Seeking transparency and social justice

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Phillip Blond, director of think-tank ResPublica, tells Alison Thomas why we need a more open approach to how we structure our society and why more government bureaucracy is the wrong way to go about it

Sometimes there is a sense that a tide is turning, a real shift in ideas – and not just because an election is looming.

Climate and environment campaigners have been challenging conventional notions of economic growth for years. Meanwhile critics of social policy have pointed to widening social inequality, despite a decade of extra money for public services. And the global financial crisis sparked a more general feeling that it may be time to do things differently, even though some politicians and not a few banks appear intent on getting back to business as usual as quickly as possible.

As the debate shifts, Phillip Blond has gone from teaching theology and philosophy to Cumbria University students to heading his own ResPublica think-tank. He has been described as an inspiration to David Cameron and the strand in the Conservative Party that campaigns on social justice, reflected in the title of his forthcoming book, Red Tory.

But he has also given a seminar to the Prime Minister's strategy unit, and some of his ideas have been picked up in ministerial speeches on mutualism and social ownership, and the Commission on Ownership announced by Tessa Jowell.

"I think there is a vacuum at the moment, consensus has collapsed and nobody is really that sure how to replace it," Blond says. "Inertia is one of the most powerful historical forces and most people just want to keep the status quo or what has already been, but I don't think we can do that. New ideas can have an incredible resonance and I hope that ResPublica will become a forum for the centre ground and a new British politics.

"It's true that every crisis is an opportunity. A crisis should cause you to think profoundly and differently and I hope we can do that as a country, because there are real structural problems."

Blond insists that ResPublica seeks cross-party support as part of a new centre ground putting forward ideas for a new economic and social settlement that "can play to the right, left and middle".

But he admits to being particularly impressed by Conservative notions of civic renewal.

"It's something I profoundly agree with. We need a new civic settlement to challenge the monopolies of the market and the state."

And though some of the social problems of an allegedly "broken" society are deep-rooted and spread a toxic legacy from one generation to the next, Blond argues that this does not mean they cannot be solved, or are even necessarily difficult to tackle.

"It's very difficult to tackle in the way we are tackling it – but not so difficult if you do something differently," he says. "I believe this is a broken society. We are not Afghanistan, but I think we are an eroded social culture. British people aren't particularly nice to each other, and we are not particularly nice to those below us. We need a new way of building human relationships, and creating new networks and new forms of social capital."

The answer, he suggests, is "to stop doing it from the state, from the top down".

But surely creating empowered communities delivering change from the grassroots up is easier in places with a bit of hope and dynamism than in a sink estate?

Blond replies that, despite doom and gloom headlines, very few estates are in a desperate state, and even they are not without hope.

"Even on the worst estates one of the groups that gives a damn and wants to operate differently is mothers trying to bring up children. Very few mothers, unless they are in real trouble, do anything other than try to do their best by their children, and they don't want to see them grow up in violent, dangerous, dysfunctional backgrounds.

"But they don't associate with other mothers, they don't have civic groups, there's no way for them to change their environment. So let them come together and start to take control of the budget to run that estate.

"Why don't they become the commissioners of policing and patrol the estate with the police – they will know who the dysfunctional and problem families are. By that I don't mean to give local control over the police, but some sense of commissioning authority or ownership."

Similarly, communities could take over responsibility for estate maintenance. "If they get control of their residents' budget and meet certain standards of transparency and structure, why not employ people on the estate, with appropriate training, to service that budget, so then they are on-site and they too have ownership of what's going on. You can build a whole network that more or less starts running its own estate."

It can be done almost anywhere, Blond insists. "I definitely think we can resurrect these areas. Just because you are poor doesn't mean you have to live like that, and giving poor people control over their environment is absolutely decisive for a future we would want to live in."

Transparency and trust are Blond's watchwords for the public and private sectors, arguing that excessive regulation imposes enormous costs and bureaucracy that gets in the way of what it is trying to achieve. Despite the banking crisis illustrating that some people will do whatever they can get away with, he says getting things out into the open is the best deterrent.

"It's to do with transparency – if you can reveal that behaviour nobody would ever deal with them again. If we can introduce trust mechanisms, the very thing regulation is trying to protect us against would get crowded out." Some of those trust mechanisms could be modelled on the ebay idea of rating people's trades online – service users could flag up how happy they were with the service they received, he suggests.

Instead of overbearing bureaucracy there would be regulation of last resort. "It's rather like criminal behaviour – think how much behaviour of all kinds we have, and what proportion of that is criminal. When do you call the police in? When you think something is seriously wrong. We don't need to police all behaviour – that's madness."

His aim is an economically secure society that "conserves and stabilises" human relations and is "oriented around participatory notions of the common good" that would be arrived at through democracy and the contest of ideas.

"What we have been living in is a sort of post-modern liberal hell really, a world that people claim isn't a common world, so they think they can behave in any way they want," Blond says. "But we do live in a shared world – although it is a contested one – and what we have to do is share and contest, and we can't be frightened of attempts to persuade us of different visions and outcomes, because that's what politics is.

"But unless we create a genuine culture and a society that has a specific shape we have no society at all. That, of course, should be an open and free society, but what we have actually produced is cultural, ethnic and class ghettoes."

We are now in a society "pluralising in ever- decreasing circles", he claims, where people are cutting themselves off from those unlike themselves. "We are producing a dis-associative society. The social sea has receded and we are all in rock pools of like species."

And while, as an Anglican theologian, his vision of the common good is informed by Christian values, he stresses: "The point is, I believe in an objective order, but I also believe in debate and differential takes or discernments of that objective order. And I think that's the grounds for truth and justice and goodness.

"If you don't have belief in an objective order you can't achieve truth, you can't achieve social justice. Social justice is impossible in a relative universe. So all those people who claim to believe in a good society have in some way to have an account of what that good is."