude: the new Secretary of State has begun his very own Blog, under strict non-partisan rules, which is his attempt to reach out to more people and to encourage them to engage in the issues around environment and government.
David Miliband’s blog is being evaluated by the independent parliamentary body, The Hansard Society, to see how his attempt to ‘reach out’ is working. I very much hope that well before Defra is ten all Government Departments will have been following the Defra Secretary of State’s example for some time.
Sustainability: Where Private And Public Interests Meet
Sustainability is a huge challenge. Solutions won’t come cheap, but come they must. The imperative for meeting the huge challenge of global warming is now recognised by people across the economic and political spectrum, from Al Gore to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Sometimes there is a commonality of interest between sectors of the economy which is probably larger than the differences. The active involvement of no less a person than former US Vice President Al Gore at the 2006 Cannes film festival suggests that one place where this commonality now applies is sustainability. An Inconvenient Truth in some ways says it all.
It seems now everyone is agreed that sustainability is The Issue, and that Something Must Be Done. From the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to the various ‘Green’ not-for-profits, via vast organisations such as the National Health Service (NHS), there is a determination to address the issues – or at least some of them.
Same problem, different perspectives
There’s certainly no denying that the issue is pressing. Politicians of all the major parties have been keen to present their green credentials, and they even sometimes offer similar ‘solutions’; and the same applies across the private – public sectos of the economy. Everyone knows they must conserve energy, look for more sustainable ways to travel, reduce manufacturing and distribution transport requirements, save water and the like.
But there’s another way too in which these problems are often shared. To paraphrase a poltician who was recently challenged about his local authoritiy’s poor record on sustainabilty, that’s OK as long as no-one has to put up the rates or local taxes. Just as it does for commercial business people, increased expenditure frightens the politicos.
Where business meets politics
So here’s the crux of the matter. We know we need to change, as even some politicians such as Arnold Schwarzenegger who are far to the right the politics of Al Gore acknowledge, but for some the change may happen only if there are few or no costs involved. The temptation to ignore the longer term is sometimes great. It won’t be the same people in charge then; it will be someone else’s problem.
But we also all know in our hearts that’s balony. Sustainability and environmental challenges are increasing by the day. Tomorrow will be here all too soon.
And that’s where business comes in. Large amounts of money will accrue to anyone who can crack these enormous challenges in commercially and / or publicly ‘acceptable’ ways, so there’s a great deal of interest now in energy futures and sustainabilty. The nuclear energy debate continues, but there’s gold in them there tidal waves, wind turbines, biomasses and all the rest, if they can be exploited quickly enough.
Sometimes Adam Smith’s invisible hand is hovering right where it needs to be, ready to guide the market as soon as the political and public climate makes this possible. Sustainability is an issue bigger than any special interest or perspective.
Early Intervention In The Early Years
Critics of Sure Start, the U.K. government’s early years programme, have been vocal of late. Yes, there is evidence that benefit has not always as yet reached those small children and families who need it most. But this is work in progress, and it must be continued.
Sure Start, the huge government-led programme for 0 – 4 year olds, has been subject to quite a lot of criticism of late. It’s understandable that senior polticians, the Prime Minister himself amongst them, should want to see progress before the next general election. The problem however is that small children don’t become achieving teenagers in the same time-span.
This was never going to be easy. Sure Start is at present specifically focused on the least advantaged families, where take-up, especially for those parents who find themselves most challenged, is variable. But it’s essential that those with the governmental cheque book hold their nerve.
Evidence that it works
One thing which stands out in the Sure Start programme is its emphasis on activities such as reading aloud for parents (and that includes fathers) and children to share. There is a dedicated theme in all this about bedtime stories, and indeed about just simple conversation between little ones and their carers. This is a difficult activity to measure with any degree of accuracy, but we know from longitudinal studies that, over years rather than just months, it works.
Sure Start is not the first programme of this sort. There’s plenty of evidence from previous programmes here and in the U.S.A. that early intervention is really beneficial for those who become involved. But we’re still learning how to reach the least advantaged and those who feel most marginalised.
Adapt, perhaps; abandon? No
Workers in Sure Start have had to find the way forward for themselves. Inevitably in such a situation some have had more success than others – not least because some local contexts provide greater challenges or fewer already established resources than do areas elsewhere.
The move towards Children’s Centres, whilst unsettling for many of the professionals concerned, is if handled sensitively probably the right way to go. It would be a tragedy if critics determinedly take a short-term view which makes it difficult for the Government to continue with this work.
Dismissing the idea behind the initiative would result in damage to the futures of many thousands of children who deserve the better start in life.
Downtown Liverpool Week
Downtown Week (11-18 June 2006) is unique in the U.K. to Liverpool. Perhaps it’s a sign of a new independence of mind in our citizens that people in the city are developing this entrepreneurial event for themselves, and not because of some outside or official imperative?
‘Downtown’ is, in the words of the organisers of Liverpool’s Downtown Week 2006, ‘the beating heart of our great city, a celebration of the culture, the creativeity, the business, the new downtown living renaissance; indeed all the activities that are bringing our downtown back to life…. and, what’s more, it’s unique to Liverpool! There’s only one downtown in the UK and it’s at the heart our great metropolis!’
With enthusiasm like that, how could I deny myself the opportunity to be a part of this imaginative enterprise?
We all know about the entrepreneurial drive which moves some of the great downtown cities of the USA; here’s one Stateside bug which I really don’t mind reaching British shores.
Enthusiasm begets energy; energy begets engagement
There is a fundamental truth in the claims of downtowners:- there’s much more going on than we can ever know, but it’s both essential and fun to explore and find out as much as we possibly can. It’s a lesson also being learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, by other communities in other places.
This rich diversity, the result of centuries of ebb and flow, of enterprise and migration, is both a challenge and an enormous opportunity. It’s what Downtown Week is really about.
Scheduled events for Downtown Week include guided walks, visits to special places, commercial and retail opportunities, cultural events and whatever more various people can come up with. In the end, however, what we’re being offered is a chance to open our eyes and see what’s right before us.
Social glue
As ever, it boils down to finding ways to get people to communicate and, from that, to collaborate to mutually beneficial ends. It’s an engaging and enterprising technique which many of us find valuable (c.f. Arts Based Community Development), not least because it encourages people to explore areas of possible mutual interest.
Perhaps the point is that we need Downtown Week (and other civic and cultural celebrations) precisely because otherwise, in the concrete jungle, it’s difficult to find occasions to share and jointly to develop the sorts of relationships which make life better for everyone. This is recognised in one way or another by, amongst others, the Civic Trust and my own organisation, HOPES: The Hope Street Association.
A commonality of meaning
The old-style village way of life most surely had its shortcomings, but it also had established cycles of events with meanings common to all. It is perhaps a sign of a maturing metropolis that, after many years of invisibility, Downtown is now once more coming to the fore through community programmes and celebrations.
There’s so much still to be done, but at last there are signs it’s understood people have to do it for themselves.
Liverpool’s Downtown Week is still in its infancy. Before long however the infant will be a teenager and, like all teenagers, will doubtless seek to spread its wings elsewhere. As other parts of the UK also take up the idea of celebrating the heart of their civic communities, just remember where you heard about it first – from the real thing, the cutting edge of Liverpool’s city centre, from people who actually live, work and play in Downtown Liverpool.
Menage A Trois With A Violin
Musicians and their instruments often have a very particular relationship, almost ‘human’ in some respects. Here is an example of a three-way arrangement which offers even those on the side-line, in this case the notoriously long-suffering ‘orchestra wife’, something uniquely special and positive.
The Strad dropped through our post box this morning, arriving on cue for our monthly up-date of All Things Violinistic (or, as they say of themselves, as the ‘voice of the string music world since 1890’).
The magazine (journal?) carried the usual range of articles about performing styles, who’s the newest arrival on the block, current techniques for making instruments, the latest string recordings, and, in amongst the other inserts, a special poster of the exact dimensions of the Antonio Stradivari violin of 1721, the ‘Kruse’. Hardly the stuff of general reading, this, but that kind of specialist detail has been the backdrop to my life for the past four decades or so. In other words, I’m married to a professional violinist.
Three’s not always a crowd
There are no Stradivaris in our house, but there is a violin which has served very well for many years. It took some eighteen months to find – it had to ‘speak’ orchestrally and as a chamber instrument, whilst remaining within the stratosphere price-wise – and it caused us penury, but it’s been a very constant companion.
Here is an almost ageless piece of ‘equipment’, already over a century old, which carries without doubt a fascinating history. (Anyone who saw the film The Red Violin, with such an impressively reflective performance by Joshua Bell of
John Corigliano’s score, will want to know more… but we’ve been acquainted with this instrument – oddly, also red – only since the era of that very different cultural phenomenon, the age of Flower Power.)
A voice with a mind of its own
I’ve lost count of the number of violins which come and go in this household – tiny (‘quarter’ and ‘half’) ones for little beginner student violinists, tough relatively modern Mittenwald instruments for open air use, intriguing painted ones for amusement, most recently a genuine rock electric model – but ‘the’ violin remains aloof from these passing visitors, a trusted and constant companion to its owner, to his partner musicians and indeed to me.
This violin met its match in a beautiful bow, and it stays here, 
serenely assured of its incumbency. It has seen joy and sadness, comings together and partings, sickness and health. It has travelled the world and explored the local neighbourhoods.
A welcome guest
Often, I suspect, this instrument tells its owner more about inner thoughts and feelings than could any words.
In a very different way, the film Un Coeur en Hiver, with its haunting music from Ravel’s Piano Trio, also explored the enigmas of this violinistic inner voice. For me too, though much more happily, our musical domestic ‘trio’ has offered a partnership which crosses from what can be articulated in normal ways to what cannot.
Inevitably, there are times when the violin takes first call – though I doubt any real examples of the stereotypically self-denying ‘orchestra wife’ now exist, not least because so many current players are women (and in any case, what orchestral salary supports a whole family?). When the music plays I go about my business contentedly alone, taking the distant musical role simply of involuntary audience whilst I work.
But to know so well the relationship between an instrument, a player and that person’s music – to have heard almost as though performing them wonderful works such as the Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings – is a gift well beyond any singular demands of this particular menage a trois.
The ‘Thank You’ Officer
Local communities need people who are engaged and involved – and if possible, even happy. Thanking people regularly for what they do would be a good start here….. and it might even fit the government’s intended move to ‘Double Devolution’.
There’s been a lot in the media of late about how happy or otherwise people are. The gist often seems to be that although our wealth and standards of living are hugely better than they were, people are no happier than before.
I once read that one of the Scandinavian countries decided to do away with ‘targets’ for public services; they just set the objective of increasing ‘customer’ satisfaction by a certain percentage each year – and it worked.
This set me wondering whether the same sort of principle might be employed to increase community engagement.
‘Thank yous’ denote recognition
Perhaps every town should have a Thank You Officer – someone whose job or allocated task it is to find out about the good and helpful things which individuals and groups in the community have done, and who would then arrange for them to be thanked publicly. (There are of course already various formal awards systems etc; but this would be an on-going and integral part of the civic life of the community, not something you have to wait months in silence to be ‘awarded’.)
This strategy might have three positive upshots. Firstly, the people who did the ‘good deed’ would feel appreciated, and perhaps even want to do more of the same.
Secondlly, public recognition offers positive role models and might encourage others also to make additional community input.
And thirdly, it would assist the powers-that-be and the strategists in perceiving the difference which local people (at all levels) can make in their own and their neighbours’ communities. This, as has been commented before, is not always apparent to those whose job is to deliver policy.
Double Devolution
Perhaps encouragement to acknowledge what is contributed to a community would help the policy makers understand what matters to people in that community, and to see where simple support, not official ‘direction’ or formal strategy, can be the order of the day.
Not everything needs to be led from on high; and sometimes (though not always) local people have a better grasp of what needs doing next than anyone else. It’s all a matter of combining local understanding with that essential wider vision – so why not start by appreciating much more those on the ground who seem keen to think-on about their communities? They’re the folk who, with support, can make it happen.
This could be the start of a really genuine Double Devolution of power, at the points where it matters.
The ideal job?
Is Thank You Officer the ideal task or job? And would it repay the costs pretty quickly?
Only time would tell. There would be snags in this idea, as there are in all other ideas, but saying Thank You is something which might increase both engagement, and also satisfaction, across the board.
A Taxonomy Of Enterprise For Growth Theory?
The knowledge economy is a huge area, with impact at every level from the micro to the massively macro. Yet there is still much debate, influenced by celebrated economists such as Robert Solow and Paul Romer, about whether technological progress produces economic growth, or vice versa. One commentator, David Warsh, has recently suggested that this debate currently throws only limited light on economists’ understanding of how economies make progress. Perhaps nonetheless there are interesting questions which arise here in terms, particularly, of the impact of ‘invention’ and ideas in, say, social enterprise environments?
If technological progress dictates economic growth, asks The Economist, (‘Economic focus: the growth of growth theory‘, 20 May 2006, p.96), what kind of economics governs technological advance?
The Economist article and blog praises David Warsh‘s new book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, and his analysis of the shifting understanding of the genesis and impact of technological advance.
‘Ideas as goods’
In his book Warsh examines Nobel prize winner Robert Solow‘s supposed notion that ideas are bound to end up in diminishing returns (they are ‘exogenous’ to economic growth theory), and contrasts it with the proposition of Stanford University’s Professor Paul Romer, that ideas are endogenous to growth theory – that they can be part of it.
In this analysis there are as I understand it three main principles:
1. ideas are ‘non-rival’ – i.e. they can be used by as many people as care to, at the same time;
2. ideas are expensive to produce, but almost without cost to reproduce;
3. nonetheless, the business of reproducing ideas does not usually give much in respect of financial returns, because ideas, being ‘free’ to reproduce, end up having very little economic value.
But goods in what market?
From these three premises it is easy to see that ideas have to be ‘protected’ if they are to have ‘value’ in normal business markets. In other words, they have to be copyrighted; and at the same time obviously other people have to be educated to a level where they can usefully employ these ideas, once they have ‘bought’ them.
But does this apply to all types of ‘market’? I’ve been musing for a while on the idea that enterprise can be taxonomised in ways which make differentiation of impact (on ideas, people, systems) quite interesting. The normal ‘for profit’ economy behaves in one way, the ‘ideas generator’ ‘academic’ economy sometimes behaves rather differently, and the ‘social’ or ‘not-for-profit’ economy probably behaves in a different way again.
All these responses make sense to the ‘actors’ involved. Commercial business people aim very clearly at protecting their ideas in the knowledge economy; but academics and social entrepreneurs currently often promote their ideas without much reference to the ‘business’ value of the ‘invention’ because they are more concerned, respectively, with their status or with general social outcomes, than they are with how fast the actual money flows in their particular direction.
Shifting bases of ideas production?
Over time, things may change of course. The same edition of The Economist which carries the Growth Theory article also has a piece on shifts in the understanding of American academics concerning intellectual and real estate property values. Likewise, the economics of social enterprise is still in its infancy.
Maybe economics at the ‘small’ level – the level of academic and social-enterprise activity – is like the physics of particles… ‘nano’ behaviour is different from larger-scale activity in its impact.
Whatever (and here I’m trying to articulate something which others will understand much better than I), it’s likely that over time the behaviour of those who produce academic and / or ‘social-technical’ ideas in the new knowledge economies will change. The question is, how and when?
The impact of benefit from ideas
Who will ‘profit’ from these changes? And, in the end, could the impact of freely shared ideas be felt even on the global scale, if the sharing extended to developing economies as well as those where the knowledge economy already has huge impact?
Will the growing realisation that all ideas have economic value in some sense lead to attempts to ‘protect’ social-technical invention as well as as the ‘normal business’ sort? Or will there be a continued wish to leave the way open for sharing and mutual development – just as, for instance, Tim Berners-Lee chose to do, when he created the world-wide web?
Dreaming Realist 