POLITICS/NOT BORN YESTERDAY

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Learning difficulties in Cool Britannia

 

Earth to legislature....

'Now it's time at last for reality' announced the Daily Express last week, but I can't say I see much sign of this among those who move and shake. Like most things in the media these days, it sounded sharply focused and looked typographically slick; but actually, it was both narrow and superficial.

What do we mean by reality? Sobering up in the cold light of dawn? Yes, I suspect most people mean precisely that. The trouble with sobering up if you're an alcoholic is that by noon you'll feel better, and then the boozing will start again. It's the same with financial markets.

The Prime Minister's speech last week - and the audience reaction to it - demonstrated more clearly than any lengthy essay could that the 'sober again' analogy doesn't cut it at this stage in the development of humankind. These were folks standing two inches from a personal and national debt bomb unprecedented in British history, and just a few feet from aticking device called Congress. Everyone (especially the sick man uttering promises of bewildering impossibility out front) behaved as if peacenik Aliens had just landed on Earth and offered us the gold-plated planet of our choice - plus the electromagnetic key to get us there in ten minutes.

...come in please, your time is up

Maybe 'unreality' as a word per se doesn't do it in that kind of situation. I've always preferred 'empiricism' as a defining aspect of having a balanced awareness of one's environment, although I have to admit it's not the most accessible of words. It's a bit 1960s behaviourist University bloke with lank hair. You can't imagine Parisian students tearing up cobbles and running for the barricades while shouting 'Desormais l'Empiricisme - a bas la folie pc!'

The reason I like the word is because it's about observation and measurement of what is, rather than vacuously cynical promises about what might be. But while we could do with a whole heap more of it, yes - it is boring and not widely understood. And most important of all, it was used by Thatcherism to remove all human aspirations of a socially supportive nature. When confronted with an American friend of mine who told the Handbag mny years back she worked in the field of public feelings and desires, the Belgrano-sinker fixed her beadily and said "I only deal in facts". Of course you did dear, of course you did.

'Common sense' is a phrase I'm hearing more and more - especially from people who are fundamentally apolitical. "I'd vote for anyone with common sense" said my sister-in-law last year. She's still waiting, but as a brand strategist I confess to being surprised that nobody has as yet grasped this straw. To be honest, when the Camergoon arrived, I thought this was precisely what he'd do - which was partly why (having tipped him to win) I welcomed his accession. Shows how much I know.

The trouble with it as a phrase is that one man's common sense is another woman's vulgar idea - and vice versa. My Dad used to talk about the need for common sense, usually as he was outlining his somewhat homicidal plans for Arthur Scargill. I've heard people say on the Left that wealth redistribution is common sense. My Mum won an essay prize as a kid for praising Mussolini's common sense. And no, my parents weren't interned during the war.

Perhaps the word for 'what those in command need to get back to' doesn't exist. Certainly, I find it easier to run through related words that get close to what I'm on about. Words like grounded, real life, street-wise, experience at the sharp end, courage, facing the music. In touch, finger on the pulse, sensitive, practical, tough, feet on the ground, classless. These words are, of course, exactly the sort of apple-pies to salute and flags to eat that everyone says they want in focus groups. People always say sensible things in focus groups. Then they go back to real life and do something entirely different.

And that brings me neatly back to empiricism: watch what people do - and just as important, what they've done - and ignore how they package it. Last week we saw Gordon Brown waving a fragile isotope about while insisting it was candy-floss. No matter how many bags of sugar you wrap an isotope in, it's still radioactive. For the objective onlooker, it's important to decide whether New Labour's leader simply can't tell isotopes from candy floss, or thinks that we can't. For the purposes of this piece, I'll be generous and assume that the former is true.

Why has the Prime Minister never learned this simple rule?

Learn and Grow

If like me you're sad - and think that stats can be fun because they often give you breakthrough insights and hypotheses - then you are what we doctors call learning stuff all the time. Most of the remaining folks (once they've reached the top or retired) stop learning. So they give the Far Eastern futures market management to Nick Leeson, or put their money in Equitable Life. Of the folks below these folks, most never learn anything much after school - and especially not at University. A disturbing number leave academia with 27 GCSEs while still semi-literate - a remarkable achievement considering their disability. The residue are called politicians.

The overwhelming majority of politicians we breed and groom today have never been taught properly how to learn. They skip the Page One stuff (being far too clever and important for the basics) and go on to Module Three, quadratic equations. As life progresses, they skip the body of that report on white collar crime and go straight to the Management Summary of Conclusions. Then they ask what the most important conclusion is; and if there are votes in it, they choose it. (Spare me the 'cynical bastard' emails: I've debriefed Minister-level politicians on many occasions).

Politicians are, by and large, people in a hurry, people on the way up, people who think themselves exceptional. Usually they are very well educated. And far too often, they have come from Oxbridge, the Law, management consultancy, the media, academia and trade unionism.

Being whipped by the Party system, they don't have open minds. The vast majority come from a generation which has rarely if ever questioned the socio-economic mores of the era. From the minute they attain any government post, senior Party function or chairmanship of a committee, their feelings of deserving protective special treatment and respect are massaged by acres of flunkies and oleaginous civil servants. The higher they go, the more time they spend either in London, in limousines or on red carpets and aeroplanes. The Club to which they belong is increasingly viewed by them and their peers as the most exclusive of all.

None of this is conducive to retaining a belief in being the People's servant.

To summarise at this point, I'd say our political elite is narrow, pompous, commercially inexprienced, out of touch - and largely both blind and deaf to the concerns of ordinary people. But then, none of that's new. A large part of me thinks it very hard indeed to ever arrive at a system of national government which isn't prone to just such a process. More to the point, a truly efficient system of getting key empirical data in front of these people would still be filtered by the civil service: which is stuffed with precisely the same narrow, naive plonkers.

No learning, no competence

If you don't think this is important, let's go back for a minute to the fundamental point with which I started: learning.

Although one doesn't see this published much anywhere, the governing elite has a great deal of new learning at its disposal in 2008 - were it to choose to use it. When I say 'new', what I mean is the stuff discovered across various disciplines over the last half-century. The trouble with this body of knowledge is that it isn't often in accordance with the polemical beliefs upon which much of the main parties' positions are based; or indeed, with the bigoted desires of the electors who vote for them. (For those who've seen me go on about some of this before, apologies)

Neuroscience has made huge leaps forward. Among many other things, it has suggested that humans (especially women) gain far more satisfaction and stimulation from being with families and taking exercise than they do from making money. And also that men's brains are indeed wired differently to those of women, who have a far greater capacity for provisioning, child empathy and compromise, but a lower satisfaction level from commercial strategy/making money. Finally, neuroanatomy is now pretty conclusive about the causal link between independent responsibility (control of one's own destiny) and self-esteem - from which comes much better social behaviour.

Equally, the 1960s behaviourist assumptions about socialisation's dominant role as a factor in human actions have been completely overturned. It is now almost universally accepted among social scientists that male and female behavioural characterists and attitudes are as much (if not more) down to genetics and inbuilt instincts than life experiences. In turn, economics studies repeated many times in many different societies show (a) no link at all between high levels of material wealth and contentment (b) a higher level of per capita output efficiency in mixed versus free-market economies, and (c) declines in corporate honesty, growth in wealth disparity and increases in social alienation being more marked under laissez-faire economic systems. (The worst scores by far on all dimensions are in command economies)

Advances in the understanding of evolution and natural selection have largely produced a bitter debate about how gene pools expand, the effect of modern medicine on this gene pool, and the rate at which natural selection is accelerating. But what every geneticist can more or less accept today is that permanently changing the fundamental behaviour patterns of Homo sapiens is impossible without evolution; and that the only two ways to achieve evolution are through science (by borrowing genes from another species) or dramatic climate change (watch this space).

Last but not least, long-term social study fieldwork has confirmed previous anthropological evidence suggesting that above a certain pack size, humans feel uncomfortable; that they are calmer out of cities than in them; and that sticking them in prison without relevant attitudinal and skills training has no positive social effect whatsoever - and a huge cost attached to it. Internationally, the largest levels of social unrest, discontent and political instability are to be found in multi-cultural societies. (Nigeria/Biafra, India/Pakistan, Eire/Northern Ireland, various Balkan countries, and the Middle East).

Ignore and die

On these bases, the following policies currently being either suggested or employed by government are (on the basis of likely social functionality) completely at variance with the above data:

1. Positive discrimination in favour of gender advancement in the workplace

2. Concentration of more and more power in large, remote central government departments; approval of and expansion of large-scale globalist concerns; removal of funds from local government; proposals to make county administrations bigger (eg, the so-called 'unitary Devon')

3. Doing very little of any substance to eradicate the long-term welfare culture

4. The increased emphasis (often legal) on politically correct control of what people say and think as a means to the end of producing more harmonious social-group relations; the assumption that multicultural = good; and zero control of immigration into an already overcrowded island.

5. The acceptance as a given that mixed economies (with government control of key utilities) will never perform 'better' than economic neo-liberalism

6. The assumption that 'better' can only be judged on the basis of material well-being

7. The idea that wealth will 'trickle down' from the super-rich in a laissez-faire economy

8. The decision to build more and bigger prisons

9. The promotion of multi-culturalism as an ideal

10. Expanding overflow housing into old green-belt and new green-field rural environments.

There is an old adage about futility, which runs 'Never try and teach a pig to sing: you don't get a song, and it annoys the pig'.

I can tell you from personal professional experience that it is a career-ending move to try and teach senior politicians to listen: you don't get applause, and it annoys the politician.

Politicians in the Cool Britannia culture want only three things: to be told they're right, to be the owner of a result, and to attract votes. They don't need to learn because they know everything. Watch them in action and you can see this.

Hazel Blears knows that Britons in 2008 want another class war. Harriet Harman knows that commerce needs neo-fascist feminism. David Miliband knows that the way to deal with foreigners is to threaten them as if he were some tin-pot Ruritanian brigadier. Gordon Brown knows he was right to sell gold in 1999 because he wantedto diversify the Treasury portfolio. Public schoolboy David Cameron knows that Grammar schools are wrong. In their time, Tony Benn knew Britain was ready for hard-line Leftist government, Margaret Thatcher that if left to themselves, people making a lot of money would give most of it to charities, and Tony Blair....well, Tony knew everything: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that the only way to do arms deals in the Middle East was by employing bribery on an appalling scale, that Lord Levy was a good fundraiser, and that universal ID cards held no threat to personal liberty - but would solve the terrorism problem.

Power-learning: a new model

Our current crop of politicians (and, to be fair, this applies to an awful lot of industrial captains and quango queens too) can be summed up as follows: they know what they want to know, and tell the public what they want to hear.

I propose a radically different approach to running things: one that has always proved successful in the past - and probably always will. It looks like this:

Information up >>> Information digested >>> Decision down >>> Back to start

 

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