Some thoughts on the call from the Chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee for a root-and-branch examination of the civil service.

Bernard Jenkin made a call for a Parliamentary Commission on the Civil Service in a speech to one of my old trade unions – the FDA Union. Mr Jenkin is the Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee – the select committee I keep closest eye on given my civil service background. They are also the select committee that keeps the closest eye on Puffles – with a third of its membership following Whitehall & Westminster’s favourite dragon fairy. It was also on this committee that Puffles was first mentioned in a parliamentary debate. See Qs 231, 235 (asked by Jenkin himself) and 242 – asked by one of Puffles’ followers, Greg Mulholland MP, in the evidence session on Public Engagement in Policy Making.

So…should we have a parliamentary commission?

There needs to be a ‘something’. What that ‘something’ is, I’m fairly open-mined. What matters is the robustness of the evidence presented, the resources the ‘something’ has to scrutinise that evidence, and the likelihood that the recommendations stemming from that ‘something’ are implemented.

Parliamentary commission, royal commission, government review, independent review, judge-led review, think-force paper – it could come from any of those. In the grand scheme of things, call it what you want.

What I fear will get missed out is the millstone currently hanging around Nick Clegg’s neck: constitutional reform. That’s his area of policy responsibility, yet in so many high profile areas of constitutional reform he’s not been able to deliver. I made a similar point in a blogpost on the equal marriage debate. Unpicking the Church of England’s current legal rights and responsibilities started pulling on strings around much needed House of Lords reform – not just because of bishops but because of this, which then leads to undermining the hereditary principle in politics [Good], which then leads to questions on the legitimacy of the monarch.

A small number of chaps working for a smaller number of chaps scrutinised by a larger number of a small number of chaps

This was the world that Whitehall and Westminster was back in the times that all things Northcote Trevelyan were written. Ministers are responsible for policy, civil servants for delivery, and ministers are responsible to Parliament which is then responsible and accountable to the electorate. In those days though, the policy-making functions within the civil service were much smaller than they are today. There was also a much greater role for local government too – as Tristram Hunt describes beautifully in his book Building Jerusalem - essential reading for anyone interested in local government & public services.

Since Northcote Trevelyan, there were arguably two points in history when the principles of civil service accountability & functions should have been reviewed and refreshed in a big way. The first being 1945 and the post-war consensus. The massive growth of public services – including the NHS, along with the widespread nationalisations of major industries (which, to all intents and purposes for the War were under state control anyway) involved a significant growth in the number of people who were working in the public sector, as well as the increased complexity of those operations. The second being the large-scale privatisation & outsourcing brought in by Thatcher & subsequent administrations. Contractual vs democratic accountability anyone?

Why a root and branch review?

One of the reasons why now is a good time to have a root and branch review and refresh of what the civil service should be there for is the increasing connectivity people and institutions have with each other in this digital age. The thing is, once you start teasing away at the tensions within existing policy-making processes, a number of other tensions are exposed – ones that the civil service has little influence over but are stuck with either way: The regular reshuffling of ministers is but one example. Incredibly destabilising not just for civil servants, but for all those with an interest in delivering public services. For some of the non-state organisations delivering public services or government programmes, a change of minister (even in the same party) can be the difference between a contract going ahead or being cancelled.

What I’m saying is that a parliamentary commission on the civil service cannot be looked at in isolation. You’ve got to make it consistent with something similar for the role of Parliament and government. Otherwise you run the risk of having a very partisan commission that ends up weakening/strengthening one institution while doing nothing with the others to ensure that all things balance out. For example you don’t want an over-strong civil service that ends up being viewed by citizens as a powerful unaccountable technocracy in the way the European Commission is. You also don’t want to weaken the civil service to the extent that ministers can easily override important checks and balances that are in place. e.g. “No Minister, you cannot do that because The Law prevents you from doing so.” Then there’s the problem of Parliament – which is far too weak vis-a-vis both the civil service and ministers. The payroll vote and inherent conflict of interest of MPs being ministers is the biggest problem for me. It is an inherent conflict of interest to have MPs tasked with scrutinising the executive being members of that very executive. Have them appear before MPs as they currently do in select committees, business questions and urgent questions, but as ministers only, not as voting MPs.

Who’s said what so far?

The FDA Union published Delivering for the Nation: Securing a World-Class Civil Service. A number of interesting recommendations indeed – in particular on training as well as on big-picture policy making principles. I was struck by the line about departments being given a budget by The Treasury and having to work backwards – which reflects John Birds’ thoughts at JCI Cambridge last week. Interesting to note too that the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Jon Trickett has been quoted by the Institute for Government that tackling narrow diversity in the senior civil service will be something a future Labour government will tackle. It’s a fair comment to make given how things seem to have gone backwards diversity-wise (in particular for women) in the senior civil service. Read this by Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government.

What seems to be missing in the FDA’s report is a discussion about open policy-making in an era of social and digital media. My anecdotal feeling is that trade unions in general are a little behind the curve on digital and social media in general, looking perhaps to the Labour Party for initiative rather than outwards towards both grassroots members and wider communities.

Will we get a Parliamentary Commission?

Unlikely in the next two years – I expect ministers will three-line-whip the proposal out of the water. The Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the Civil Service have both come out against the plan. It’s something that may come up again after the next general election. I get the feeling that the top of Whitehall wants to just get on and implement the existing reform plan as is, rather than re-opening debates that they feel have already been had.

Technical policy expertise – can we have it back please?

My remaining big concern about the civil service though is about the hollowing out of expert policy teams, and how dependent the civil service has become on secondments from outside the civil service in a number of specialist policy areas – especially those that have lots of very expensive lobbyists thrown at them by wealthy interests. If we are to have a parliamentary commission on the civil service, I’d like to see that issue in examined in detail. In particular, I’d like to see some evidence and analysis around impact (on the economy and society) and expenditure vs the resource (including numbers and types of) allocated to the various policy and delivery functions.

Food for thought.

A write-up of John Bird’s recent visit to Cambridge

A few of you may know that I am a member of JCI Cambridge, the Cambridge branch of Junior Chambers International, an organisation that seeks to develop the professional skills of young professionals through series of self-organised events and community projects. Last month, our branch adopted the Cambridgeshire branch of Mind, the mental health charity, as our charity for the year. The person who brought me into JCI Cambridge was Jenny Willatt, so it’s all her fault really. In the Cambridge branch there are about 50 of us, but something tells me there is huge potential to grow that number – particularly in some of the larger public sector organisations, as anecdotally much of the membership comes from smaller private sector organisations based locally.

John Birds’ Words

It’s his Twitter-handle too @JohnBirdsWords. Or John Bird Swords, if you like. And he had a lot to say – but given what he’s been through in his 67 years on this planet, there was more than enough content to pack into the couple of hours he had with us. The big thing I took away as an interesting fact was the role Gordon and the late Anita Roddick (of The Body Shop) had on the founding of The Big Issue - the weekly magazine sold by people who are homeless and those in unstable housing. Cambridge has a separate local magazine written by and sold by people who are homeless too – FLACK Cambridge. Interestingly, The Independent pulled up this article from 1995 which covers it too.

Having moved on from some rip-roaringly funny-but-painful anecdotes of getting The Big Issue of the ground, John then turned his fire both on charities and on the state. What I found interesting was that he had come to a number of similar conclusions that I had come to – even though we both come from very different backgrounds. The other thing that was interesting was that he had similar criticisms about government grant making schemes that Cambridge entrepreneur Peter Dawe had when he did a talk for JCI Cambridge about the big mistakes he had made (and what he learnt from them) in the world of business. There was me nodding in agreement to both when they said that grant making schemes often benefit those who are better at filling in the forms rather than helping people develop a really great idea.

‘We’re here to help you, but no you cannot join our board of directors’

One of the things I asked myself following John’s paraphrased observation above, was to what extent the real ‘decision makers’ in government, the civil service and in large charities had experience of being dependent service users of the operations that they are responsible for.

Think about that for a moment.

Great school, top college, oxbridge/redbrick university, top internships, highly-sought-after graduate placement, fast-tracked to the top, running large public sector organisation. (I didn’t have Sir Jeremy Heywood in mind – but looking at his wikipedia page…). On internships, Tanya de Grunwald picked up the issue of unpaid internships with charities a couple of years ago.

Actually, it’s unfair to focus on a single individual. I alluded to the same in my earlier blogpost about Jo Johnson’s recent appointment. But what is the impact of not having people who have experience of either frontline delivery experience or receiving the public services directly, within the decision-making functions of your organisation? For a start, there is the perspective. When you start dealing with such large numbers of people and such huge financial sums, it’s all too easy to forget that these are human beings we are dealing with. It’s also all too easy to forget that you need to be careful with the small amounts of money when you look at it from the perspective of a tax-payer on the minimum wage.

John raises a reasonable point: What is the route from dependent service-user to chief executive of your organisation? How can someone who has been kicked out by their parents, fled from domestic violence and found themselves homeless, become director of housing policy in a Whitehall department? the single mother with lots of potential but who has been failed by the system and has no qualifications become permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions? This is where I hope the Civil Service Apprenticeship Scheme will be expanded, having worked with some talented apprentices on a departmental scheme in my final year in Whitehall.

John on how to restructure Whitehall

“Why can’t we bring in something that says if you cut spending on youth clubs in economically deprived areas, it is likely you will have to increase spending by this much”?

Or in management-speak, feedback mechanisms and automatic stabilisers. It’s what some politicians don’t understand about our benefits system: The automatic stabilisers kick in for a reason: eg people have lost their jobs. Therefore, in order to reduce spending, do you a) get people into jobs or b) artificially clamp down on the benefits system?

A party-political point maybe, but because of the way Whitehall is structured, individual ministers can only work with the levers that they have. Housing ministers cannot do anything about using the tax system to deal with problems in the housing market because the levers are in The Treasury. Employment ministers can only do so much in their area where levers are held by ministers in the Department for Business. The Universities Minister can only do so much on accessibility if the primary and secondary education system is not functioning in a manner where children with huge potential from economically deprived areas are not mentored and inspired to reach for the stars. Health ministers can only do so much if the minister for sports is not playing ball.

…And all of the above are barriers before we’ve even considered whether ministers as individuals get on with each other or not. Just because they are in the same party doesn’t mean they are friends. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite -as any political activist will tell you.

“That’s all very well Pooffles, but why was he telling a bunch of people not in the private sector this? Shouldn’t he be telling civil servants and politicians this?”

Chances are he already is. What pleased me was that, between the lines he was encouraging people to become interested in local and national politics. He was also telling people what things they need to learn about too. He said that people needed to learn about systems – about how things functioned: The political system, the economic system, the legal system. Once you’ve got the basics of that sussed, then you can start scrutinising things more effectively. For Cambridge-dwellers it might mean going along to and keeping tabs on your local area committee. Or for those using social media, engaging in local politics through some of the people linked in this blogpost.

Next steps?

For JCI Cambridge, one of the things worth thinking about in terms of future speakers is having a few of the younger councillors (Carina, Samantha and Ian, Puffles is looking at you) coming along to take part in a panel discussion, as well as council officials doing one explaining what they do on the inside day-to-day. After all, many JCI members pay council tax in Cambridge, so isn’t it worth finding out what the money is spent on?

A short series of thoughts on today’s Public Accounts Committee hearing on tax avoidance featuring Google, Ernst and Young and HMRC, along with the Goldman Sachs ruling.

There were two things in the news today on all things tax avoidance. The first was the Public Accounts Committee hearing on tax avoidance – Google’s UK executives being hauled back before the powerful select committee of MPs. The second was the High Court judgement on HMRC’s tax deal with Goldman Sachs, which the judge ruled in HMRC’s favour against a legal challenge brought by UKUncut’s legal arm.

Previous blogposts on tax avoidance

I’ve blogged before on this subject, in particular at:

• Tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax breaks – can we get definitions right please?
• Multinationals, franchises, the superwealthy and tax avoidance
• Does a Parliament-inspired consumer boycott let MPs off the hook on tax avoidance?

Browsing through Twitter on the #PAC hashtag today, I’ve noticed that opinion has become polarised. Tax professionals have come out against the Public Accounts Committee, while activists have come out in favour.

Richard Murphy’s take on today’s proceedings makes for interesting reading. I’m particularly interested in the final points that he makes – 3) and 4), in which I broadly agree with him. The risk that tax professionals face is that their public profile is beginning to look like they are the apologists for the tax-avoiding super-wealthy. HMRC on the other hand continues to have sand kicked in its face, even though there are growing numbers who want HMRC to take a stronger stance against tax avoidance by the super-wealthy.

“Hang on Pooffles, isn’t it the job of tax professionals to reduce the tax burden of their clients? So long as that is legal, what’s the problem?”

Depends how big a world view you are taking it from. From a narrow world view, it’s a perfectly understandable and rational thing to do: taking the law as is, and trying to use it in a manner that benefits you. The two problems are:

1. Tax avoidance is a very murky area, not helped by the 14,000 pages of tax code the UK currently has
2. People are looking at headline numbers – things like total profits, shareholder dividends, executive remuneration and (given the economic context of austerity) are not liking what they see.

Thus what’s coming out on Twitter seems to be:

• tax professionals on one side tearing their hair out when an MP on the Public Accounts Committee is seen to make some basic errors of interpreting that tax code
• activists tearing their hair out because those appearing before them seem utterly ignorant of the wider social context of these headline figures.

So the question then is: How do you reconcile the two? (Can you reconcile the two?)

“Let’s put that in the ‘too difficult to deal with’ tray”

I gave Treasury an absolute kicking in an earlier blogpost in the section with the above title. Treasury has got to take the initiative to simplify the tax code significantly. At the same time, it needs to avoid the risk of simplifying it in favour of those who, in my opinion already have too much. (The super-wealthy). I recognise though that this is a very  ’Political’ point, and that people with different dispositions may disagree.

If The Treasury won’t take the initiative on this, then the onus falls onto Parliament. There is only so long MPs can haul firms before them to be harangued. I believe we’ve already passed that point, and that Margaret Hodge (Chair of the Public Accounts Committee) has got to set in train by whatever means, a process that does the job that Treasury seems unwilling or unable to do. This also means engaging with tax professionals too.

“But Pooffles! What about my clients? Won’t someone think about the poor little rich people?!?!”

I jest – tax professionals are not simply there to see how much they can screw the taxman for on behalf of their offshore clients. Amongst other things, they take some of the burden off of small businesses when it comes to managing tax. The time spent having to manage tax issues is money not spent focussing on improving things like customer services, or products.

The problem at the moment seems to be that in criticising politicians, tax professionals are seen in the eyes of the public to be defending the super-wealthy and tax-avoiding corporations. What I’d like to see coming from the world of tax professionals are some solutions: solutions that, in the eyes of the public are seen to be socially just. Because if bigger dents can be made in the amount of money lost to tax avoidance can be made, it might have an impact on the cuts to public services and/or reduce the tax burden on the rest of us.

What about HMRC? Are they not off the hook?

Turning around HMRC is like turning around a super-tanker. What to do about them is something I’ll leave to someone more familiar with the inner workings of the organisation. But the status quo is unsustainable.

Some thoughts from a couple of talks inside Cambridge’s public policy community

Puffles has been flying around the Cambridge Public Policy community of late. Talks hosted by the Cambridge Science and Policy Exchange, by the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities, and the Cambridge Public Policy programme have brought a few issues to the surface.

Prof Henry Tam – are we living in a plutocracy?

The name may ring a bell with some of you. Henry Tam used to be the deputy director for community empowerment delivery at the Department for Communities and Local Government, one of the senior civil servants that worked on the Communities in Control White Paper, and formerly the Head of Civil Renewal at the Home Office. He’s now back in academia both at Cambridge and at Birkbeck, and blogs here.

The picture Henry painted was one where the social progress of the post-war consensus, in particular with income disparities, has been undermined by the neo-liberal consensus. He looked at time-series data on income & wealth – citing these as the strongest indicators of power. The picture isn’t good, as the data from the Equality Trust show.

He also looked at the historical context, citing Ancient Rome, the Catholic Church in the middle ages and France in the years preceding the 1789 revolution. With the Church in particular, one of the core societal beliefs was the belief in the monopoly of salvation: – only through the organised church can you get this. As a result, church gained huge wealth and power. As it became institutionalised, people had to submit to the church because of both the belief & power of the institution. Challenge that & you could get killed – and people did. “In the next world, you’ll get your share. In the mean time…” Exactly. With France just before the revolution, it was the belief that there was this ‘special’ group of people – the aristocracy. The belief they propagated was that the land has belonged to them and they should be treated with deference & respect…& should not be taxed. While the workers on the land should be.

In both those cases, the beliefs were undermined, leading to the rebellions, revolts and revolutions.

Henry then compared those historical precedents to today – the belief around the core concepts of the neo-liberal consensus. This is especially important in public policy debates today because the acceptance or otherwise of this framework has a huge impact on the sort of policy responses that are dreamt up by policy-makers. One of those is about the role of the public sector. Another is about the level of public sector spending. Coalition ministers have framed the debate around Labour’s record on public spending – set in concrete by Liam Byrne’s extremely ill-judged note to his successor David Laws just after the 2010 general election. Thus making it much harder for Labour to argue for any alternative.

The wider question that Henry tried to unpick was who are the people and institutions that can unpick the neo-liberal consensus given that the data tells us that this consensus is leading to policies that is exacerbating things like climate change, growing polarisation of society and the enrichment of the top 1% to levels not seen before. In particular what is the role of academia? One of the big barriers for academia is fear of losing funding – something that impacts charities that deliver state contracts too. On the latter, this was explored in a fairly old paper from the Charity Commission. How can academia and academics retain their independence of thought from the state without having to worry about funding impacts of any criticism of policies of the government of the day?

Dr Hugh Hunt – Engineering the Climate

Dr Hunt covered similar material (but at greater depth) from his talk at Science Day at the Department for Communities and Local Government. (He’s working on the SPICE project) The big thing that came out of this discussion for me was the huge barrier between the science world and the public policy world. Ditto the science world and mainstream media & through them, the general public.

One issue – one that came up at the Cambridge Science and Policy Exchange event, was the engagement of scientists with politics. For whatever reasons, there are scientists that choose not to engage with politics and the public policy processes. Yet it is essential that scientists do this because – and as Dr Hunt set out clearly, there are some very difficult choices that need to be made in terms of mitigating for, and adapting to climate change. But science and scientists need to be at the heart of the conversation, informing and educating the public as well as policy-makers, not least so that people are equipped to deal with and challenge the noise coming out from big corporate interests.

Science and party politics?

This comes back to the point I made in response to Steph Gray: Where do you draw the line between public policy and party politics? If the high level principles are set at a party political level, doesn’t this require at least some scientists to become active in political parties? The challenge with that is that the world of party politics is a very messy, opinionated and potentially dangerous one – to ones reputations anyway! Hence I use the term ‘Whitehall jungle’. That’s not to say the world of science isn’t just as messy & opinionated – it’s just that in science there is a strong focus on evidence bases. In party politics, it can literally fall down to whether you like the other chap or not, or whether he went to the same public school as you.

The point I’m trying to make here is that scientists need to bring scientific analysis in particular into the realm of politics – to scrutinise what happens in the world of party politics. This is especially the case where politicians try to use weak evidence bases to justify their policies. In the new world of open policy making as well as open data, it is essential that academics and scientists engage with the world of public policy and party politics, if anything to scrutinise and improve the quality of the policies that are ultimately implemented by ministers.

Some thoughts on Phil Rogers’ findings on electoral trends in Cambridge – with some tough questions for Cambridge University colleges and Anglia Ruskin University

This blogpost follows on nicely from my previous one on the role of civic society & local government social media boosting voter turnout & engagement. (If you haven’t read it, it’s here, & puts what follows into context).

The Sage of Cambridge City Politics, Phil Rogers has posted this very interesting analysis of voter turnout & active campaigning.

Before you proceed, please at least scan the graphs in Phil’s blogpost linked above.

Comprendez? Then we can proceed.

“What did Phil have to say?”

There were three things that stood out:

1. There is a correlation between active campaigning and voter turnout
2. There is a correlation between active campaigning by more than one party, and size of majority
3. The wards dominated by Cambridge University student closed residences (ie halls) had low turnouts with low majorities

I’m not going to make the mistake of saying correlation = causation. My interest as per my previous blogpost is in engagement and turnout. What citizens choose to do with that engagement & with their vote is their business. The impact that greater engagement and turnout has is that it helps people exercise an informed vote – which then impacts on the legitimacy of the decisions taken by councillors.

Institutional rather than personal barriers

My interest is on the former rather than the latter. A number of people – myself included have commented (in particular at a national and international level) the lack of talent in political life, and the lack of calibre of a number of people elected to high public office. Rather than applying the same moaning at a local level, I’m looking at institutional barriers to engagement – because I think there’s more to local democracy than casting a vote.

In my previous blogpost I looked at barriers around face-to-face engagement and ‘hustings’. In this one, I want to look at something Phil raised – one that is currently being discussed by a number of Cambridge locals on Twitter as I type this. (See Richard Taylor and Tim Haire in particular). Looking at students in particular, Phil wrote the following:

Student turnout tends to be low for several reasons:

• young people in general have a lower turnout than older people
• many students feel less involved with local government than more permanent residents
• student residences tend to be inaccessible to local party campaigners – colleges do not allow them access to knock on students’ doors, and some colleges refuse to accept election leaflets unless they are individually addressed
• many students were away for the Easter vacation during much of the election campaign

With the second bullet point, how can we encourage students to feel more involved with what goes on in their local community? Especially if every academic year they move to a new residence and/or are kicked out during the holidays to make their rooms available for the lucrative conferencing market?

With the third bullet point in particular, this also applies to sheltered housing. How do you make closed and sheltered housing more accessible for canvassers in particular around election time? (It’s one of the reasons why I abhor gated communities too. I can understand why you’d have them in high crime areas, but Cambridge? Really?)

With the fourth bullet point, this is one for those tabling the university terms. Is there any way to co-ordinate university term times to account for when local elections are on, given that Cambridge has them every year.

“Hang on Pooffles, don’t universities have student societies? Or are they all so far to the left that they fall off the pavement?”

There’s nothing stopping far left candidates from standing, as one or two do regularly. And yes, there are fairly active university party political societies in Cambridge. So part of the response to improve voter engagement and turnout may rest with encouraging party political student activists to play a more formal role in encouraging people to vote – or at least have a look at who happens to be standing before deciding whether to vote or not.

The other issue is the rules and regulations of colleges regarding canvassing. Ditto closed and sheltered accommodation. In recent years, colleges have clamped down on who can and cannot flyer student pigeon holes. Ditto with sending out college-wide emails. With good reason. There’s more than enough junk mail and spam in both. So what are the alternatives?

This for me is where elected councillors together need to sit down with colleges and those that run closed housing operations to thrash out a suitable agreement that ensures people are made aware when there are elections and who is standing. How they go about doing so will vary depending on the nature of the accommodation. I’m not going to be prescriptive and say everyone has to fling open their doors to every activist who turns up every other day or at random times in the middle of the night, for example. Rather, leaving it up to those who know far better about either side to come up with a sensible and reasonable compromise that can help tackle the problems of low engagement and low turnout.

Roles of student unions, housing associations & council democratic services

This is something where conversation and co-ordination could have an impact. It doesn’t need to go beyond the essentials of:

“There is an election, it is for institution X that is responsible for Y services, and you can find more information about who is standing on what platform at Z. Oh, & here is when & where to vote/how to register to vote.”

Links to wider political and public policy debates

As I mentioned in February 2013, something is stirring in Cambridge public policy circles. There are a growing number of conversations that are happening in academic circles – a number of which I have been party to. (More often than not, with dragon fairy). One of the things several people facilitating these discussions have asked me is how they can engage with both the wider local community and with wider public policy circles. Hence the importance of linking the various groups and societies together, both at a face-to-face level and on social media.

I was at an event recently with Cambridge University’s Science and Policy Exchange, where three eminent academics – Barbara Sahakian, Mark Stokes and David Nutt – were talking about evidence-based policy-making & the role of science. (I touched upon it in this blogpost). One of the things I said to the many scientists in the room is that some of them needed to get involved in party politics in order to have a greater impact on the policy-making process. The reason being that it is at party political level that many of the high level principles are formed, that then end up in the Whitehall policy jungle later down the line. But what route does a city buzzing with scientists have if the institutions that they work within are not as open as they could be to grassroots politics – one of the routes into politics at a national level. Remember Julian Huppert MP is one example of someone local (he went to school in Cambridge) who has ended up in national politics having gone through local government as a former councillor in Cambridge.

So to finish with…?

There are some changes that can be made within various institutions. But those institutions need to be aware of the problems, accept they exist and acknowledge they are part of the solution too.

Some thoughts from a Cambridgeshire perspective.

I had a look at the turnout figures for the recent local government elections in Cambridge. Chesterton, The People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Romsey, and The Royal Division of Her Majesty the Queen Edith (the latter two separated by that no-mans-land of Coleridge, where rumours are that it’s being occupied by a dragon fairy) scored much higher than the rest of the city in terms of turnout. Choice and ‘contestability’ (ie candidates genuinely campaigning hard for votes) in these wards were, so activists from various sides tell me, was what made the difference.

It makes it all the more boring for me, in a safe-as-houses seat where none of the councillors or candidates are social media users. Hence chasing after the other political types on social media. Is that good enough for society and the city? I say it isn’t. But setting up a Twitter account isn’t going to change the world on its own.

Who hustled the hustings?

Do people generally know what hustings are anymore? I can’t help but feel that the lack of regular local politics’ hustings in general reflects badly on the state of civic society in an area. The only one I was aware of locally was the one run by the Cambridge Cycle Campaign who not only held an event but provided a platform for all candidates in the city to have responses to their questions published online. It reflects poorly on those candidates that chose not to respond given the size of the Cycle Campaign.

Why aren’t more civic societies in Cambridge organising hustings or local political debates involving a cross-section of political parties?

Genuine question. Why didn’t every parents’ and teachers’ association, every place of worship, every single issue group, every collective look at organising a hustings? The one thing that stands out is the effort required to organise one. It requires someone to do the legwork. As anyone who has been passionately involved in any voluntary organisation will tell you, it’s often a very small number of people that keep things ticking over.

Beyond that, I’m interested in what the barriers are to all concerned. Things like:

• not having a suitable and affordable venue to put on something like this on
• not knowing where to start in terms of contacting people to take part. You might call me a digital native, but what about those community groups that don’t have anyone familiar with or confident using the internet?
• given the ‘paper candidate’ nature of some of those that stood, candidates refusing to take part
• having a facilitator acceptable to all parties
• having very limited means of publicising your event
• people not being able to get a baby-sitter
• people not having transport access or assistance
• charities or community groups worrying about being seen as politically partisan

Those are just a few off the top of my head. There are many more.

Councillors and candidates as civic leaders

One of the things that I have been pondering for example is the role of councillors and those standing for election as civic leaders. In particular I’m thinking about how councillors and activists can make it easier for residents to get in touch with them and improve their availability – not easy given many on both sides have full time jobs or commitments too.

This is where I’m learning a fair deal from being a community governor at what was my old primary school, although spending much of my first year listening rather than doing as I get up to speed. I don’t see my role as someone who gives the staff a hard time, but rather someone in and around the school community who looks to see what can be drawn in from wider afield for the benefit primarily of the children.

Given the fragmentation of, and the closure of so many public services, the big ones that seem to remain are schools and hospitals. One of the questions I think councillors and candidates need to ask of their local political parties is who within them is on cordial terms with the key ‘non-executive’ governors of schools and hospitals – eg governors at Addenbrookes Hospital, or the governors of Long Road Sixth Form College, to the governors of Cambridge Regional College. The reason why I’ve stated ‘non-executive’ is because the board of governors has the formal scrutiny role. It means any concerns that a councillor may wish to raise, or have raised, is done through a transparent and accountable route rather than through off-the-record conversations. Use informal routes to put people in touch with each other by all means – as I do. But with decision-making processes and the running of those institutions, it must be above-board.

Getting younger people involved

Personally I’m with Richard Taylor on this. In Cambridge we have a series of ‘area committees’ where local issues are discussed. I think that pupil/student/youth representatives from the school and further education college councils should be invited to attend those area committee meetings that their schools or colleges sit within. I also think that consideration should be given for a substantial formal slot say every quarter, where youth representatives can raise issues with councillors, with the proviso that there is a formal means by which they can report things back to their schools and colleges. I dare say too that there is an onus on governors (possibly pointing the finger at myself here) to keep abreast of what’s being said too – ideally by attending but if not, through online or social media.

What about social media?

This is where local councils can make things easier for people to be reminded via things like Facebook accounts, email alerts or smartphone calendars. Or for those not online, do things the old-fashioned way: Invite people to subscribe to a snail-mail mailing list to remind people closer to the time that there is a meeting on, or invite residents to subscribe to a telephone list where your customer services team phone up people 24-48 hours before a meeting is due to take place to remind them.

Contact details of local councillors that sit on area committees

As mentioned above, a little icon that allows people to download meeting details onto online calendars or smartphones would be incredibly useful for those who are interested but for whatever reason ‘forget’ about the meeting on the day. For example, the Eastern Area Committee has a link to listed meetings here. For each meeting, a single-click icon such as the ‘Add to my Calendar’ icon on this Teacambs event clearly visible on each meetings page would be incredibly convenient.

With contact details – again using the Eastern Area Committee as an example, social media contact details of councillors (where they are using social media in their official capacity) would be really useful – as would links to the websites and group social media pages of the local political parties too. That then gives residents some sort of an idea of the disposition of both political parties, and of individual councillors too.

Finally, there is a role for educating councillors, candidates and residents about social media. Yes, I have a financial interest with corporate training, but I have a general open offer to Cambridgeshire councils to run free group seminars for their local councillors (such as this one I did in my very very early days for councillors in Cambridge City. Things are much more polished these days!) Furthermore, I am one of the social media ‘surgeons’ that runs free 1-2-1 social media surgeries with the local charity Cambridge Online – the next one being on 20 June 2013. If you want to sign up for this, please call Cambridge Online on 01223 300 407.

“Will all this impact on voter turnout?”

I don’t know, but I’m working on the principle that stronger personal relationships and a higher profile of party political types within their – our communities, gives people more of a reason to vote. Using social and digital media increases the ability of people to cast an informed vote, and giving them reminder prompts too, which is even better.

Food for thought?

Can such a labelling system help shoppers make the conscious choice to buy products manufactured under more humane and environmentally sustainable conditions? Or will it require legislation?

This blogpost follows on from “I don’t want your charity, I demand my rights!”  the one about the factory collapse in Dhaka, the death toll of which has now topped 1,000, and in which working conditions were described by the Pope of all people as ‘slave labour‘. Let’s see Primark put that on the front page of their 2013/14 annual report.

I accused Primark of presiding over a massive failure of corporate governance in my blogpost mentioned above. Primark publicise in a very high profile manner what it does ethically. It failed catastrophically in Dhaka. One thing Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and similar organisations may wish to do is to buy shares in the firm’s holding company, AB Foods, and grill executives at the next AGM on why the firm’s corporate governance failed so badly. It’s a tactic that a number of NGOs have tried for years – although to what effect? [Edited to add: Adam Ramsay of People & Planet informed me that the Workers' Rights Consortium campaigns in universities, getting students to put pressure on manufacturers to stick to their published codes of conduct].

A failure of markets as well as a failure of law?

I mentioned in my previous blogpost that local laws had not been enforced regarding the building. Part of the ‘market failure’ on not just clothing, but on imported manufactured goods in general is clear and understandable information that allows customers to decide whether to buy something on ethical grounds. Remember all that stuff about choice I was jumping up and down about? Yes, lets have the information there but have it in a manner where people who might be short on time and/or ability to process that information can do so thus allowing ‘informed choice’.

“Yo Pooffles, do we really need another label? Isn’t this just more red tape?”

It doesn’t need to be. It depends on who sets the standards, who monitors and how they are enforced.

Who should set the standard – the state?

It doesn’t need to be. Two standards many people will be familiar with at least ‘brand wise’ are ‘Organic and Fairtrade‘.

The point with both of these brands of ethical standards is one of trust: Can the shopper trust the labelling when it is listed as ‘organic’ or ‘fairtrade’? As far as the law is concerned, retailers definitely can be prosecuted for labelling food as organic when it is not. Both the Soil Association (that owns the ‘Organic’ brand) and the Fairtrade Foundation (that owns the ‘fairtrade’ brand) keep watch on misuse of their brands. Although it is local Trading Standards that prosecute for criminal offences. In particular Part 2 of The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. In particular Regulation 5 (2)(b) where the action

“causes or is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision he would not have taken otherwise”

So…yeah, just by looking at that it looks like the labelling of goods as ‘Organic’ or ‘Fairtrade’ without the consent of the brands’/standards’ owners is in breach of the above-mentioned regulations. Oh – and there’s a possible prison sentence in one of the offences.

So the state is setting the standard?

No. The standard is set by independent organisations who then license them. It’s that licensing that in part funds the assessment and monitoring activities to ensure the terms of the license regarding the standards required, are being met. Because the branding provides a commercial advantage over non-branded competitors (that otherwise cannot claim to meet the same standards), there is an incentive for the latter to misuse the brand if it is not enforced. As this potentially misleads the shopper (who ends up with a product that doesn’t meet the standards they desired) and leads to a market failure, the law gets involved.

Could ‘Fairtrade’ be expanded to clothing?

It already does with cotton. But at the moment it feels very small scale. It would be interesting to see the impact of a large-scale marketing campaign backed by the major retailers listed in the weblink above. One for Fairtrade Fortnight in early 2014?

But it’s not just cotton – what about other materials that clothes are made from? 58% of all clothing fibres manufactured in 2009/10 were synthetic. With cotton, you’ve got issues around the wages farmers are paid (bearing in mind too the huge subsidies Western cotton farmers get) as well as environmental issues around water use & pesticides. With polyester as an example, it means getting your hands dirty with fossil fuels. Can you have an ethical labelling system that incorporates such a synthetic fibre? Because if it fails on those grounds, then why would manufacturers of polyester products – whose brands include the big sportswear brands, bother with the rest when it comes to manufacturing clothing? Remember that the aim for the ‘ethical label’ is one that is easy for consumers to understand & trust, with both limited time and knowledge.

Ethical electronics, ethical manufacturing

It’s not just clothes but electronics too that has issues with how it manufactures its products – as Apple for example has found out.  The challenge here for something like the Fairtrade label is how to go about moving into the realm of manufacturing.

When I first became aware of Fairtrade in my childhood, it was all about helping farmers in poor countries. When you look at the international website, the recent updates it has posted reflects this. (What its website doesn’t say is that during the 1980s & 1990s it was churches running Fairtrade stalls that did a lot of the groundwork to get the whole thing up and running). In a nutshell, could people use their consumer power to have an impact? In 2011, €4.9billion was spent on Fairtrade products. (Source – their 2012 annual report, which is worth a read).

One for the global NGOs

After all, they’ve got more than a few executives on six-figure salaries! It shouldn’t be beyond them to get their organisations & partners together and produce a robust ethical standard for clothing and consumer goods – and an easily recognisable brand to match. Isn’t this something where they could link up with the international trade union movement too? ‘Industriall’ has spoken up over this – in particular on CSR and ‘greenwashing’ (Len McCluskey of the Unite Union is one of their UK reps).

“If harnessing consumer power in this manner has little impact, then we’ll legislate”

It’s a tactic that has been used in other fields. You tell those operating in ‘the market’ to sort things out within a specific time frame, and if they don’t, you threaten to pass laws to do the job for them.

Actually, as I’ve mentioned before my own view is that the EU should adopt a system where it sets the minimum working standards that all goods sold in the EU should be manufactured to, irrespective of where they were made. My point is ‘European Society’ has decided very poor working conditions inside the EU are unacceptable, therefore goods imported to the EU under working conditions prohibited within the EU should either be prohibited, or slapped with such a tariff that any competitive advantage gained as a result of poor working conditions is nullified. But you can imagine the outrage from big business that would occur if such a move was adopted.

What can we expect from UK politicians?

Not a lot given the rhetoric around EU membership in general.

Leadership is conspicuous by its absence. To give you a couple of examples:

In 2012, the UK’s non-financial corporate cash surplus was estimated by Deloitte to be at £750billion. (Others have suggested that is an overestimate and the real figure is a lot lower, but still in the hundreds of billions). What would political leadership look like? The Chancellor and the Business Secretary getting the heads of those corporations (and their political EU counterparts) to say: “OK, we are going to co-ordinate a stimulus of both public sector and private sector investment to get the economy going. We’re all going to jump in at once.” But that simply hasn’t happened.

Another example could be on the ethical labelling of products – telling the NGOs and manufacturers to get together and come up with a workable system in X number of years, or the EU will legislate. But that requires leadership, of which the EU is completely lacking. Eurozone members are tied up with the economic stagnation, while the major economy outside the Eurozone is playing with the idea of leaving the EU altogether, rather than doing something constructive. Constructive in that it could raise living standards across the world, and at the same time lead to the movement of some manufacturing jobs back to the EU.

One thing that minsters – in particular cabinet ministers have, is the ability to bring ‘decision makers’ together to act upon something. One nice example of an otherwise junior minister doing this in Cambridge – but not for Cambridge University, was Richard Caborn’s intervention that saved Cambridge United Football Club. (The transcript of the original report is here).

Who’ll step forward?

There’s the challenge. Which senior politicians are going to step forward and either set in train the railroad to a more comprehensive ethical labelling system, and who will carry the stick that is the threat of legislation?

Some thoughts from an awesomely amazing workshop with Catherine Howe of Public-i at Comms Camp earlier this year.

If you’re interested in public sector social and digital media, and are not following Catherine Howe of Public-i, please rectify this. No – really. Not following her is about as outrageous as not following Steph Gray of Helpful Technology in these fields. No, neither of them paid me to type this and no, I’m not due any contracts or commissions from them either. Some people are just that good in their fields that sometimes all you can do is sit back and admire – or point people towards them.

“Take me back – what was CommsCamp?”

I blogged about it here at the time - Puffles and I volunteered to help out too. Basically it was a big unConference gathering of anyone who was interested and passionate about local government social media. It ended up being heavily over-subscribed, so next year we’ll hopefully have an even bigger and better event! You’ll also note from that blogpost my first mention of Catherine’s masterclass.

“What did Catherine have to say that was so brilliant?”

She blogged about it here. Please read before continuing.

“Read it. Now what?”

No you haven’t. Please read it properly. She hosted a workshop that was all about unpicking the problems several of us seem to have had with press offices and communication teams. Catherine, who is doing a PhD in this field (the results of which I expect to be mind-blowing for the sector) took on a very awkward subject area and systematically deconstructed it in a manner where the real issues had nowhere to hide. Being able to do something like this in a very diplomatic manner takes a huge amount of skill and talent.

Are communications teams the blockers?

My instinctive reaction to that question (as far as local public sector institutions are concerned) has been “Yes”. The big issue being the fear of losing control of communications to other parts of the organisations. The other one is an inertia issue of social media being about communications, therefore it sits in the comms’ silo. The big barriers I’ve faced trying to build Teacambs – the Cambridge offshoot of the Whitehall Teacamp gatherings have in part included trying to convince communications teams that these gatherings are open to anyone in their organisation with an interest in public sector social media, not just people with the communications hat on.

Catherine’s workshop showed that the barriers are much deeper than one team

Rather than going through a “Why do we hate communications teams?” exercises, we started off brainstorming where all the barriers to uptake of social media may come from. Hence identifying human resources, legal teams, ICT teams and senior management was an eye-opener in itself. In part for me I’d always been aware of the barriers that these sides could throw up, but had never thought about exploring them in a systematic manner that Catherine took us through.

The way she led the next bit allowed us to identify a number of cross-cutting issues – ones that would not have been as visible or clear had we gone through each unit silo by silo. For example issues around data protection cover both legal and HR – as well as management. Getting something OK’d by legal and getting it OK’d by comms creates a time-delay that in a social media world may cause problems in terms of how you communicate – but then creates a resource problem if you want to go down the route of having every tweet OK’d by legal and comms. You can see the problem: it’s unsustainable.

Which moved us onto the next bit: If salami-slicing won’t work, you’ve got to rebuild your system in a manner that accounts for social media pressures

Which was the next bit – one that actually came out with more questions than answers – as it should have done. The reason being is that the way society is using social media is something that organisations are really struggling with. It genuinely is a societal change. I look at the way I interact with MPs on Twitter and compare it to how I tried to interact with politicians during my university days. (Days when emails were easily ignored). Just because your organisation is not using social media does not mean that social media users are not talking about you. Therefore how do you deal with it?

The lesson for senior managers is that they need to become familiar with at least the basics of social media (and the impact on organisations) in order to ask informed questions & take informed decisions. This ranges from who needs what skills sets to updating and monitoring corporate risk registers. How would your organisation deal with a social media firestorm that risks becoming a mainstream media firestorm?

One of the lessons for general staff is around skills: This could be in terms of upskilling – what are the new skills that you will need in a social media environment. Or – especially in the case of recent school leavers, how can you present and apply your social media skills to a work environment?

Communications teams as crisis managers

This was one of the points I took away from the session: with social media use, something is bound to go wrong. How do you manage and recover the situation?

This is where one of the new roles for communications teams is one of crisis management and recovery. Rather than having the traditional corporate communications teams of today, will we move towards a system of communications being centres of excellence within organisations – where individual teams go to communications teams for advice, rather than going to them to deliver the communications function of whatever piece of work that they are working on?

Food for thought.

Some thoughts from the Open Policy Teacamp

This blogpost stems from the Open Policy Teacamp that Puffles and I went to on 2 May, and from this article by Steph Gray, who you really should be following if you are interested in public sector social media. He used to run the digital engagement show at the Department for Business, something that has now been taken on by the equally brilliant Betony Taylor, formerly of a very big bank.

I’m particularly interested in the first bullet point Steph pointed out – the idea that each policy area should have its own blog. This aligns with some of my thoughts towards the end of my civil service days when I became convinced that each policy team would need to run its own social media operation similar to how civil servants use the phone today. Long time civil servants told me that the approach to social media is similar to how departments reacted to the development of first the telephone, and then the internet: i.e. you had to be trained to use it and only certain people were allowed to use it – from a terminal at the end of the office.

“Policy teams having their own blogs? Press officers would have a fit!”

You can see it now. The mainstream media taking tweets and blogposts as quotations for excruciatingly embarrassing stories on policy going wrong. Or is that only because of how our political system is structured? This was one of the things that came out of the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange talk I was at this evening, where each of the keynote speakers, Barbara Sahakian, Mark Stokes and David Nutt (the last, infamously sacked by Alan Johnson) indicated that our policy-making structures are not suited to scientific advice.

“You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning”

Ironic given that many of the attributes given to Margaret Thatcher were about her insights into policy as a scientist. The idea that ‘U-turns’ are bad isn’t necessarily a bad thing – especially if the evidence in front of you changes. But for the past few decades, the idea of a policy change (for whatever reason) has all too often been seen as something of a weakness.

Personally I like the idea of policy teams using social media – it makes for a much more transparent method of policy-making. It puts policy teams at the heart of the social media network, as the diagram below from an ancient slide pack I created ages ago illustrates

The problem of policy teams not engaging with social media means that they risk being outside of conversations that they really ought to be at the centre of. This is particularly the case with academic specialists and those with frontline experience on the ground. It can be just as useful to have a practitioner saying ‘this won’t work because in my experience, X, Y & Z’ as it is the academic saying ‘studies A, B and C indicate that this policy is fraught with danger.’ What social media can do is that it can level the playing field.

One big challenge therefore is how to change both the political and media discourse around policy-making. Opposition politicians have an interest in picking out any sign of weakness in a policy – especially one that a minister has staked his or her reputation on. Hence even though the statistical evidence may indicate a policy is crashing and burning, it still continues because a minister has too much politically to lose if the policy is then changed or withdrawn. (Especially if the minister is then expected to resign over it – given that ministers quite rightly have to take policy responsibility for when things go wrong).

This also comes back to a point the Universities’ Minister David Willetts made at a talk I was at earlier this year. He said that while he was in favour of evidence-based policy-making, it could not ignore the wider political and democratic context of general elections  and governments that are elected by the people. Which is a fair point because as another academic at a different gathering said to me during my civil service days, if it was policy-by-evidence only – one that did not have democratic checks and balances, we could find ourselves living in a soviet-union-style technocracy.

‘Making policy based on imperfect information’

I remember complaining to one of my directors in my early policy days on the Fast Stream that I didn’t have enough evidence to make some of the recommendations that I was being asked to make. He said that this was one of the inevitable challenges of policy-making: you never have all of the information you want in order to make a decision. More often than not, ministers have to make decisions based on an incomplete picture. The best information available may not be all of the information that they need. The challenge for civil servants engaging in social media as a policy tool is sifting the ‘noise’ generated by social media users and sifting for the diamonds in the sand dunes.

“Anything else on what Mr Gray said?”

• The strict ban on ghost-writing indicates that whistle-blowing mechanisms need to be improved – in particular where civil servants are being pushed to do things that are in breach of their professional codes
• I like the idea of community managers – I’d go further and have them as being people who also go out and about all over the country to engage face-to-face as well as online. This role may also entail some trouble-shooting too where things go wrong – as they will do.
• On the ‘field force’ I’d almost be tempted to go further and make familiarity with social media a requirement for policy roles, with an expectation that in however-many-years time, this will be a basic requirement in policy – as will understanding of basic social media analytics. Have a look at the digital video introducing it in my resources page.
• I generally agree with the final four points – in particular the re-writing of the civil service code – and the management code too. This was something I had some very passionate debates with various civil servants during my final months in 2011. I was convinced that the code needed re-writing. They were not, saying that the code as it stood was flexible enough to handle social media. But this assumed a static policy-making model. If the policy-making model changes – e.g. MPs start replying directly to blogposts put out by policy teams, then what? (Officially, the minister responsible has to respond formally, but should such a letter be automatically be made public?)

“So…which policy team is going to go first?”

I get the feeling that this is what everyone is waiting for. Which policy team in Whitehall is on a stable enough platform (given the fallout from the recent local government elections) to try out a new method of policy-making where there is a significant level of engagement with social media users?

There’s also the question of finding one that is not particularly party-political, or one where the parameters of the big picture are broadly accepted. The reason for this is that where the parameters of the big picture are NOT broadly accepted, then this is an issue for party politics and the forums there.

And that’s the bit that I’m unsure about.

Where do you draw that line between party political debate and Whitehall policy-making? Bear in mind too that it is all too easy for civil servants to be drawn into what can be seen as a party political debate. Civil servants’ policy roles involve developing, implementing and defending government policy. It has nothing to do with attacking the policies of the opposition – or any political opponents for that matter.

For me, this is one thing I’d like to see the great and the good in Whitehall and Westminster explore in future discussions and events. The other issue is this: To what extent do ministers want to be influenced by the outcomes of social media engagement? This is important is because people won’t bother engaging if they see their engagement has no impact. If you go through a massive social media engagement exercise to develop policy only to see it vapourised by a meeting between a secretary of state and a senior lobbyist for a fabulously wealthy vested interest/party donor, then why bother? Does this then mean that a set of general principles need to be stated on how to go about developing policy in a social media world, or should it be left on a case by case, department by department basis?

Food for thought.

Why recovery seems further away than ever.

It’s been just over a year since I crashed and burned mentally. I’d like to say things have improved healthwise, but…have they?

The thing with mental health is that it’s not like a minor illness or infection where you take a course of medication and ‘job done’. It’s something that potentially stays with you for the rest of your life, something that comes in waves, in peaks and troughs. Much as you want to slay the fire demons in your mind, you can only force them to back down, knowing they will come back another day.

I’m glad that current and future younger generations are now in a place where their mental health is taken seriously. Mine was the last generation where it was assumed that if you were performing well in your exams, there were no problems. I performed well in my exams, therefore what was I complaining about? (Said my first form teacher at secondary school, blissfully oblivious to my emotional state at the time).

Not being able to work full time

This is probably one of the hardest things to deal with. In part there’s a societal expectation that I’m fighting against. Shouldn’t someone my age be in full time work with own house and own car? Well, I gave up on that one. Hence this.

The emotional impact stems from no longer having a positive vision for my medium to long term future. Well, any vision actually. In the past, I’d always had one – a coherent set of aims woven together to picture what life would be like if I made certain things happen.

On the outside, things seem fine. If I need to polish up for an occasion, that’s not a problem. Ditto for individual workshops, seminars or conferences. But you don’t see the mental scars behind the polish. The dry eyes screaming out for replenishment as a result of sleepless nights. The electric brain shock pulses that inhibit sleep. The permanent tension in my internal intercostal muscles.

What does recovery look like?

Not having the symptoms described above would be a start.

Stability – something massively under-rated by politicians and economists alike – is another. What I mean by that is a level of social and economic stability that can allow for some sort of planning. Frances Coppola absolutely nailed this point in her blogpost The Bifurication of the Labour Market. Why would anyone want to borrow to invest in the current economic climate – especially one where the medium term outlook is so miserable?

Freelancing alone vs teamwork – One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the past six-nine months is the digital video projects. Not least because the final products have been ever so useful at training sessions (and at the same time emotionally makes me feel less ‘alone’ when facilitating!) There’s a world of difference between going it alone and working as and with a team on a daily basis. I don’t regret doing what I did leaving the civil service; I needed to. But let’s not underestimate the impact of spending day-in-day-out in the face-to-face company of yourself. Or in my case a dragon fairy.

Learning – One of the reasons why I turn up to lots of events is because of the amount I learn from people there. Even when I’m the one facilitating or presenting, I’m always learning from the comments and questions from other people. My style of learning is one that involves learning socially; one where I am with people, not on my own all the time. That’s why I’m not so good spending hours and hours in front of books, holed up in a library. In an ideal world, I’d have a couple of mornings/afternoons a week where I am at a college, learning in a social environment. The problem is that the direction of travel from the political class is one that makes this route more expensive.

Taking the fight to the fire demons – By that I mean no longer treading water on long term medication, but having an active, managed programme of treatment to help my recovery. The problem is that the sort of things I have in my mind are simply not available on the NHS, and I fear never will be. Having had bad experiences with my existing NHS trust, the idea of going back to sessions there fill me with horror. It’s as if I need to be taken out of my current environment and geographical surroundings if I’m ever going to break free.

Let’s get physical! – Well, it’s not as easy as that. There are days when the act of getting out of bed is traumatic. (Those are the days when I physically have to drag myself across the road to get out of the house). Yet in my mind I am almost panting like a dog with exhaustion, even though the rest of my body feels like it would quite like to do something active instead. It’s also been a year since I last did regular exercise too – a time when I thought things were going well but actually were not. It’s frustrating too because I like physical exercise. Not to the extremes of the gym-bunnies, but to a level where you can sprint to the traffic lights, leg it across the road and recover your breath very quickly without breaking sweat. That, plus doing so in a manner that, as my sister-in-law says doesn’t involve running like a ‘mum’.

“And the problem is…?”

Despite all of the things that I would like to get done, this permanent state of exhaustion means that my functionality comes in peaks and troughs, and is also to some extent dependent on medication. It’s one of the reasons why I commissioned some of my younger Twitterfriends to work with me on the digital videos. I knew I would not be able to complete them on my own – and certainly not to the standard they made them to.

This sort of explains why getting to a point where I can work more regular, stable hours is something that is going to take a few more years at least. At the same time, I can’t pretend that there isn’t a bit of a boredom factor hidden away in all of this too. Part of it stems from returning back to my home town after years away in London and Brighton. Once you’ve spent time away in somewhere larger & with more variety and accessibility than your home town, you begin to realise what the barriers and limitations are with it. This is something I am trying to work through in Cambridge at various levels while I still have the time. I’m still of the view that Cambridge could be a city far greater than the sum of its parts, but the silo nature of some of the organisations & institutions is preventing this. (That said, not everyone agrees with my viewpoint on this – eg stating that Cambridge is collegiate, not corporate in its nature & that this needs to be understood & respected).

The wider political and economic picture

It goes with the territory of much of what I’ve studied and also in the fields that I have worked in to be clued up on this. In one sense I have a strange admiration for those who ‘don’t do politics’ and who lead lives that, on the face of it are much more straight forward. I’m thinking of those people whose lives revolve around their family and their workplace, and who are content doing the job they are paid to do without a huge desire for promotion or greater responsibilities. There are still a couple of people at my local supermarket who started long before I was working part-time there in the mid-late 1990s. They’re still doing the same job – but without them, there’d be no fresh produce or dairy products on sale.

The problem I had was that there was too much ‘noise’ going on in my mind – too much other stuff going on that I felt the need to sink my teeth into at some stage in the future. I was never cut out for retail.

But that big economic picture is a problem. It’s a problem because many of the people that I interact with on social media are struggling in it. Many of them stupendously talented in a variety of different fields – far more so in their skills than I will ever be. And it hurts me to see them hurting. It hurts me even more because there is so little that I can do to alleviate things. I can’t pretend to be deaf or blind to it. The current political and economic status quo is unsustainable. It cannot continue. Something’s gotta give. We already saw symptoms of that in the local council elections last week.

“Complicated stuff!”

Three very complicated strands. There’s the internal physical and mental – ie what’s happening to and inside my mind and body. There’s what’s happening in and around the community I live in, and finally there’s the wider political and economic picture too. On the downside, it feels like my disposition is one where my wellbeing is in part dependent on things way outside of my immediate control. On the other hand, it means there are positive causes worth fighting for which others will benefit from too. If only I wasn’t so permanently exhausted I’d make a better go of it!