{"id":77,"date":"2011-05-09T23:04:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T22:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/?p=77"},"modified":"2011-05-09T23:07:14","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T22:07:14","slug":"a-civil-servant-writes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/a-civil-servant-writes\/","title":{"rendered":"A civil servant writes"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, in response to the AHRC\u2019s continuing to say nothing much you\u2019d want to hear<\/a> about this Big Society business<\/a>, there is another petition<\/a> \u2013 this one pointing its basal paragraphs in the direction of Rick Rylance\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

I was discussing the whole sorry affair recently with a friend who is a civil servant with a policy role. (Yes, you\u2019re quite right. As a clueless humanities academic, I should have no idea that any such activity as government administration even exists, and should spend the entire time eating toasted buttered punts in the ivy-lined seclusion of a book-clad turret or something. My apologies.)<\/p>\n

Anyway. With her permission, I\u2019m going to quote part of her response verbatim here. I think it usefully illustrates how those of us who live in Thinkyworld need to bear in mind that other people involved in the decision-making process don\u2019t necessarily share our starting assumptions, are almost bound not to share our working context, and may tend to stare at us in some confusion. It\u2019s also as decent enough place from which to start thinking about policy questions more broadly. (Which is not even remotely what I was supposed to be devoting this blog to, but I can\u2019t think of anything interesting to say about the Blagden-Gilpin experiments at the moment.)<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the position that I, and the several thousand signatories to the original Brooks petition<\/a>, and more than 25 learned societies<\/a> have adopted. The AHRC Delivery Plan<\/a> formally and openly endorses a Conservative Party electoral slogan<\/a>; this is unacceptable; the obviousness of its unacceptability is mind-bending.<\/p>\n

To my correspondent, it\u2019s a bit more complicated.<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s a Conservative party policy (actually, they are keen to emphasise, it\u2019s not a \u201cpolicy\u201d but an \u201capproach to government\u201d \u2013 but I\u2019ll spare you the details). But given they are in Government, doesn\u2019t that make it a Government policy? I\u2019m slightly unclear how you can accept that research can and should influence and inform policy, but argue that this particular policy is somehow different. [\u2026]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[G]iven that (we\u2019d hope) the winning party tends to implement the policies it campaigned on during the election, how can we separate the two?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is fair enough. Like a couple of other people, I grasped at the term \u201cparty-political\u201d while trying to explain why, unlike more subtle forms of political influence (which deserve serious discussion), the BS-language in the Delivery Plan must straight away be classed as mind-bendingly objectionable. The \u201cpolitical\u201d\/\u201cparty-political\u201d distinction is the wrong one for that particular job. (In my defence, my mind was all bent at the time.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a better presentation. \u201cBig Society\u201d \u2013 commonly elaborated as \u201cBig Society, Not Big Government\u201d \u2013 was coined as an electoral slogan. Its primary purpose is to get people to vote Conservative. The Conservatives, though they are approximately in government, continue regularly to contest elections. Manifestly, the AHRC should not spend money to \u201ccontribute\u201d (in the words of the Delivery Plan) to their turnout.<\/p>\n

My correspondent, again, doesn\u2019t see it as clear-cut:<\/p>\n

However hard you [as a civil servant] try to draw a line in your head \u2013 for example between making [government] policies work better (fine) and making people like the Tories more (not fine) \u2013 in practice they are hard to keep separate. The same goes for \u201cBig Society\u201d the election campaign slogan and \u201cBig Society\u201d the idea and accompanying collection of policies [\u2026]<\/p>\n

\u201cBig Society\u201d basically pulls together lots of things Tories (and some Lib Dems) like \u2013 localism, a different role for the state (smaller, but the difference is more than size), more voluntarism, taking personal responsibility, efficiency and choice through more competition (in public service provision), etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most people, I suspect, would end up with something like this view if their job was to enact Government policy. It\u2019s a view which we have<\/em> to engage with, if we want to end up with anything other than the conclusion that everybody hates us because they\u2019re evil.<\/p>\n

By \u201cengage with\u201d, of course, I mean \u201csteadfastly and unblinkingly refuse to take at face value.\u201d Because that<\/em>, you see, is what we<\/em> are paid good money for.<\/p>\n

If you probe the evolution of the \u201cBig Society\u201d with various standard tools of the humanities trade (a rhetorician\u2019s oscilloscope is ideal, provided you keep a parliamentary history fishknife for the messy bits), you\u2019ll find that its function is predominantly electoral to a degree that\u2019s rarely seen (although the same, as My Lot keep pointing out, would have applied to \u201cThird Way\u201d during its brief co-option by the Blair people in the late 90s). The chief point of the BS initiative is to maximise support across the spectrum of public sentiment, by presenting major state spending reductions in terms that don\u2019t imply the collapse of social infrastructure. It may also, conveniently, make life complicated for any opposing party which wants to promote a social-voluntarist platform.<\/p>\n

I am not a Tory, as you will have observed from the striations between my median and axial fins. But it\u2019s not exactly the height of subversion to assert that the Conservatives have engineered an electoral strategy. (I\u2019d have done the same myself, in the circumstances.) Said strategy, being a thing with agency in the world, ought to be studied.<\/p>\n

Carefully.<\/p>\n

Contrary to the impression the AHRC appears to be trying to give<\/a>, \u201cThe Big Society\u201d is not<\/em> social voluntarism in general. Anyone who doesn\u2019t see the necessity of the distinction is not doing the work of an academic.<\/p>\n

Gordon Finlayson recently published a good piece<\/a> on (or, rather, leading mercifully away from) this stuff. In brief: co-opting the BS makes no sense even from self-interest, because whoever\u2019s claiming to be the Government a couple of years from now will have ditched it; all of this is distracting us dangerously from general questions of governmental influence on research, and specific questions about why the AHRC wants to do social policy stuff anyway<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing inherently wrong with studying the BS, if you have the tools to do so. It\u2019s too transient to be worth a major programme, but might make for a decent ed. vol., I suppose. Or a day conference. Next month, just across the road from me<\/a>, some social policy researchers, and people working for NGOs, and political types and whatnot are going to try this out. The meeting\u2019s being organised by CRESC<\/a>, which is core funded by the ESRC, and its title is \u201cThe Big Society?\u201d That thing on the end of the phrase there bears examination. It\u2019s what we in the trade call a question mark or eroteme: properly used, it can convey elements of uncertainty, dissent, or critical distance. It\u2019s a surprisingly handy little gadget for its size.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, in response to the AHRC\u2019s continuing to say nothing much you\u2019d want to hear about this Big Society business, there is another petition \u2013 this one pointing its basal paragraphs in the direction of Rick Rylance\u2019s head. I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jbsumner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}