Brexit, Syria and The Political Opportunity Donut

There are many ways to draw the political spectrum, but most of the time we talk about "Left" and "Right" as an endless series of tiny but increasing differences stretching in both directions - a political continuum. 

And most of the time that works - especially for "Yes"/"No" issues - since voters' views will be similarly grouped. There's not much pressure on the tiny differences or cracks among the political views on each 'side'.

Then something very complex and uncertain comes along - like Brexit or the latest chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on 'rebels' as well as its own citizens that highlights all the problems in the Middle East in one hit. 

Suddenly those on the "Far Left", like Jeremy Corbyn, find themselves sitting cheek by jowl with those on the "Far Right", like Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nick Griffin. 

The longer these situations last, the greater the pressure on the usually tiny cracks between politicians and voters on each side. 

And as the pressure increases, those tiny cracks widen to the point that politicians begin to worry about which way they might need to leap for their political survival...

Hardliners toughen their stance, looking for ever more extreme views to hold. This rams home to the more moderate politicians just how far from the centre they've drifted, and causes them to look for ways to move back that way.  So, for example, you have growing numbers of Brexit 'rebels' in both the Labour and Tory parties, with the Liberal Democrats offering to scuttle Brexit altogether...

Here's what a former master of centrist politics, Tony Blair, said today:

"If you leave that vast, uncultivated centre ground,

someone is going to come along and cultivate it."

In other words, don't ignore the other side of the donut.

Labour's Idealistic March Into Oblivion

So, another political 'party' season slips by and the casual observer would think the Tories' policies must be more or less the right. There are no practical alternatives for anyone interested in the decisions actually required to drag the UK back from the abyss into which it's been staring for decades. Fortunately, that seems to be the majority of voters - the electorate finally understands that the UK reached the limit of taxing and spending sometime in the noughties and it's the Government's job to figure out how to do less of both.

Sadly, the Labour Party is giving up on such tough decisions, preferring the cosy bubble of idealism in which the air is a mixture of moral panic and dogma, and the 'answer' must fit on a placard. 

For instance, this week's 'news' that a single grammar school in Kent is expanding is said to threaten the quality of teaching at every school in the country, and Labour's 'solution' is that all children must go to state school. 

Trident costs too much? Unilateral disarmament. 

Steel plants to close through lack of demand for British steel? Nationalise them.

A living wage? Tax credits.

Unhelpful, impracticable, unrealistic, vacuous, dogmatic twaddle.

And since Liberal Democrat voters decided they, too, are sick of their party having to make the hard decisions, we are left with the Tories having to be their own conscience...  and do all the work.  

Let's hope they get it right - and remember, every country has the government it deserves.

2015: The Year Our Political Class Went Rogue

April passed in stunned silence on this blog because I was waiting patiently for the UK General Election to get real.

Instead, our political classes went rogue.

Today, all the way from Greece to Scotland, there are no politicians who believe it is their job to ensure that society lives within its own means.

James Palumbo hit the nail on the head in his article for the Evening Standard this week. "In place of facing hard truths, our leaders offer unaffordable and undeliverable promises." The Institute of Fiscal Studies promptly confirmed it.

You might think our politicians went rogue years ago, and some of them did. But I think the last coalition was formed by people in such a deep state of shock at how badly the New Labour machine had transformed Britain's economic plight that they were genuinely committed to ensuring the country did not go broke. 

Since then, the endless process of distraction, deception and spin has meant that even the dreaded Tory machine has realised it can 'extend and pretend' just like the Greeks. 

These days nothing in politics is real. The same effluent is cycled from the pollsters to the media to the party machines, out the mouths of candidates and canvassers and into the eyes and ears of the deceived, who feed the same crap back into the polls. Every 'issue' - from health, social welfare and education to immigration, foreign aid, devolution and higher taxes for 'non-doms', 'mansions' and foreign corporations - is debated on the utterly false assumption that the country can finance whatever policy is touted.

If you thought Gordon Brown has had a rough ride, just imagine what will happen to the Prime Minister in charge when the truth really dawns.

Another Hung Parliament, Please

With the UK general election looming in May, I thought I'd declare my apolitical hand: I'm hoping for another 'hung' Parliament and a coalition government.

I've been a fan of the idea since the opportunity presented itself in the last general election. I think the beast has worked pretty well for the pragmatic amongst us, and is well suited to dealing with the nasty challenges ahead. As I hoped in April 2010, politicians on both sides of the coalition have had to behave much more reasonably and responsibly in seeking solutions to the root causes of our problems than their party-political dogma would have otherwise dictated. This has spiked the guns of an extremely dogmatic opposition. And even the media's doom-mongering about instability and chaos has proved groundless. Sure there have been U-turns and major disagreements between the coalition parties, but the democratic progress should be dynamic, open and messy - not engineered, top-down, by a party leader with a Whip.

The same form of government is needed over the next five years because the long journey out of the tunnel has barely begun. That light up ahead is not looming economic recovery, it's an on-coming train laden with vast public sector debt, slowing Chinese growth, savagely low oil prices that might rebound higher than before, the Russian Problem, insanity in Greece, negative real interest rates and a stagnant Eurozone. Oh, and a new global financial crisis, as Hank Paulson infamously forecast in 2010:

"...We'll have another financial crisis sometime in the next 10 years because we always do.""

The public finances are still in a parlous state. So all the UK political parties face the need to cut public spending, whether they like it or not. Raising expenditure is out of the question, because it would mean borrowing more - and higher taxes won't bring in any more money. The total UK tax receipts have hovered at or below 40% of GDP for over 40 years. We're bumping along the ceiling, people! Raise taxes, the economy grinds to a halt and the best you'll get is 40% of a smaller pie. Cut taxes to around 35% of GDP,  the economy roars into life and you get a smaller slice, but of a much bigger pie.

But, hey, if you think the UK should drift into the next financial crisis with even higher debt and taxes, why not simply move to Greece?

What's left to cut? There's no end to it: we need our politicians and civil servants to remain focused on making the public sector more efficient, by removing waste and insisting that services be designed to operate more efficiently in future, particularly in the major spending areas. The defence budget, for example, is a rounding error on a more efficient tax and benefits system and a leaner, better co-ordinated public health and social care sector (20% of hospital beds are occupied by people who aren't even sick!). Money could also be saved by addressing root causes instead of their many symptoms. For instance, would more social housing have helped ease the pressure on first-time buyers, avoiding government subsidies to them and pre-empted the policy battle over immigration levels? Similarly, we must continue financial reforms to increase the sources of funding and the range of payment services for consumers and small businesses (who create half of all new jobs) because the economy is still too dependent on a few major banking groups who remain a millstone around the country's neck.

Some people will say this is dry, boring and unimaginative. But if you want entertainment, head to the movies. 

Others want something to believe in. For instance, they accuse David Cameron of lacking political ideology or a 'pattern of belief', an '-ism'. Yet they claim that his "legacy will be a collection of tactical manoeuvres, with as many prominent surrenders as victories." Apparently these people have never heard of pragmatism. But they've also unwittingly hit on the benefit of the hung Parliament in restraining coalition parties from implementing their more extreme policies. By contrast, the 'believers' expect us to cling to the idea that Ed Miliband is "in politics for the right reason" (just the one?) or "propelled by something more noble than the salvation of his own skin", which you could choose to mean anything that gets you through the day. But beware words like 'right' and 'noble'. They are the cloaks of dogma and moral panic - rallying cries for the likes of Tony Bliar's weird crusade or Gordo's crash, in which Miliband (and Balls) played key roles - not to mention the ballooning cost of the Security State. So, actually, if we believe anything in this vein, then it's surely that such 'noble' ambitions make Labour governments the kind of luxury that only a much wealthier country could afford. 

But, who knows, maybe being trapped in a coalition would even convert Ed to pragmatism.

Whichever way you look at it, we need a government that's forced to focus on resolving the root causes of society's actual problems - not one driven to distort the facts to suit its own dogmatic solutions. And my sense is that only another hung Parliament will ensure we get it.

What Happened To 'Class A' Political Journalism?

My appetite whetted by this week's local electoral melodrama, I've been searching for some Class A political journalism to feed my lust for pragmatism. 

There were little flashes of it from a few of the TV people. Michael Crick, who blew the lid off the Andrew Mitchell stitch-up, was rude as hell to Farrago, no doubt furious at having stuck to him like a leech in the hope of discovering anything coherent and coming up empty-handed. That left the usually mild-mannered Gary Gibbon to go after the rest of the gang. Desperation set in after the AutomEtonian responded to every single question with the line that this week was simply about local councils. He genuinely seemed to forget he was the Prime Minister, and I guess it's easy to see why. This seemed to put Gary in such a foul mood that he went after Flash Nick and Millibore like a mortar crew on speed. Each prevarication was interrupted with a fresh round down the tube, and another explosion of disbelief at the factually-twisted response. 

The only problem with the Gibbon assault was the apparent premise of the questions on capital spending: that it's the job of the state to fill every hole in the infrastructural landscape. Creating a whole new mountain range out of UK public debt is strange medicine indeed, whatever the cause. Ironically, Flash Nick went closest to a straight response, saying that while they'd barely invested a bean of new public money, the coalition has done a great job of attracting private capital to public projects. If that's true, then let's hope they've overcome the planning fallacy, and the PFI vultures leave a little flesh on the state carcass for the rest of us. 

As for Ed, well... 

In the end, the howling in my soul could only be quieted by re-reading "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72". Forty years on, nothing has changed. The vicious wheels of the party political machines are still flattening the best interests of the citizens into the road in the rush for power and patronage, and Thompson's substance-fuelled take on the political animal is so brutally right that the recognition will make you laugh like a hyena. This, for example, could have been written today:

"This also reinforced my contempt for the waterheads who ran Big Ed's campaign like a gang of junkies trying to send a rocket to the moon to check out rumours that the craters were full of smack."

Now why doesn't anyone write about politics like that anymore?

Is it merely because today's journalists are sober, or have they abandoned hope that we can produce anything different to the current stage-managed pantomime?

There Must Be Dancing In The Streets

Oblivious to their economic plight, UK citizens are preparing to spend up to £10m celebrating the immortality of former Dear Leader Madge. Much of the cost stems from the involvement of a mass North Korean dance troupe famous for leading their country's Founding Day performances.

While state radio broadcasts were briefly interrupted by dissidents singing hymns to mortality on Sunday, Dear Leader Dave, who will himself be immortalised in due course, defended the move during an 11 hour state television broadcast:

"We respect and admire the North Korean people for their unquestioning loyalty to immortal leaders. It's true that £10m represents a year's salary for the 1200 street performers involved, but feigning joy on a mass scale is something we need to learn from them, even at such a cost. Remember, too, that this was the specific wish of former Dear Leader Madge."

UK worker collectives also expressed their support for the immortality celebrations, with a re-enactment of the Jarrow march. Comrade Leader of the Union for Exported Manufacturing Jobs, Eduardo Millibando, said:

"This may seem a lot of money to my members, who have lost generations of employment opportunities, but they will be grateful that the nation has learned these dance steps for mass adulation when it is the turn of former Dear Leader Tony to be immortalised."

North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, welcomed the exchange, adding, "we are also especially pleased to have won the contract to build the next generation submarines for Britain's Trident nuclear programme. This realises Britain's foreign aid ambitions, while meeting our own desire to become a nuclear threat to the entire universe." 

LSE Gets It: More Pragmatism, Less Politics

Having recently made the same point, I'm encouraged to see the London School of Economics setting out in detail some of the ways in which the UK could benefit if pragmatic political consensus were to replace party-political dogma. 

However, it would be wrong to think that this approach is only needed in the areas of education, infrastructure and innovation, on which the LSE's report focuses in particular. It's a general shift in attitude that is required in every aspect of our lives. 

This doesn't simply mean that politicians and civil servants should adopt a different top-down attitude. It means inverting the institutional narrative altogether. Politicians and the public sector must adopt a pragmatic, bottom-up view of what works and what does not work at the individual level, for the common good. The public sector must monitor and disclose publicly whether - and, if so, how - its activities, regulations and incentives distort all kinds of local and national markets in favour of private and public sector institutions, thereby constraining innovation and competition. Critically, this extends to the wasteful way in which the public sector purchases its own goods and services.

In practical terms, that shift in attitude requires the civil service and politicians to focus on obtaining data, defining problems, measuring their scale, analysing root causes and implementing lasting solutions. After all, hard choices are easier for more people to accept when they can be shown to be driven by harsh reality rather than party political dogma.

While, fortunately, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that this change is already underway as part of longer term trends discussed on this blog, the voices of institutions like the LSE are critical to those trends becoming mainstream behaviour sooner.  Let's hope similar reports follow from others shortly.

Pragmatism Grows At Night

In "India Grows at Night" the writer and commentator Gurcharan Das shares his insights into how India's growing, pragmatic middle class can achieve the country's necessary political and economic reforms. While inspired by Das's presence in Tahrir Square two years ago, these insights also resonate with the plight of Western democracies whose growth is inhibited by extractive private and public sector institutions.

The title of the book comes from Das's belief that India's knowledge economy powered her economic growth because: 

"Bureaucrats did not know how to regulate it and could not choke it with red tape, in the way they stifled India's industrial revolution through licences, permits and inspectors... India's knowledge economy literally grew at night while the government slept."

But India's problems are not over. Das explains that the "puzzle is... how can a vibrant democracy with a rising economy and an energetic civil society have allowed the state and governance to decay"?  He then describes the evolution of the Indian state from before British rule until today, tracing the tensions between social and official structures, and the shortcomings of the political system and key market failures.

Despite different starting points, this 'decay' also awaits Western democracies who have not been alert to the need for ongoing political and economic reforms. There's an ominous familiarity, for instance, in the complaint that the Indian state is preoccupied with the quantity of schools and other public services rather than their quality - "which is what really drives shared prosperity." The problems in our financial system are well rehearsed.

Das's description of the reasons for India's institutional decay is also echoed in Phillip Blond's explanation of the 'political bankruptcy' in Western countries. I understand them both to be saying that right wing policies allow the concentration of wealth amongst relatively few extractive institutions and their management and investors, rather than creating an environment in which widespread entrepreneurship can flourish. Meanwhile, left wing policies that are designed to 'redistribute' income through taxation and public spending are grossly inefficient by comparison to markets. The self-interest of partisan politics has gone too far, and legislators have no real commitment to the common good. Electoral battles fought along social and cultural lines distract everyone from critical long term issues, as well as being dangerously divisive. As a result, we lack appropriate regulatory frameworks and incentives to address market problems that stifle innovation and competition. Not only does institutional decay reflect the bankruptcy of dogma-ridden political parties, but as that decay constrains growth the economy itself drifts into liquidation.

Das argues that successful reforms will only be achieved through more active political participation by the members of the rising middle class, since they are the most conscious of the problems and the most impatient for the necessary reforms. He argues that the intransigence of existing Indian political parties creates the need for an entirely new, 'bottom-up', liberal political party. Das explains that this is a 'classical' rather than a 'social' liberalism - tolerant on social and cultural matters, yet wary of state intervention where the private sector and the market can be more effective.

This also seems to reflect the "renewed political idealism" and "participative democracy" for which Phillip Blond argues. 

In UK terms, this would seems to place Das's vision for a 'liberal party' somewhere between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. And it seems quite telling that UK voters have forced those two political parties into coalition.

However, I disagree that the formation of a new political party or even a new political idealism is a necessary pre-condition for achieving political and economic reform.

As discussed in Lipstick On a Pig, the bottom-up approach that Das refers to has already been unleashed, largely enabled by the Internet's 'architecture of participation'. The 'Arab Spring' and developments in sub-Saharan Africa emphasise both the global nature of this phenomenon and its effective political impact. This process of 'democratisation' requires no more structure than the social media and a city square, and its power lies in the fact that it isn't confined to politics or economics. Greater transparency, knowledge and reform in one area creates the desire for change elsewhere. The result is both seismic and chaotic, yet significant reform is bound to be 'messy', not orderly and neat. As a result, I've suggested we're seeing the evolution of a "personal state" in which we're acting pragmatically as individuals in a highly collaborative fashion through the services of facilitators, rather than passively relying on our institutions to set the pace of reform.

New political parties and ideals might well emerge in this environment, but they will be a symptom of reforms achieved by each of us acting personally, not the cause.   

Nude Labour and The Hung Parliament

Hung Parliament

Three Labour Party conferences after the sun set on New Labour, and it must be obvious to everyone that the party's eon in power gave it no insight at all into what might fix the root causes of this country's economic and social problems. So I must henceforth refer to the latest evolution as "Nude Labour".

Not that I'm any great fan of the other parties. As I said in May 2010, a hung Parliament means we have MPs where we want them: "They are not in control. They have little alternative but to listen and respond to our issues bottom-up."

I said "little alternative" because they are very persistent in manufacturing policies designed merely to get themselves elected rather than to actually solve the country's problems. This manufacturing process seems to consist of endless polls amongst 'swinging' voters (the confused but willing) and 'deserters' from the last election, littered with leading questions designed to persuade the victims that the party has the answer to problems created to fit pet policies. At the same time the 'party leadership' must battle the zealots and extremists to avoid appearing like complete lunatics to the rest of us. Oh, and of course they must find ways to disagree with everything the other parties say. And blame other politicians for every error, to encourage the myth that politicians make a difference. 

The recent West Coast railway fiasco is a case in point. The opposition politicians seem obsessed with blaming other politicians, rather than focusing on the deep problems in the way government departments have handled such bidding processes for many years. For instance, Daniel Kahneman refers to a "Planning Fallacy" in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He points to a 2005 study of worldwide rail projects between 1969 and 1998, in which it was found that 90% over-estimated passenger numbers by an average of 106%, and costs overran by an average of 45%, regardless of the publicity associated with each debacle. Gee, I wonder if it's possible that government tendering processes somehow reward bidders who over-estimate utility, and under-estimate cost?

It would be glorifying political parties to say they are themselves a root cause of problems in the UK. As I said in the context of the Red Book, their internal activities are more or less irrelevant to how any problems actually get solved by the more pragmatic amongst us. Witness the Labour Left's dogmatic approach to the reform of the NHS or social housing. And Ed Ball's astonishing rabbit-out-of-a-hat idea to blow the revenue from a 4G licence licence auction on affordable homes merely served to distract conference delegates from Labour's terrible record on actually building them. For the rest of us, his proposed magic trick eerily echoed Gordon Brown's ultimate destruction of the enormous 3G windfall. Hey, let's never forget that Balls was an economic adviser to Brown and staunch ally to the bitter end, and Ed Milliband was Brown's special advisor from 1997 to 2002. None of those people must ever be allowed anywhere  near the nation's coffers ever again.

Alas, not content with showering us with raw waste from two political non-events so far, we must now endure big media's coverage of the Conservative Party's attempt to thrill the faithful with its own recipe for clinging to power. A poor lens through which to view the world, but good fodder for the writers of vitriol. 

Meanwhile, it's down to each of us to find real solutions to the root causes of real problems, charting a pragmatic path through the party-political dogma-doo-doo.

The Enemies of Growth

The Economist article on The Question of Extractive Elites certainly resonated with me last week, as it did with those involved in the subsequent discussion on Buttonwood's notebook. It's another way of looking at the difference between 'facilitators' and 'institutions'.

In “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty”, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, suggest "extractive economies" experience limited growth because their institutions “are structured to extract resources from the many by the few and... fail to protect property rights or provide incentives for economic activity.”

"Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ulimtately short-lived."

Acemoglu and Robinson place certain 'third world' economies into the "extractive" category, but place the developed world into an "inclusive" category on the basis that their institutions tend not to be extractive. But as Buttonwood notes, there are elements of developed economies that fit the description of extractive economies, citing banks and the public sector as the most likely candidates - although I would add the institutions that comprise the pensions and benefits industry as another example. And we should define "public sector" quite broadly to include political parties, unions, quangos and so on.

These extractive institutions tend to be linked, since the public sector is not only capable of extracting resources in a way that starves business or crowding out private investment, but it is also responsible for regulating the private institutions that are themselves extractive.

As previously discussed, high levels of public spending and national wage bargains are partly to blame for throttling the UK economy and preventing the development of manufacturing, particularly in regions which struggle to capitalise on the lower cost of living to keep wage costs down. The tax and regulatory framework favours banks and regulated investment institutions over new entrants. 

The current UK government is trying to spend less, but it's refusal to regulate means extractive frameworks are not being overhauled. Of course there is a danger that the new entrants seeking a level playing field may be tomorrow's "extractive institutions". But that would at least imply significant creative destruction in the meantime. Ideally the rise of "extractive institutions" would be kept in check by more dynamic regulatory intervention, but future overhauls may be required.  

That is the politicians' job. But they, too, have a tendency to be the enemies of growth.

A Dogmatic Approach To Social Housing

For today's post, I'm again drawn to the Red Book and the 'problem' of social housing.

Remember, the game here is not to solve anyone's housing problem. It's to get the Labour Party elected to run the country. So it becomes necessary to explain the social housing problem in that light, rather than in a way that might elucidate its root causes and allow us to figure out a solution.  The facts should not be allowed to get in the way of a good story.

Why social housing? Because, as Dr Eoin Clarke explains, Labour's figures show it was deserted by a disproportionately large number of private renters, compared to property owners, in 2010 compared to 1997.  I can't vouch for any causal connection, but let's roll with it.

The primary challenge for the Labour Party is that this slide in support appears to have beeen a problem of its own making. Dr Clarke explains that in his view, "The Right to Buy scheme launched by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 was initially a good thing." And by the time she left office in 1990, the government was building social housing at about the same rate as it was being sold. That continued during the Major government, although both social housing sales and builds decreased steeply. 

Dr Clarke then asserts that the reason for the decline in sales and new builds of social housing was that Thatcher wouldn't let councils keep the sales proceeds - although that doesn't explain why the programme seemed to go okay for its first 9 years so I suspect something else was going on...

But never mind all that. Here's what happened next, according to Dr Clarke: from 1997 to 2010 there was virtually no social housing built at all, social housing sales boomed and the population grew by 4.41 million. House prices "rocketed". Young families had no option but to rent and "their rent payable was often extortionate... That," confirms Dr Clarke "is the legacy of New Labour's handling of housing."

Enough said, one would have thought. Yet against this background, Dr Clarke then asserts:

"Thus, it is fair to conclude that Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme was, on balance, a disaster for British housing."

"... we don't trust the Tories to build adequate stocks of social homes, because in their last 18 years of power they only built one for every four they sold."

Huh? Where does that come from?

Ironically, a little later, in her later essay on "Understanding the Psychology of the Working Class Right Wing", Rhiannon Lockley has this to say:

"...the key achievement of propaganda is to make the belief being transmitted internalised to the point where its origin is lost and it is accepted as natural and self-discovered by the individual...  The volume and diversity of negative messages about scapegoated groups in the right-wing media today does much to achieve this, and it is also supported by the factual style of reporting whch presents arguments as definite rather than exploratory."

All of which leaves the following questions: Is there a social housing problem? If so, what is it? How big is it? What are its root causes? What improvements could we make to address those causes? What controls could we put in place to show that it doesn't happen again?

But whatever you do, don't ask a dogmatist.

It's A Dog(matist)'s Life

The great challenge for political parties in a democracy is that they exist primarily to solve their own problem: how to get a majority of their candidates elected to govern the country. Solving citizens' problems is not their fundamental aim. In fact, the problem of how to get elected is so remote from the day-to-day problems encountered by the country's citizens as to render the internal activities of political parties more or less irrelevant to how our problems actually get solved. The world is too complex for the answers to lie in some political party manifesto, far removed from the activities of market participants and even civil servants. So political parties have to persuade us of their distinctiveness and their relevance. They have to convince us that they could solve our problems, if we would only vote them into power and leave them there. Trends reveal that this process, and party politics itself, is doomed.

Declining participation rates in general elections demonstrate that we don't really value the outcome of our formal electoral processes. And the relentless pursuit of MPs over their expenses demonstrated that, in the UK at least, we don't think much of our formal political representatives either. Instead, we're turning to more direct means of shaping our society bottom-up, through informal facilitators like 38 Degrees, well-organised charities or other single interest groups. We want our politics unbundled, like travel or music. Eurocrats in Brussels also admit to a rise in 'informal institutions' within the fiendishly complex framework of the European Union, and European academics point to 'networks' as the source of "informal processes of economic regulation and institutional change". This cuts both ways. National governments are relying on global businesses to act as 'private sheriffs' (e.g. to enforce their user terms to shut down Wikileaks) and big businesses lobby governments to control our behaviour when it suits them.

So party-political dogma provides a particularly poor lens through which to view this world and solve its problems. It collides with the trend towards each of us having our own personal political manifesto - charting our own, pragmatic path.

The challenge for political parties to remain relevant is particularly evident from The Red Book, a series of essays from Labour Left, the 'home of ethical socialism' within the UK Labour Party. While I don't care a fig for the Labour Party (or the Tories or Lib Dems, for that matter), I started reading The Red Book to see how an ousted political party might try to improve its relevance in 2012.

What struck me in the very first essay, introducing ethical socialism, is that The Red Book takes a top-down approach, rather than bottom-up. First, the ethical perspective is contrasted with that of other segments of the Labour Party, referred to as "Blue Labour", "Purple" and "the Blairites". Then you and me are discussed as if we're in another room, using the terms "middle-income (A/B) voters" and "poorer voters (C2)". Then come the references to the "political establishment and the wider public" and the claim that "politics is about shaping public opinion, not bowing slavishly to it" (my italics). Finally, comes the admission that "a key Labour NEC member" has derided The Red Book and/or Labour Left "as a 'Peoples' Front of Judea' no less" (the irony presumably lost on the said NEC member):

The introduction continues by asking "how to live the socialist life?" and I've highlighted the inconsistencies in bold: 

"At the outset, it means committing ourselves to living in community with all who share our social space. This means, for the better off socialists, refusing the option of buying out of that society alongside developing policies that challenge the choices of those who do... The vision of a harmonious society lies at the heart of a socialist community: and a socialist community cannot exist where we relate only to those whose experiences mirror our own.

It follows from this that we must treat our fellow citizens with decency and respect.

[and later]

"What is desperately needed is an holistic vision of society where the contribution of all its parts is recognised and treated with dignity and respect."

Surely the requirements to treat our fellow citizens with decency and respect, and to avoid relating only to those whose experiences mirror our own - the 'holistic vision' - should mean allowing rather than refusing others the option to buy out of "our social space"?

At any rate, the socialist path immediately loses its way in a series of essays on the difficult subject of NHS reform. The first (by Grimes) denies the NHS is inefficient, claiming it leads the world (contradicted by research on various measures IEA, p. 82), dismisses the idea that people must take more responsibility for their own health, and challenges the application of market forces - we simply need to spend more money. The second essay (by Taylor-Gooby) concedes inefficiency, accepts some of the recently announced Coalition reforms (claiming they were Labour's anyway), requires people to be encouraged to live more healthily and points to local social health enterprises as a means of increasing the efficient allocation of resources. Finally, Grahame Morris MP fears that the "commercialisation" of public services will open the ideological floodgates, but then reminds his by now thoroughly confused colleagues of the need to restore confidence in public services and the public sector workforce:

"Slow moving monolithic bureaucracies at local and national level need to become more responsive and we must recognise that the move towards the private sector was in part inspired by the refusal of some services to adapt and change. Trade unions and staff associations must become part of the solution to improving services...".

As a pragmatist I would agree with Grahame, but doubt the ability of the entrenched public sector workforce to change from within. The idea of exposing the NHS to competition - even from social enterprise - would seem likely to help ensure change is achieved.

It's just a pity that The Red Book is focused more on pointlessly proselytizing about 'living the socialist life' than drawing helpful conclusions based on hard facts. Presumably it has left the faithful wandering confused among the wards of some figurative NHS hospital rather than focused on improving healthcare.

And therein lies the real message in The Red Book: living a dogmatic life is a terrible waste of time and energy that would be better spent helping to clearly identify problems and figure out how to solve them.