Category Archives: Politics, Policies And Process
British Summer Time Draws To A Close
The nights are drawing in, and the debate is beginning once more… Must we really turn our meagrely lit afternoons into even more gloom? Maintaining the extra hour of afternoon daylight year-long, over and above British Standard Time (BST), well compensates most people for even darker mornings, as reports by RoSPA amongst others have demonstrated. The net benefits to the economy, energy savings, health, safety and, for instance, for the leisure industry, would be many.
Already talk is turning to the dreaded day that The Clocks Go Back – this year, Sunday 29 October at 2 a.m, in the U.K.. What daylight we may have enjoyed at 4 p.m. on 28th October will now be our allocation for just 3 p.m. on Sunday 29th; and it will get a lot worse before it gets any better, in March next year, when British Summer Time returns.
Why can’t we just keep to British Summer Time (BST; confusingly the same initials as the 1968-71 trial British Standard Time)? British Summer Time is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus one hour. The evidence shows benefits on balance would be an improvement in our overall quality of life. It’s been tried, from 1968-71, and it worked. And that was before issues around energy saving etc were deemed critical as well.
Background information
The background to the current situation, and the cost-benefits for health, safety, environmental sustainability, the economy, leisure activities and much else have had a good airing on this weblog:
The Clocks Go Forward (But Why, Back Again)?
Time is Energy (and Daylight uses Less)
The debate will continue
This is not an issue which is going to go away, so perhaps The Time Has Come for the Big Debate on this? In our eco- and economy-driven age, we can no longer simply do things as fundamental as this in a given way just because it’s the status quo.
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)…..
Read the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
Cars, Motorists And Transport Strategies
The debate about whether there should be a toll on the M62 between Liverpool and Manchester must not be hijacked by the pro-car lobby. There are plenty of reasons to treat the idea of motorway charging cautiously, but fundamental questions around sustainabilty of both the environment and the local economy are the real issues which must be addressed, and soon.
Sometimes car drivers just don’t get it.
There’s a new proposal from the Northern Way people that the M62 between Liverpool and Manchester become a toll road. This is to control traffic flow because already there’s gridlock every morning and evening, and in a few years’ time the situation will become untenable.
Instant response
Within two days the usual voices are being raised in opposition to this idea: It’s a tax on motorists! Another government scam to make us all suffer!
Well, actually, it isn’t. It wasn’t the Government’s idea, and in fact quite a few official responses have been along the lines that this should not happen, rather then welcoming the proposal to impose charges. There’s a big debate going on, for instance, about whether traffic calming measures (c.f. the M25) might work, or whether an extra lane could be added at the critical points along the motorway.
And, of course, there’s legitimate concern, articulated by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce amongst others, about how putting an extra cost onto the only serious road route between Manchester and Liverpool would be damaging for trade and economic development.
The wider picture
All fair enough, and important considerations in their own right. But have we grasped the wider picture?
The suggestions now being put forward are based on the belief that the feared ultimate gridlock will occur in about fifteen years’ time; and the proposals are deliberately intended to reduce road traffic, despite the squeals of one or two car-driving letter writers in the Daily Post etc about how this is simply a tax on motorists which will do nothing to reduce traffic.
The reality is rather different: It seems we have about a decade maximum to get the balance right, and to work diligently on bringing together Liverpool’s and Manchester’s public transport systems, both the direct links and the ‘tributaries’.
Sustainability is the key
The debate should not be based on the usual car-owner cries of ‘unfair tax’, but rather about the significant issues which the Liverpool Chamber and others have raised, and about how these fit into a long-term strategy for sustainability in our economies and our environment.
If the Northern Way manages to get this discussion going, it will have done us all a favour.
Confident, Competent, Considered? Recruiting The Lay Board Member
Person specifications for ‘Lay’ Public Appointments often require Board candidates to demonstrate ‘confidence’. Increasingly I wonder whether this quality by itself enhances board members’ contribution to the common good. Any confident Lay person might have a clear line and stick to it; but does this benefit the public? Or is it an obstacle to diversity in selection, continuing business as usual?
Perhaps Lay board members, even after they have a competent grasp of ‘the facts’, serve the public interest better when they as people are ‘considered’, rather than just ‘confident’. Involvement in decision-making by Lay board members is about being there in the public interest, not initially about being sure of one’s opinions.
There are people in history who have demonstrated supreme but arrogantly misplaced confidence in themselves; and even now this applies to some of those with the most power. Perhaps that doesn’t matter – it may even be an asset – in the private sector, where the sole aim is often the pursuance of profit. Profit is rarely however the single objective in matters of public interest.
Determination is better
Confidence in my book is an over-rated characteristic. Give me rather a person who can get to the bottom of things and then find a sensible way forward. Someone with determination and an open mind, until the time comes to make that mind up, see things through and deliver.
Certainty is rarely the order of the day in matters which require complex resolution. Underlying principles and leadership, of course; deep conviction that one is always right, no.
Listening is a seriously under-rated skill. Skills in seeking out the factors which drive a situation, and then resolving and moving forward, are also not dramatic front-page stuff; but in our complicated, always evolving world, these are the skills which matter.
Challenging, not confrontational
Perhaps the conviction that confidence is needed for a Lay person on a board is because that’s easy for selectors to deal with.
You can ascertain quickly that someone appears confident.
Ensuring however that potential appointees will, politely but determinedly, seek always to understand where the Board is coming from is a different matter. Your Lay member doesn’t need to be especially confident to do this; s/he just needs to be focused on the job in hand, and to believe it matters enough to persevere and do the task well.
Resolution and progress
That’s a more complicated scenario for others to deal with. I’d suggest however that it’s also the basis for a genuine eventual meeting of minds – which is one hopes what the whole ‘public involvement in policy’ thing is about.
The real requirement of Lay board members must be that they have core and determination, guided by a real intent to deliver
the best. Whether this is exactly the same as being ‘confident’ is another matter, as of course a good Chair – and there are many – understands.
An obstacle to diversity?
Whisper it to the HR people who routinely demand ‘confidence’ in job specs; the considered approach is quite often adopted by competent women. But could this also be said about the super-confident approach? How many women believe they’d fulfil a formal requirement to be ‘confident’?
Given concerns about obstacles to diversity in recruitment, are we on to something here?
What do you think?
Elected Mayors, Democracy And The Regional Agenda
The campaign for a debate about elected Mayors promotes ideas of democratic involvement and public accountability. It is for these reasons, not as a short-hand way to achieve city-regions, that this campaign should be encouraged. Even if elected Mayors become the norm, towns and cities will still need major regional input if they are to be effective players within Britain.
It’s not reallly news that some major cities have problems pulling things together to achieve progress; and nor, to be frank, is it news that Liverpool often seems to be amongst that number.
This is why I believe people should support the campaign for a referendum on a Mayor for Liverpool. For the referendum to happen would require 5% of those elegible to vote in the city to support it… not many one may think, but actually quite a proportion to raise in Liverpool, the city with the lowest election turn-out in the country. In my view, almost anything which encourages people in places like Liverpool to think positively about voting is a good thing.
Elected Mayors as housekeepers
It doesn’t however follow that, because moves to consider elected mayors are supported, that wide-ranging powers for such persons should necessarily be the order of the day. Cities like Liverpool need a named ‘responsible person’, who can bang heads together to get things done, and who must be prepared to take the flack if things don’t work. This person could be seen as taking the role of housekeeper, ensuring that things happen as they should, and that, for instance, streets and parks are clean and safe, events occur to schedule and budget, bids and proposals are submitted on time and well prepared etc.
It would be important for an elected Mayor to have defined, and achieved a consensus on, for instance, what is his / her role, and what is that of the City Chief Executive / Directorates, and of elected Councillors.
Not city-regions
Nor should it be assumed that an elected Mayor would take the lead role in the mooted city-regions. There may well be a role for city-regions as sub-regions, but that debate is still emerging and it is not for me convincing. In the end an excessive emphasis on city-regions not only loses the ‘hinterland’ of any metropoils, but also ignores the reality of regional infrastructure.
No toen or city in the UK outside London is on its own large enough to plan major transport, business development, or scientific investment. The things can only properly be addressed at regional level; as indeed they are in most parts of Europe.
Accountability
City regions and their merits or otherwise are a different debate from the current discussion about elected Mayors. If there’s now a decent debate about elected Mayors, that will be a good start. Maybe it will strengthen interest in the democratic process. And if it also encourages the idea that those who claim to give the lead require support, but must also be prepared to account very openly for their performance, that will be an excellent bonus.
A New Public Realm For Liverpool’s Hope Street
Liverpool’s Hope Street Quarter has just been refurbished, with an exciting and imaginative scheme of new public realm work secured by genuinely ‘bottom-up’ community engagement and local stakeholder buy-in. But this is only a beginning, for what could be one of the most important arts and cultural quarters in Europe.
Seasonal Food – Who Knows About It?
Over the past century our connection with basic food production has largely been lost. But now there are urgent environmental as well as direct health reasons to ensure everyone understands how food is produced. People as consumers (in both senses) need to know about food miles, short produce supply chains, nutritional value and the annual cycle of food production through the changing seasons.
One obvious starting point for this crucial ‘sustainability’ message is schools; and another is allotments.
The way that people find out about food seems to vary from generation to generation. This wasn’t always the case. For millennia you ate what you could grow and, if you were lucky, also what you could swap of your surfeit for someone else’s surfeit.
Then came the developing trade routes, some ancient and exotic (the Silk Road, also a route for spices and much else) and others, far more mundane to our modern minds, such as Salters Lane, the mediaeval travellers’ way which appears in British towns and villages as widely spread as Hastings, Redditch, Tamworth, Chester and Stockton-on-Tees, along with other similar reminders of trade in by-gone eras.
Also within Europe, for instance, were the horrors of such deprivation as the Irish potato famine of 1845-9 and more recently, for some within living memory, informal and formal food rationing (the World Wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45) – a deprivation it is now often considered was more of the palate than of essential nutritional substance.
Different expectations, the same basic understanding
In all these cases, however, fabulous or tragic, ancient or contemporary, people understood something about the genesis of their food. It was either from plants or from animals, nurtured intentionally or garnered whence it appeared. If you wanted to eat, you had to engage in some way in the production or location of your meal.
This, it could be argued, is what is different in times past from how things are today. It can certainly be said that although people must still find their food somewhere, it tends to come pre-prepared, in labelled packets, frozen or perhaps in tins, but not self-evidently from plants and animals.
In much of the western or ‘first’ world the conscious link with what is rather romantically referred to as ‘the soil’ has quite largely been lost. Most people now expect to be able to eat anything they can afford and that they take a liking to, any time they choose.
The downside of choice
Nobody would disagree with the general idea that variety in our diets is a good thing. But in practice it doesn’t seem to be like 
that. Our food arrives on the shop shelves (the only place now where most of us hunt and gather) processed and packaged, and often laden with things we don’t need as well as those we think we want….
For every interesting flavour and texture there are frequently too many empty calories, too much refined sugar and the ‘wrong sort‘ of fats, if not always too few vitamins and minerals. (Contrary to popular belief, frozen and tinned food can, we are told, be as nutritious in these respects as the ‘real thing’. Indeed, given that frozen and tinned foods are usually very fresh when they are processed, they may well have more nutritional value than the produce lying ‘fresh’ in the market.)
And herein lies the rub. There is a confusion in perceptions between ‘fresh’ and ‘well-preserved’ foods, between ‘produce’ and ‘ready meals’. And most people have only the vaguest of ideas about the essential differences between, say, strawberries or carrots flown in ‘fresh’ from California or South Africa, and those grown in glasshouses close to the point where they are sold…. which in turn means we cannot fully appreciate concerns around ‘food miles‘, local / short supply chains or, to return to our original theme, nutritional value-for-money.
Close to the land, close to the retailer
At last some retailers (including some of the biggest) are beginning to acknowledge some of these issues. They boast that they have short supply chains, that their produce are prepared immediately after cropping, that they are willing to promote sustainable ‘seasonal’ products; and they even sometimes offer nutritious recipes to cook from basic (and less basic) ingredients which are fresh and wholesome.
Now it is up to everyone to make sure they understand what is meant by all this.
For not the first time in this debate, much of the answer has to lie in education, in encouraging children to nurture living things; in making sure children know that food does not grow on supermarket shelves, and that they understand how the seasons can be harnessed to ensure a supply a healthy and varied diet.
The other obvious approach is helping people, wherever they live, sustain their own communities, to visit farmers’ markets, and grow at least some of their own food, in allotments or by sharing back garden space, or even just in pots.
From little acorns do great oak trees grow, just as from modest ideas about strawberry pots or rows of peas and potatoes can the notion of seasonal food once again take its place in our understanding of a sustainable world.
Robyn Archer Departs Liverpool’s Culture Company
Robyn Archer’s resignation, announced today, as artistic director of Liverpool’s Culture Company leaves many questions about what the 2007 and 2008 celebrations are actually intended to achieve. Acknowledging this simple reality would help a great deal in making progress.
So the first question everyone’s asking is, Why? Why has Robyn Archer, after in reality such a brief sojourn in Liverpool, decided that Liverpool’s 2007 & 2008 events are not for her?
Only Ms Archer can answer that, of course, and she is unlikely to add much to her media statement that it’s for ‘personal reasons’. (Well, yes, but that could mean many things to many people.)
In the meantime, the question I would still really like to see a proper response to – and which I asked Robyn Archer directly on one of the very few occasions when I actually encountered her – is this:
By what criteria will we know that Liverpool’s 2007 and 2008 celebrations have been a success?
The fundamental question for Capital of Culture
There may well be more than one sensible response, but perhaps – who knows? – it was partly a lack of clarity in various quarters about this fundamental question which provoked the latest departure. (Some of us recall that the very first 2008 lead director also departed Liverpool, almost before he’d unpacked his bags.) Perhaps there are multiple possible answers – to renew and regenerate our city, to promote and celebrate communities, even, just maybe, to bolster ‘cultural’ activities as such – but no-one seems able to offer a definitive and widely agreed response.
Whether or not it bothered Robyn Archer, this question continues very much to worry me. There still seems to be a confusion in the minds of some local people about the difference between Excellence and Elitism, between the absolutely correct requirement that Liverpool’s cultural celebrations include as many local citizens from as many different communities as possible, and the frankly silly idea that anything which is, as they say, ‘artistically challenging’ is also somehow inappropriate in this city.
The real cultural challenge
How are we as citizens together to grow in our understanding of art, music, dance, drama, or anything else, if we are afraid to take it to people who haven’t encountered it much as yet?
Of course people should be offered and involved in artistic activities which engage them directly – ‘community education’ projects and so forth – but somehow we also have to encourage them to see that there is much more than that too.
The courage to offer leadership
At present, it feels as though those – and there certainly are several, on the Culture Company Board amongst other places – who are willing and able to promote the idea that we gain more from cultural experience when we permit it to challenge us – are being outnumbered by those who, to use the old metaphor, play to the gallery of small town politics.
The real issue is cultural and civic leadership. Liverpool will be a city fit for the 21st century when the local powers-that-be are ready to acknowledge not only how far we have already travelled, but also how much further there is to go before we can really call ourselves a Capital of Culture in the sense that most other European cities understand that term.
Then, perhaps, we won’t have to rely on the wonderful goodwill of just those seasoned artistic directors who show a commitment to Liverpool well beyond the call of professional duty. Only then will the lure of Liverpool to the international cultural community be irresistible.
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.
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.
Dreaming Realist 