The lost insight

1976 did not begin well for me. I was living alone in a town where I knew no-one, still legally married and waiting for divorce, working unhappily as a social worker in West Lothian. I could have regarded my new single status as an opportunity and travelled. But I was wounded and needed to return home. So, quite by chance, I learnt of a job with the new Employment Rehabilitation Research Centre (ERRC) in Birmingham. I was interviewed in London by the Head of the Centre, Dr Paul Cornes, and became a ‘Higher Social Work Researcher’ with the Manpower Services Commission. The ERRC was an unusual creation. Part of a civil service agency, it was intended to help solve the problem of employment rehabilitation centres. These provided courses a few weeks long for disabled people, with the aim of helping them return to ‘open’ employment (ie jobs in the ordinary labour market, rather than sheltered work). Being part of the civil service was a problem - publications were seen as breaches of the Official Secrets Act. The senior civil servants who had seen the Centre as a solution were soon replaced by newcomers who saw it as a problem. This was not helped by the almost total ignorance among the same senior  senior civil servants of disability or employment rehabilitation. Paul Cornes navigated his role with great skill and increasing frustration, and proved one of the best bosses I ever had.

I joined the ERRC a few months after it began work, and replaced a kindly, committed but rather intense social worker called John Hannigan. The two of us overlapped in post for a week, to enable me to learn from him. We visited one or more (I forget how many) employment rehabilitation centres, and spent a lot of time talking. On the Friday, just after lunch, John gave me his considered verdict about myself, which went something like this:
“You’re a strange contradiction Stuart. On the face of it, you’re a brash loudmouth, but...”
At that point, someone came in the office and I never learnt the rest of the sentence. John’s great insight about me was lost forever. So I carried on being a brash loudmouth, albeit with a newly-acquired doubt that I might be a different sort of person underneath.

I stayed at the ERRC for some years, and, as usual, failed to take advantage of my employment. I did not publish, did not make the kind of contacts that would have developed a career in disability research, and failed to get a transfer to the permanent civil service. However, the research I carried out at the ERRC did form the basis for my PhD, and I spotted a rather special woman on the staff of the employment rehabilitation centre next door. The ERRC has long gone, but our marriage has remained the most important thing in my life.

The land of make-believe

You are watching the television programme Who do you think you are?, in which a famous person traces their family background. They start by visiting an aged relative. You see the famous person in their car talking about what they expect to learn from this visit and why this is important to them. You next see the car pulling up to the house of the aged relative and the famous person getting out and going to the front door. Inside the house, you see the aged relative go the front door, open it, and say “What a surprise”.

It is not a surprise, of course. There is a cameraman in the house, probably supported by a producer, a lighting engineer and a sound engineer. The scene will have been carefully set up. The scenes outside the house and in the car (perhaps filmed on a different day) will also have been rehearsed and then edited. The whole scene, in other words, is a skilful fraud. But it is fraud we are used to in factual programmes just as much as in film and television drama. This is the ‘naturalistic’ model, or the pretence that we watch people behaving spontaneously in the complete absence of all the cameras and the teams of people that make the pictures and sound happen. We are so used to this fraud that we no longer see it as such. When we see a lone presenter walking across the moors or up a mountain, we believe she is alone on the hills. Yet we see pictures of her taken from a helicopter, or pictures of her struggling up to some peak taken by a cameraman waiting for her on that peak. We are led to believe the commentator has walked the whole distance by themselves and found their own accommodation or pitched their own tent. The true surprise occurs when a commentator on television does mention his cameraman or production crew.

The frauds can go further. Wildlife programmes intersperse shots of animals in the wild (usually taken by highly-skilled camera team after weeks of careful work) with pictures of similar animals in zoos. This is all to give the impression that when we see an animal such as a polar bear go into its lair in the wild, we are then seeing the same polar bear in its lair feeding its cubs even though these later shots are actually of a different polar bear filmed in a zoo. ‘Reality’ television programmes involve set piece arguments provoked by a presenter, all to give the impression that the performers before us present a shocking insight into the raw side of life. More shamefully, contests on children’s television programmes have been fixed to produce the most entertaining outcome. 

This does not occur because the people who produce television are any more dishonest than the rest of us. Rather, they would probably justify these deceptions on the grounds that they help viewers comprehend an underlying truth (what family history tells us of the past, what a particular long walk is like, how polar bears feed their young, and so on). But they also do so to conform with the public’s expectations of television, derived in turn from films and other drama which, with very few exceptions, obey the ‘naturalistic’ model. This is so well-established that a whole genre of comic television programmes exists in which a presenter points out examples where the mechanics of film-making have accidentally been made evident (a visible sound boom or a shot of a camera crew in a mirror). These programmes are supposed to be funny because they show a breach of a sacrosanct social convention.

This is very different from drama on stage, in which it is more evident that we are watching actors portraying characters and following a script written for them. A good actor can make the audience forget this, provided the audience are engaged. Television, by contrast, requires less engagement by its audience and less suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the naturalistic model and the lack of apparent difference between factual and fictional programmes is a cause of morbid confusion for some television viewers, who send flowers when a character (not an actor) in a soap opera dies. Others have interpreted science fiction films and television programmes as the truth and truly believe that a race of intelligent reptiles have taken on the appearance of world leaders, or that the moon landings were an elaborate fake. For them, television (whatever they are watching) is the true reality, while their daily lives are but flickering images on the walls of the cave.

Going local

The Conservative Party has recently discovered to its dismay that it is unpopular. This is despite having a leader who seems fluent and intelligent, and who actively promotes ideas about society and politics that deserve some respect. These ideas (summarised as ‘localism’ and the ‘big society’) echo some fundamental themes in British conservatism, dating from Edmund Burke or before. In particular, conservatives propose that society is not a structure that can be demolished and rebuilt at will, but an organic whole, in which each citizen has a wide range of personal affiliations which involve mutual interdependence, guidance, and support. The term ‘big society’ has presumably been coined by David Cameron’s advisors to contrast with ‘big government’, which, according to conservatives, involves the replacement of these relationships by the impersonal imposition of centrally-determined rules, and the creation of subordination to the state in place of the mutual interdependence of free people. Localism is the logical consequence of this central idea. Conservatives see an efficient government as an essential requirement for a civilised society, but wherever possible it should be organised as part of that society, being delivered locally by people who know each other’s needs, rather than imposed centrally.  

Conservatives do not of course believe in equality as a virtue. Indeed, many conservative theorists celebrate inequality - a feature that makes conservatism particularly attractive for those with great wealth or high social status. Yet conservatives are usually reluctant to recognise that the extreme inequalities in this country undermine their very aspirations for both the big society and localism. Wealthy corporations and individuals make decisions with little regard for the day-to-day lives of their workers or the people who live down the road from their offices and factories. They prefer to build houses where they like and erect large standardised supermarkets to replace the distinctive local shops in our traditional high streets. Local control of planning would inevitably obstruct such developments.

These conflicts can be seen in the government’s Localism Act and its proposals for neighbourhood planning. One element of the Act is the ‘community right to challenge’. This involves parish and town councils taking over the running of services previously provided by city, county or district councils. But once a case is made by the parish or town council, then the service is open to tender. This means that the likes of Serco and Capita, which excel at winning contracts but not at providing decent services, will move in and expand their empires.

Another conflict, particularly relevant to my own village, is over new housing. The Localism Act has introduced ‘neighbourhood planning’, which is intended to give individual parishes, towns and neighbourhood of cities the right to develop their own plan for the development of their locality. ‘Town planning’, however, no longer involves the sort of vision that gave the world Bath or even Welwyn Garden City. Instead, it now means little more than the allocation of land for housing and commercial development, and ensuring that the necessary services are in place to support them. Nevertheless, devolving the right to determine land use is potentially important. The English countryside with its scattered communities is precious and vulnerable. But developers prefer greenfield sites (which are cheaper) in country villages (which are more attractive for prosperous commuters). Local control over development sites would enable towns and villages to block the speculative housebuilding which has covered so much of the countryside with breeze block and stud walls.

However, localism and neighbourhood planning contradicts the general  operating principles  of national and local government in England, which are based on centralisation, secretiveness, and subservience to the powerful rather than respect for the views of the ordinary citizenry. In my part of England, three district councils have come together to develop the South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). If it had followed the principles of localism, it would have identified future needs for employment, housing, transport and other public services in the South of the County, and then set some general targets to be discussed and implemented locally. Instead, the SWDP not only specifies individual development sites in each town and village, but also the precise number of houses to be built on each site. The total number of houses for South Worcestershire has been based on national targets (no doubt set after a cosy discussion between senior civil servants and the building industry), and the allocation of housing numbers to individual towns and villages has been based on sites already identified by developers. A ‘consultation’ by the District Council’s planning department consisted of a planner visiting the village hall and telling us what was going to happen. 

And so Malvern Hills District Council, which only six years ago fought against an appeal by a developer to despoil a local view in my village, now supports the SWDP which schedules the very same site for 62 houses. At the same time, it is organising workshops to explain its commitment to localism. Perhaps they should listening to people as a first step.