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Cruelty and neglect in the state sector wilderness
Since Tony Blair is paying a visit to Britain, we might have hoped for something statesmanlike from him about the plight of our public services. After all, if he is bringing peace from Londonderry to the Ivory Coast and healing the scar of Africa, as he promised at the Labour party conference, sorting out the public services of a small island like ours shouldn't present too much of a problem or take up too much of his valuable time. But how disappointing his visit has been. His speech on Friday about public services was completely eclipsed by his own undignified posturings about poor 94-year-old Rose Addis and the National Health Service.
He actually had the effrontery to tell the cabinet that he was fed up with "individual cases" being used "to run down health service staff". Everything about the government's response to Mrs Addis's treatment has been hypocritical or dishonest, but this comment was almost the worst. For who has exploited the politics of the personal, and of personal publicity, more than feely-touchy Tony himself? It's true that to use one personal, heartrending case to make a political point is to exploit people's emotions at the expense of any real understanding. But that is what our prime minister does ceaselessly. He exploits his own emotions and allows his eyes to fill and his lip to tremble - he even had his wife filmed weeping at a refugee camp in Bosnia - whenever there might be something in it for him and his popularity ratings.
In so doing Blair has made much more overwhelming and much more insidious the growing political culture of the personal and the sentimental. Now he is shameless enough to complain when the other side has a go at the same thing. The Conservatives don't seem to be very good at it - or not yet anyway; Conservative traditions are against it. But the truth is that it has been almost impossible to blow the whistle on the disgraceful failings of the NHS without going public about particular people. It was only when Professor Lord Winston, the fertility expert and Labour peer, spoke out in public about the dreadful NHS treatment of his elderly mother that it suddenly became acceptable to admit - and became necessary for the government to admit - that the sacred NHS was not what it should be, to put it mildly.
Politicians and functionaries can claim what they like about complaints procedures: the fact is that there are many NHS patients and their families who feel quite desperate - wretched about their treatment and furious about the lack of redress, the lack of a hearing. I have received hundreds of letters from readers describing experiences far worse than those of Mrs Addis. My own mother had a similar but much worse time in a West Country hospital. To speak out publicly is not primarily to run down health service staff (although some need running down); it is to demand change in the only way that new Labour politicians understand: through the power of the personal and the power of publicity.
It is a pity that all this aggressive Labour bullying about Mrs Addis overshadowed any real discussion of the future of public services. It is deeply frustrating; there is hardly anything more important. In fact, there was a long debate in the Commons on Tuesday about the subject (pitifully attended, of course) and there was Blair's address on Friday, and some of all that was mildly constructive. But nobody mentioned what seems to me one of the greatest obstacles in the way of public services reform, and that is the public services mindset.
Of course, it is rather awkward for a Labour government to criticise the public services culture because so many of its voters are state sector workers. But often what is unacceptable to say is precisely what should be said. The state sector mindset is one of bureaucracy, waste, lack of personal accountability and, above all, of misguided priorities. It is innocently uncommercial and ignorantly anti-profit. Public-spirited public servants struggle valiantly within this culture to achieve far less than they could and should. More money and different structures will not be enough. There can be no structural reform without a radical change of mentality.
I came to feel this after working for a few years as a trustee in the field of disability. As everyone knows, there doesn't seem to be nearly enough money to give people with disabilities the help that they genuinely need. There is endless waffle in the state sector about "best value" and "best practice", and third-rate management speak has taken over in the name of efficiency, but the truth is that enormous amounts of time and money are frittered away on things that are secondary and probably unnecessary. Then the primary needs go unmet and the cry goes up for yet more "investment".
The examples are legion. The Guardian newspaper, for instance, is the place to look for state and voluntary sector job advertisements; in one particularly heavy supplement not long ago it printed more than 1,000. Not all were inessential, but many were, and some, if not absolutely silly, should not have been even considered by managers with any real sense of priority. There was, all too predictably, a post for a part-time lesbian advocate caseworker. There were several for an "income maximisation welfare rights adviser" in Newham and (contrariwise) one for a "benefits overpayment team leader" in Tower Hamlets, both being in east London. Then there was an opening for a "cafe drop-in co-ordinator" for young black and Asian people in Manchester, because, apparently, they are "under-represented in the take-up of building-based services".
Most absurd was the NHS post in Birmingham for a "health promotion specialist: Irish communities" to "improve understanding of HIV, sexual health, sexuality and drug-related issues among agencies and organisations working with Irish people in Birmingham". You have in all these a snapshot of the mindset that I mean - its preposterous obsession with sex, racism, sexism, heterosexism and multiculturalism and its general reduplication of effort, which (ludicrously) is deeply racist, sexist and institutionally divisive in itself. Why do the Irish need special advice about sex? What is peculiar about lesbian advocacy? How many state-funded organisations are there in Birmingham chatting to each other at centrally heated talk fests about the Irish way of sex, when it is cold for those outside who are in real need?
The origins of this wasteful nonsense lie, I believe, in training. I have come to suspect that the training of public servants unfits them for public service. All too often it is based not on personal service but on covert, old-fashioned socialist ideas about social engineering; it is these that drive priorities, not service or need - or so I suspect. Some of the training material is astonishing. Much of its jargon is incomprehensible, so it is often difficult to appreciate what underlies it, but it remains unmistakably politicised.
I challenge the government, and particularly the opposition, to look at the training of teachers, social workers, nurses and all those who serve people. And, given the prime minister's constant absences abroad on more important matters, I hope to come back to the subject again myself.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 27, 2002 | Comments (0)
We've debunked authority so long, there isn't any left
The rich are different from you and me, said F Scott Fitzgerald. Not so. The rich are exactly the same as the rest of us, only more so. That goes for the royal family too.
Poor Prince Harry is just like any other Sloane teenager, but on a higher level. And while most Sloane teenagers don't have their own personal club and bar at home like Prince Harry, most Sloanes smoke dope. So do most humbler teenagers; at least half the secondary school population has tried drugs.
Smoking a few spliffs is really the least of it. Most of them have easy access to all sorts of other, dangerous drugs and huge numbers of Sloanes and Sloane wannabes, not least the girls, get hogwhimperingly drunk from time to time.
Quite often they do it in public, like poor Euan Blair, who could perhaps be called a nouveau Sloane. There are rumours that Prince Harry has been drunk in public more than once and even called a pub manager an effing Frog while under the influence.
It has also been said that while on holiday in Rock in Cornwall - the middle class Mecca otherwise known as Fulham-on-Sea - Prince Harry threw glass bottles about and vomited extravagantly outside a smart teenagers' pub. If so, he was only doing what was expected of him, and what all the rest of these gently bred young things do - getting completely rat-arsed, breaking things and braying loudly about shagging. Why single out Prince Harry for sanctimonious disapproval?
The poor boy is just part of a revolution in manners. We have already seen the embourgeoisification of the masses, or most of them - we are all middle class now, according to John Prescott - but we are also seeing the proletarianisation of the middle classes. Once, only nobs or yobs behaved like this; now the respectable bourgeois are aping both. Once, drugs, drink and casual sex were restricted to the upper and lower classes. In between, the middle classes stalwartly toted the weary load of empire, commerce and public service. Now bad behaviour has been thoroughly democratised.
A well-off acquaintance recently told me coolly how, while out looking for his daughter at dawn in Rock, he had come across one young girl he knew slightly, face down in the surf on the beach at Trebetherick, helplessly drunk and unable to guess how many people she had had sex with.
What was most remarkable to me was that he didn't think her behaviour unusual, nor did he think there was anything much he or her parents could do about it.
Why not? And why couldn't Prince Charles, strictly brought up as he was himself, do something about Prince Harry?
The answer is, on its higher level, the same as it is for all of us: there has been a very striking abdication of authority in the past 30 years.
It's an abdication that affects all relationships, not only those between parents and children, though those are the first and most important. Millions of parents have abandoned all hope of controlling their children. Most teachers have abdicated their authority in school, and where they haven't, politicians have taken it away from them anyway. As a result, bullying has soared out of control, as even the government admitted last week in a reversal of its long-standing old Labour policy on exclusion.
At the same time parents have all too often stopped supporting teachers in their efforts to keep control; and even assault them occasionally for trying to discipline their feral children. Children know that adults cannot lay a hand on them without breaking the law. They are also well aware of the current obsession with paedophilia, so they know that they can threaten to call Childline with lurid allegations, if adults are becoming tiresome; my daughter threatened me with this when she was only six.
Childcare theorists have done a great deal to undermine authority as well. Not long ago I sat next to the husband of a leading expert in this field; he was outraged by my admission that I sometimes tell my children to do things "because I say so". "Because you say so?" thundered this man, in furious indignation. "What right have you to tell anybody what to do, just because you say so?" The idea that a mother has, or ought to have, authority just because of her position was incomprehensible to him, and horribly authoritarian. And this was unmistakably the authentic voice of liberal intellectual opinion.
So, too, was the comment of some American academic friends of ours, whose delightful teenage children had just trashed our rented holiday house. They told me in the aftermath, when I was expecting apologies, that they think it is an important rite of passage in growing up "to desecrate the household gods".
Well, maybe in California. And, I suppose, if in California yesterday, then in Virginia Water today.
As is so often the way, all this is due to something that felt right at the time, in the 1960s and before - the rejection of deference and of hierarchy.
Parents and teachers had been too strict. Children's and teenagers' views had been pretty much ignored. The personal deference expected up and down the entire social system was humiliating and shameful, and had become absurd; it was entirely at odds with the powerful feelings of egalitarianism that had developed since the second world war.
It was absolutely right to renounce most of all that. But, as always, the pendulum of social change swung too far too fast. The hand that came down from tugging the forelock rose up again in an angry V-sign. At the same time people were shamed out of the conviction that they had any right to any authority. And so the asylum was abandoned to the lunatics, so to speak. "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command," as Bob Dylan sang, "for the times they are a-changin'." Schools became child-centred, vicars shrank from being judgmental, respect for age and experience gave way to ageism, a rejection of tradition went beyond innovation to crude neophilia, libertarianism drifted into libertinism.
Young nurses have complained to me that there is no chain of command on their wards - nobody to exercise authority over those who would welcome it. The police, too, hesitate to exercise their authority, or what remains of it, hemmed about with regulations and guidelines as it is, and some crimes are now out of control; they themselves acceded to the institutional libel about their own institutional racism, and are hugely inhibited now by the national obsession with race and racism. It's not so long since they were openly called pigs by the educated young students of Jack Straw's generation, so a loss of nerve is hardly surprising.
I don't want to exaggerate; Britain is hardly at the point of collapse, and I can't think of a country where I would rather live. All the same, it is dangerous for a society when the idea of authority breaks down, because without control, and without self-control, there will in the end be chaos. And chaos is no respecter of persons - neither of princes, nor of the rich, nor of the rest of us on our various lower levels.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 20, 2002 | Comments (0)
How can the community save us if there isn't one?
A return to the community is the politician's universal panacea these days. All our social problems can be traced to the breakdown of the community, so therefore we must have it back. We must rebuild it or recreate it.
All sides say the same thing. New Labour used to call it communitarianism, and called for a rather scary harnessing of social energies to reconstruct the community, although it seems to have quietly dropped this line for some reason. Now the Conservatives are insisting on the same thing, although they are calling it "the neighbourly society": that is, at least, slightly less irritating.
The phrase comes from Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, who made a widely publicised speech last week on crime and society. His timing was fortunate; in the past fortnight some frightening figures about crime have been released. David Blunkett, the home secretary, has tried hard to convince us that crime is under control and not nearly as bad as we imagine. But it is difficult to believe him.
Respectable statistics suggest that Londoners are six times more likely to be victims of violent crime than New Yorkers; these crimes have increased by 28% in the past three years. City street crime has become a national scandal; muggings in London are at a record level of well over 50,000 a year and armed muggings are increasing fast. Crimes committed by offenders under the age of 18 have risen by 76% in the past decade. And so on. It feels obvious on the streets of London; teenagers keep telling me how much more afraid they are.
My 14-year-old son has been mugged several times in broad daylight on busy roads in west London; he and his friends have learnt to expect it. Usually they don't even bother to report these attacks to the police. They see no point. This means, of course, that the alarming statistics are probably less alarming than they should be. Our children have been discovering in their early teens what children from sink estates have always known: that the police can't or won't protect them. One can only guess at what this does to their idea of a civil society.
They might be relieved, cynical though they are, to know that Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, announced on Friday various new measures against street crime, including a special squad of 475 officers, some of whom will be released from the job of persecuting motorists in their traffic duties - and not a moment too soon.
All this is good as far as it goes. Deterrence works, if it is fierce enough, as the New York police have discovered. But deterrence deals only with the symptoms; violent crimes committed by angry, disaffected young people are the symptoms of a serious and complex social disorder. Since the Labour party, after almost five years of government and nothing to boast about, has run out of platitudes on this subject, it ought to be a good moment for the Conservatives to come up with something sensible.
I don't think they have. Letwin's speech seemed pretty much like communitarianism warmed up. By a curious coincidence he himself had an encounter a few days earlier with street - or rather with doorstep - crime; he was unwise enough to let into his house, at five in the morning, a stranger who asked to use the lavatory, and he was duly robbed.
This quaint combination of kindness and naivety not only drew attention to his lecture; it also rather characterised what he said. A neighbourly society, presumably, in which it is possible to invite any stranger caught short to use your lavatory, without fear of the consequences.
How nice that would be, up to a point, although personally I would prefer to find other ways of being community-minded. Of course Letwin is quite right in insisting that the good society is founded on trust, on shared responsibility and mutual help. And of course it's true that the sense of community has broken down, long since, in many parts of Britain.
The entirely predictable failure of the "care in the community" policies (supported by all parties) was due to the entirely obvious absence of any real community: it was obvious and therefore ignored. And of course there would be a lot less misery and crime if, somehow, a sense of community were to return.
But how? I am always suspicious of the politician's call to "build" or "recreate" community. It's not just that there's something statist about the sound of it, or that it comes oddly from a Conservative. It's that it's very unrealistic, too. It refuses to face some extremely obvious and painful truths, and some difficult choices.
I am reluctantly convinced that one of the chief causes of the breakdown of community here is women working. And if community breakdown is responsible for increasing crime, particularly for juvenile crime, one has to say by extension that women working contribute to crime. I don't enjoy thinking this.
Most women need to work, and many women want to work. I myself passionately wanted the chance to work. But traditionally it was women at home who had the time for those little acts of neighbourliness that bind communities together and weave invisible webs of support and care. Women at home traditionally found time to look out for a frail old neighbour, to listen to someone's sorrows, to visit someone sick or to help with the Guides or a charity.
When working women today get home, they do not have time for anything much beyond their own four walls. They are certainly too busy for voluntary work and they barely have time even for their own children; they are not there for them after school, to listen and encourage, or to help with homework. Very often they do not even eat with their children and they are too busy for those moments of unscheduled time that are often the most important.
The children of career women suffer from affluent neglect and the children of the poor bunk off school onto the mean streets. This is a perfect recipe for raising amoral, insecure and lawless children.
The truth is that community involves self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is not a fashionable idea and there does not seem to me to be any chance that women or men are prepared to make enough of those sacrifices of time, of income, of opportunity and of pleasure. Many neighbourly acts are tedious and unrewarding.
All parties speak of the importance of the voluntary sector; why don't they realise that it has become increasingly professionalised, regulated and time-consuming and that there are very few working women (or men) who have the time to do it?
I don't suppose, for instance, that our national First Role Model, Cherie Blair, has time to be Brown Owl to a troupe of Brownies; I can't imagine when she actually finds time for her own children, what with her ethnic fancy dress parties abroad and her busy job. There's no point in calling for a universal panacea that nobody is prepared to swallow.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 13, 2002 | Comments (0)
