Have yourself a merry/melancholy/some other emotion Christmas

Christmas looms so large in our minds that it distorts our sense of time. Rather than seeing one day ahead, of feasting and entertaining, Christmas appears like a prolonged season. Women (who in most households are responsible for provisioning, entertaining etc) stock up as if preparing for the siege of Malta. Siege-panic is also driven by the many examples in the media of well-stocked Christmas tables, surrounded by contented families enjoying the most expensive gifts. However, the urge to eat well and buy gifts is driven by more than imitative consumerism. Parents give gifts to bring happiness to their children, and, by seeing the pleasure these gifts evoke, to themselves. The desire for your children to be happy is a recognition that their lives will not always be so. But seeing their happiness pushes from our minds the pain we feel when we think of those we have loved (still love) that are no longer round the table, telling their usual jokes, laughing in the way we remember. There is another source of melancholy, derived from the passage of time. We remember previous Christmases, when we were younger and had the hopes and expectations of life we see in our children.

This mixture of emotions explains the persistence of Christmas songs that express regret and disillusion, like The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas. Another popular song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from the film Meet Me in St Louis, differs in being melancholy because the singer looks ahead pessimistically to future Christmases. This made the lyrics unacceptable for those who dislike emotional complexity, and new, more upbeat, ones were devised for Frank Sinatra to sing. This re-writing follows another pattern of Christmas - the hope that over-eating, alcohol and jolly songs will swamp any emotions we find painful. Spending becomes a way in which we can avoid understanding ourselves.

The Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex

In a speech at the time he left office, President Eisenhower warned the USA about the power of the military-industrial complex. By this, he meant that US foreign and defence policy was increasingly driven by the needs of an informal coalition between the military and defence contractors. These groups came together because both benefited from an expansion of military expenditure, and were able to generate political support by exaggerating the external threats facing the USA. Since in Eisenhower’s time the main challengers to US dominance were communist states, this meant depicting any foreign leaders not aligned to the USA and any uprisings against foreign regimes as part of a single world ‘communist’ conspiracy. US foreign policy became driven by a kind of collective paranoia, with the USA involved in military interventions and murderous wars in an attempt to fight the incoming tide of this supposed conspiracy. Communism has declined, but the paranoia remains. Imaginary wars on drugs and ‘terror’ have involved real wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the frontier regions of Pakistan.

New technology is promoted with particular enthusiasm by the military-industrial complex, ostensibly because it offers the possibility of gaining an advantage over prospective enemies. But new technology is usually less reliable and more expensive than the equipment it replaces. The more unreliable the technology, the longer the contracts, which offers the prospect of greater profits since contracts for military equipment are awarded on a cost plus basis. And equipment failure and cost over-runs can always be explained to the public as an inevitable risk required for the effective defence of the state.

In British central government, domestic expenditure is far more important than spending on the military. Our own equivalent of the military-industrial complex therefore is built around on the vast sums spent on health and social care, public order, and transport. Public funding for these areas can be seen as a treacle pot from which members of the complex can feed, and there are three ways in which they can do so.

The first is through the privatisation of what were previously regarded as being government services. This has expanded vastly since a neo-Thatcherite government came to power in 1997, and has been rationalised as introducing competitiveness and the efficiencies of the private sector into public services. A key component of privatisation is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI), which involves public authorities paying contractors high fees to rent from them newly-built hospitals, schools and other public buildings (usually with additional payments for servicing the buildings). Besides PFI, there are contracts for transport, prisons, nursing and residential care, cleaning services in public buildings, employment services and so on. Needless to say, finance raised to pay for PFI and related schemes has involved large transfers of public funds to the banking sector.

The second way is through consultancy fees. These have expanded with the introduction of contractual relationships throughout government, usually following privatisation. One or more of the big four professional services firms (PWC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) appear in every such transaction, and are even brought in by government to audit each others’ work, and report on each others’ failures. They have managed to sell a spurious technology of management expertise to politicians and the public, such that no major governmental decisions can be made without their engagement.

The third way is through major IT projects. These have involved the world’s most expensive database (the NHS Programme for IT) which will probably have a final cost of £20 billion, plus such projects as the database for identity cards (£12 to 18 billion), ContactPoint (the database recording all children, costing £1 billion), The Libra court management system (£341 million), and the C-NOMIS offender management system (£279 million). All of these systems have spectacular cost overruns, and have failed to deliver the benefits they initially promised. Very large parts of the NHS Programme for IT are hardly even used.

The complex can therefore be referred to as the ‘Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex’, or ‘PIC Complex’ for short. As with the military-industrial complex in the USA, the PIC Complex in Britain shapes government policy in its own favour. There is no public demand for identity cards, and security experts see them as having a negligible impact on public safety. The phenomenal cost of the scheme is seen as an argument against it. But the very cost of the scheme is the reason it exists - it will produce an endless stream of public funds from the treacle pot for IT companies, professional services firms, and the financial sector. Few if any experts in child care asked for a child database, but we have paid for one which will almost certainly not work, and will divert resources from services which do protect children. The diversion of resources from services which deal with people into IT schemes which enrich the PIC Complex has already happened with C-NOMIS.

How can this be allowed to happen? One reason is that the concentration of power in English government gives great leverage to the PIC Complex. Its members only need to convince a small number of senior politicians and civil servants to secure multi-million pound contracts. This saves all the bother of selling products to lots of local councils, hospitals schools etc, let alone having to convince the public who ultimately pay for them. This is a symbiotic relationship - privatisation and large centralised databases weaken rival local centres of power and hence maintain this leverage. Convincing small numbers of senior politicians and civil servants has proved easy because some are for sale. This is not traditional corruption in which a contractor pays money and then gets what they want, but a new time-displaced version in which the politician favours a contractor and is subsequently rewarded with a seat on the board, consultancies etc. I would not of course allege such a thing about Patricia Hewitt MP, the former Secretary of State for Health, who is currently earning £12,500/month from BT Group (a major contractor for the NHS Programme for IT), and £4,600/month from Alliance Boots (which is a major pharmaceutical distributor to the NHS and a contractor for privatised primary care services). October was a good month, when she also earned £15,000 from Cinven, which owns a chain of private hospitals which contract with the NHS.

Academics are also subsidiary players in the PIC Complex, providing essential legitimation services, using suitably high-minded and abstract terms like ‘contestability’ and ‘choice’. But more of that in a later posting.

Learning our incompetencies

All men at an early age believe they are talented at football. Some (like myself) realise their lack of talent in the first years of primary school. Others persist in years of hope until the final disappointing realisation that theirs will not after all be a life of Premiership fame, Ferraris, and beautiful but expensive girlfriends.

Learning our incompetences helps us avoid wasting time on activities where there are more talented rivals, and enables us to concentrate on what we can do effectively. However, there are some areas of life in which this learning usually fails to take place. Most people, against all the evidence, continue to believe they are ‘above average’ drivers and lovers. Many people also believe that, despite lack of training or any previous evidence of competence, that they can run a pub or a restaurant.

The results of this delusion can be found in every town. Here is an example. My wife is a member of a group of women (which she calls the ‘ladies’) who have worked together in the past, and celebrate each others’ birthdays by meeting for dinner. The restaurant is usually one chosen by the lady with the birthday. The most recent meal was at a new Indian restaurant in Worcestershire. The ladies met there at 8pm. The decor was pleasant, and there were poppadums and chutneys awaiting them at the table. But no waiter came to ask for their orders for drinks, and there was a long delay before any waiter came at all. When this did eventually happen, the ladies decided to skip a starter and ordered main courses. Nothing happened for a very long time. The group at the next table decided that they too had waited for far too long, and decided to leave. The waiter pursued them into the street and told them the food was ready. The food then came for the ladies. It was lukewarm, indicating that it had been cooked some time ago and then forgotten.

No waiter came to ask them if they wanted to order a dessert, so the ladies decided that they would move directly to coffee. A coffee pot arrived, but no cups. The ladies found some in the restaurant and served themselves. They then seized a waiter, who produced three bills. These included one for £27 worth of lager, which they certainly had not drunk. There followed a process of negotiation to reduce the bills. The toilets were in the basement, but when reaching them, the ladies found they were closed, and they were redirected to the disabled toilet at the top of the building (!) By the time they were due to leave it was 11-30pm, and the front door of the restaurant was locked.

The sad thing is that the ladies could have gone to the Spice Cuisine in St John’s in Worcester and paid rather less for an excellent meal, cooked rapidly and served efficiently. But then, the people who run and work in the Spice Cuisine have discovered an area of life in which they are supremely competent. The staff at the other restaurant could try being footballers.

The Hadamar Clinic and humanity

In the summer of 1941, the staff of the Hadamar Psychiatric Clinic in Germany held a party with beer and wine to celebrate the 10,000th patient they had murdered. Initially, the doctors and nurses of the Clinic killed their patients by lethal injections. However, this proved far too slow a process, and so they devised the more cost-effective system of using carbon monoxide in fake shower rooms to kill large numbers at once. The people they murdered were a diverse group of disabled and mentally-ill people, but most had an intellectual disability (called ‘learning disability’ in the UK) and were thus deemed a threat to the efficient survival of the German ‘race’.

The policy of mass murder of people with an intellectual disability by the Nazi regime was an extension of a widely-approved public policy of eugenics. In the first part of the 20th Century, eugenics attracted support from left and right, and from leading intellectuals. Indeed, it was the more socially-progressive societies like Sweden and Canada which at that time most ardently promoted the eugenic policies of the compulsory sterilisation of people with an intellectual disability, and their incarceration in mental handicap hospitals. Eugenics became discredited by its association with the Nazis, and public policy in almost all countries today favours the integration of people with an intellectual disability into the day-to-day life of society. The old hospitals have closed, the rights of disabled people are increasingly protected, and strenuous efforts are made to improve their employment opportunities.

It is tempting to see these changes as marks of ‘progress’, in the sense of an incremental improvement of civilised values from barbarism to humanitarianism. But this would be historically inaccurate. The harsh policies associated with the eugenics movement replaced those influenced by more humane ideas in the 19th Century, which had emphasised the potential of all people with an intellectual disability for learning and social improvement. Rather than a march of progress, our recent history has been a struggle between two views of humans and their worth. Eugenics represented the idea, popularised in the Enlightenment, that human beings are distinguished from other species by their rationality. Rationality then becomes the measure by which people can be ranked, but also a means of determining the general arrangements of society. This legitimises ‘social engineering’, or the application by those in power of measures to shape the lives of those deemed less rational than themselves. A fear in the early 20th Century that the less rational sections of the population were increasing in numbers compared to the more rational created support for eugenic ideas, and led to the ultimate Nazi social engineering project at both the Hadamar Clinic and the mass industrial-scale killings that followed.

There is another and older view of humankind: that each of us possesses an essential essence or soul, that gives us our human character and by which we can be judged. The quality of our souls is unrelated to our physical strength, our intelligence, or our rank in society: a person with an intellectual disability can have a soul more worthy than that of a scientist that sneers at him. This is of course a fundamentally religious outlook, which should make us very troubled by attempts to drive out religion in the name of science. What, therefore, should be the duty of the scientist and the intellectual according to this older view of mankind? It should be to find out the truth and tell it to others, to maintain knowledge in society from one generation to another, to help people reflect deeply on their values and choices, and to do all this with humility.

The curse of the generic

I became an (unqualified) social worker in the early 1970s, just after the creation of social services departments in England. These merged three former organisations, each of which comprised professionals skilled and experienced in work with distinct groups of people: children’s departments employed children’s officers who dealt with child protection and adoption and fostering; welfare departments employed welfare officers who maintained long-term contact with disabled people; and mental health sections of local health departments had their mental welfare officers who supported people with a mental illness living outside hospital.

The decision to merge these departments followed the ‘Seebohm Report’, which correctly noted that some families were involved with two or three of these agencies, and incorrectly proposed that it would be more efficient to have a single generic ‘family’ service. The resulting merged social services departments were large and had management hierarchies rather than being led by a senior professional. The commitment to ‘generic’ social work, in which each member of staff dealt with the full range of clients, became departmental orthodoxy. Both these trends led to a rapid exit of the most skilled and senior staff. They were replaced during my first year as a social worker by people like me: well-meaning, untrained and incompetent.

The results across the country were a radical decline in the quality of child protection, and support for disabled and mentally-ill people. The first indicator of this was the avoidable death of the child Maria Caldwell. The subsequent official enquiry identified that a major cause of institutional failure was the confusion among social workers about whether their primary responsibility was to the child or to the ‘family’ (ie her parents). This was the first of many such enquiries, which led to a succession of management ‘solutions’, from inter-agency committees, registers of children at risk, centrally-imposed targets, inspections, child databases, and repeated re-organisations. No-one in power paid much attention to enhancing the professional skills of social workers involved with children, enabling them to develop specialist skills, or setting up the kind of small specialised and professionally-run departments that had been a success in the past. When specialism did arrive, it was implemented as part of a bizarre governmental reform which merged local authority child protection services with local education departments.

Why this resistance to specialism? I think it is a product of the managerial control that arises with the creation of large public organisations. In small organisations, staff are known as individuals, and there is an awareness of their different strengths. Staff can be assigned to different work informally, and their supervisors can generally assess their performance by observation and informal meetings. Large organisations see staff as a block of people to be matched with some quantitative indicator of workload. It is easier to move people around if they are supposed to have generic responsibilities rather than diverse specialist skills.

The drive to generic work and consequent de-professionalisation arises in many large public organisations. This can occur even in organisations in which specialist professional skills are regarded by almost everyone as being essential. The National Health Service has attempted to grade all its diverse professions on a single ‘knowledge and skills framework’ - a spectacular example of the kind of ‘blue skies’ (crackpot) thinking that occurs in very large organisations. At the same time, the government has attempted to reduce the time spent in specialist medical training. There are similar trends in universities. These value their most highly skilled staff, at least as long as they attract large research grants, but post-doctoral researchers and academic staff who specialise in teaching are sometimes treated as classes of helots, interchangeable and disposable.

The curse of the generic partly explains an apparent paradox: as public organisations get larger and employ more managers, the less competent they are in delivering effective public services. There are other explanations for this paradox: the conversion of previously-autonomous professionals into highly-regulated functionaries produces the alienation familiar in industrial process work. Also, long management hierarchies move decision-making further from the organisations’ customers, who usually encounter junior members of staff with limited authority to adapt procedures to meet individual needs.

We therefore need revolutionary change - towards small-scale public services, with a re-assertion of professional specialism and autonomy. We need to down-size schools with thousands of pupils, so-called ‘local’ authorities which cover wide areas of the country and multiple and formerly self-governing towns, and large welfare departments which fail to protect children at risk or adequately support the disabled. Of course, some public agencies will always need to be large: big cities need governments, and the large numbers of students in higher education will probably require large universities. However, authority can be devolved within cities to community councils (as in Scotland and Wales), while universities can operate more on the Oxbridge model, with academic staff working in semi-autonomous colleges. After all, Oxford and Cambridge Universities have hardly been failures despite lacking the benefits of centralised management.

Disneyfying the body

People have probably always regarded animals as being versions of themselves, albeit devoid of everyday speech and with some enhanced senses (smell, vision) or physical abilities (strength, speed). People develop deeper relationships with animals, relying on them as workmates, regarding them as personal friends: their grief at the loss of a favoured pet matches what they would experience at the loss of a child or sibling.

This tendency seems to be an extension of our innate ability to empathise with each other - an ability said to be lacking among people with Autism. It is one step from understanding animals as if they are human to telling stories of them as humans, speaking and wearing clothes. I call this process ‘Disneyfication’ after Walt Disney, who set up theme parks full of humans pretending to be animals, to resemble cartoon characters of animals resembling humans.

Disneyfication does not stop with animals. Genes can be Disneyfied too: Richard Dawkins has sold a lot of books called ‘The Selfish Gene’. I went to a presentation this week on techniques for regenerating cells in the Central Nervous System. The researcher spoke unselfconsciously about neural cells ‘choosing’ between options, and ‘preferring’ one binding site to another. I am sure a Disney or Pixar cartoon of neural cells, dressed as people, falling in love, and plotting with each other to rebuild a brain will arrive soon at local cinemas.

Surviving school

My parents were very ill-advised about my secondary education. I was raised in Shirley, a suburb just outside the Birmingham City boundary. At the time I was in primary school, Shirley fell within Warwickshire Education Authority, regarded as one of the worst in the country. Children from Shirley who passed the ‘11 plus’ exam had the option of going to grammar schools in Birmingham, and many took advantage of this. However, by the time I was eleven, Shirley came within the new Solihull Education Authority, which set up its own grammar schools. The whole of my ‘A stream’ class in primary school went to the new Tudor Grange Grammar School, while my parents sent me, alone, to King Edward’s Camp Hill Grammar School in Birmingham. At 13, I passed to King Edward’s School, which at that time was a direct grant school, with a combination of fee-paying students of well-off parents and scholarship boys from ordinary families. So all my social connections and friendships were disrupted twice in two years, and I moved to a school where I knew no-one and with an ethos I found incomprehensible. To make matters worse, I needed to take three buses each way to get there, with a commute of over an hour.

The ethos of the school was incomprehensible because it involved a strange nostalgia for an imagined mediaeval England. The headmaster renamed his post ‘chief master’ to revive some supposed tradition, and the school was organised into ‘houses’ to mimic private schools. The school’s sports teams only ever played private schools such as Bromsgrove School, Malvern College and the like, and never the oiks of such schools as King Edward’s Camp Hill. Around the school were boards with the names of old boys who had gone to various Oxbridge colleges. London University was given a board on its own, and there was one for ‘other universities’. Classics was the most esteemed academic subject, and there was a sneering approach to anything practical. I completed a science project on computers (then in their very early days), and the teacher dismissed it for being too technological. There were endless petty distinctions and grades among the students, all to create a world of dull conforming hierarchy. So a school in a metal-bashing city famous for its inventiveness and outspokenness produced students equipped to thrive in a synthetic medieval nostalgia.

I left the school with relief at the age of 18 and went to Handsworth Technical College and completed three social science A levels in a year. My life opened out: I enjoyed the chance to learn as an adult, study things I enjoyed, and meet people from different cultures. I then went to the London School of Economics and studied at a time when English universities were at their peak, full of new ideas about education and the world, taking students from a wider social background than before, but not yet swamped by the vast numbers who come to university now. In those days, undergraduates were tutored by professors and the leading academics of the day: mine included Alexander Irvine (later Lord Chancellor); Edward Mishan (the first economist to challenge the worship of growth); and an American lawyer William Letwin (father of the Conservative politician).

Now my life has come full circle. I work in a university about a quarter of a mile from King Edward’s School. It takes me a long commute of an hour to reach work from home. The University is thankfully more aware than King Edward’s School of the need to be in the forefront of knowledge and to engage with its City. But I miss the intellectual challenge I encountered at the London School of Economics, and the hope for a better future which inspired me when I was a younger man. I was unhappy with the synthetic mediaeval nostalgia of King Edward's School, but I can now see that, for its teachers, it was an attempt to maintain the continuity of the human spirit after the terrible years of war they had experienced. Their beliefs, however old-fashioned, were in any case superior to morality of money and power that eventually triumphed in England.